Sorry, meant to log on earlier and post strategy. I'll see if I can remember it all... it's late and I'm tired haha.
#1 - All my kids had the geek trait because of the higher chance of finding collectibles. I tested this theory specifically for finding voidcritter cards vs. toys/nothing in my practice run, and I definitely saw a difference (roughly 45% chance without the trait vs. 65% with it)
#2 - Got one of the parents to level 3 writing skill ASAP. This gave them the ability to write excuse notes every 4 days. So my kids' schedules were:
Mon 1 - Excuse notes for all
Tues-Thurs 1 - Vacation days
Fri 1 - Excuse notes for all
Mon 2 - Skipped school
Tues 2 - Excuse notes for 2 kids, sent 2 to school (hw done and study hard for max performance gain)
Weds 2 - Reverse of Tues 2
Thurs-Fri 2 - Sent kids to school because I had maxed out my score already, but performance was high enough that I could have skipped both days if needed.
#3 - The only time my kids ran around town collecting cards was the first day, to give them a jump start. All other cards were gained by trash can diving and trading. Running around just takes up too much training/trading time.
#4 - My kids also met lots of neighborhood kids as they were running around, so that they could invite them over for trading later.
#5 - All cards can be gained through trading. After I got my first duplicate card, I consistently had neighbor kids over at my house and at least one of my kids trading with them constantly.
#6 - Also, as far as trading goes, you are much more likely to get a Rare card if you trade a Rare card, etc. There's still a chance that you can get a card of a different "level" (rare/common/uncommon) when trading, but it's definitely most likely that you will get back a card of the same level.
#7 - I don't know if that applies to Foil vs. Regular cards (didn't actually think of that until I was having difficulty getting my last card - but then I tried trading a Foil Articorn and immediately got the last card I needed - Foil Canis).
#8 - Train higher level and rare cards first. For example, if I have the choice to train a level 7 Canis or a level 1 Articorn, I will train the Canis first. Even though the Articorn trains faster at first, I had every intention of getting a perfect score, so that was irrelevant to me. Also, the longer my kids are trading, the higher possibility they might find say a level 5 Articorn, which I can swap out my level 1 for. If I've already trained up my level 1 Articorn, that's time wasted. So I always trained the higher level and rarer cards over the low level/common cards, simply because there was a higher probability that I could replace the low level/common cards with higher level cards gained through trading.
I think that's pretty much it. I had 39 of the cards by Sunday #2, and then it took me till Wednesday I think to get the last foil Canis. I maxed out my score on Thursday #2 in the early AM.
