Cup of 13s: Overview

August 11, 2026 // IOTM Overview

For the July IOTM, TPTB took a hint from tarot and arcana. You see, tarot cards have four suits. None are tweed, unfortunately — they vary based on the region, but a traditional four from the Italian deck feature swords, batons, coins, and cups. These suits have ten numbered cards and four “court” cards. Instead of giving us the much-ballyhooed “Baton of 17s”, though, they decided that our adventurers are in desperate need of a cup to drink out of. Hence our shiny new Cup of 13s. No, Virginia, that’s not a cup filled with Olivia Wilde’s character on House — it’s just a cup you drink from!

General Summary

The Cup of 13s is an off-hand item. It comes with the following shiny enchantments right out of the wrapping paper:

The fourth enchantment refers to the fact that, when equipped, the Cup of 13s will occasionally give you a random booze item after combat. It gives you the first free booze after 6 turns, with subsequent libations dropping every 10 turns thereafter. (The first few will be anywhere from EPIC to awesome quality, but as more booze drops, the booze will get worse and worse.) And the fifth enchantment, well…

Mechanically: How to Mix Cup Drinks

The fifth enchantment refers to the Cup’s [use] link. This brings up a free choice adventure that allows you to add three ingredients to your cup and drink them, using 1 drunkenness to sip the items from the cup. The ingredients are selected via a drop down that consists of most of your inventory; items eligible for selection are those that are open to theft in PvP, have positive autosell value, and are not discardable items. That’s a lot of stuff!

Depending on what you choose, your mixed Cup of 13s drink will consume the three items in exchange for some amount of adventures, some turns of an effect, and some amount of stats. Items all have their own inherent value in the cup, although most of them aren’t particularly obvious. This public spading spreadsheet has most of the useful in-run stuff noted, and I will go over some specifically good items later in this post. Generally, an item will hold value as a Cup of 13s ingredient either because the item provides a very valuable buff, a lot of adventures, or (in future metas, perhaps) some useful stats to start out your leveling.

There is one very important limitation, however. While you can theoretically fill your entire liver with Cup of 13 drinks, you almost certainly don’t want to do that. That’s because across all Cup of 13 drinks you swig, you will only get 13 total adventures in a day. You could in theory get that from a single drink, by doing something like a bat hat and two meat shields. But no matter how many drinks it takes: once you’ve gotten 13 adventures, you get no more. You can still drink, but your drinks will be exchanging 1 drunkenness for 0 turns, only stats and buffs.

Speedrun Applicability

The normal enchantments are in the “nice, but nothing to write home about” category. The booze drop is mildly nice for trying to get the bottle of chateau de vinegar to make your wine bomb in the level 11 quest, or trying to cap blackberries. The HP/MP regen is comfortable but largely a quiet comfort. The extra booze drops are cute, but quite unreliable… and in standard ascensions, there’s a pretty high chance that whatever it drops isn’t actually consumable in your run. So that all leads us to the only real benefit to the IOTM: drinking some booze.

Luckily, that’s valuable!

There are ten new effects introduced by this IOTM. (Candidly, this is a real missed opportunity. There should have been 13!) Of these ten effects, three of them (+5 resistance to hot, stench, and spooky respectively) are relatively low-value, and I am going to skip discussing them. One of them, +5 familiar weight, is quite useful in unrestricted but somewhat middling to meh in modern Standard, only marginally increasing the efficiency of your split pea soup search. (Still may be worth it in some cases, as all you have to do is buy one eXpand from CyberRealm.)

The best buffs can be generated with a lot of different items. Here, I will list them (roughly) in order of quality with 2-3 sample in-run sources for the buff in question.

1. RUNNETH A TIGHT SHIP - +5 Familiar Experience per Combat (60 turns via a dripping meat crossbow, 20 turns from a bar whip via spooky forest & freecrafts, 80 turns via a bat whip)
2. RUNNETH ON EMPTY - +100% Meat from Monsters (20 turns from a basic meat crossbow via free crafts, 40 turns from an asbestos meat stack via free crafts, 60 turns from a dense meat crossbow via free crafts)
3. RUNNETH OVER - +50% Item Drops from Monsters (20 turns via a Queue du Coq Cocktailcrafting Kit via the general store, 20 turns via a green pixel potion in 8-bit, 20 turns via a sphygmomanometer in the Hidden City)
4. RUNNETH COLD - Superhuman Cold Resistance (+5) (60 turns via a porquoise from your Mt. Noob letter, 20 turns via a lead yo-yo from the Armorer and Leggery)
5. RUNNETH WILD - +100% Combat Initiative (20 turns via a scrumptious reagent from saucecrafting, 20 turns via a chain-mail monokini from the Armorer and Leggery, 80 turns via a heavy necklace chain from Little Canadia)
6. RUNNETH INTO THINE EX - Superhuman Sleaze Resistance (+5) (60 turns via a starchy staff, 40 turns via a starchy sword)

These are (mostly) pretty accessible. On the subject of accessible finds, here are ingredients that give a notably large amount of adventures.

• FIVE ADVENTURE ITEMS: a bat hat (late-run; requires leathery bat skin from a tomb bat and some free crafts)
• FOUR ADVENTURE ITEMS: a dripping meat staff (2 free crafts and some meat, and/or knoll sign), spoons (via Generate Irony, a PVP reward skill), meat shield (1100 meat + 1 free craft), yams (via the Mayam Calendar)
• THREE ADVENTURE ITEMS: a basic meat kilt (200 meat + knoll moonsign; also gives +50 muscle substats), sweet potato punch (yam + vodka + coconut shell + 1 free craft; also gives 20 turns of +50% item drops), Arrattabbattabiata (drop in the Ratbat Burrow; also gives +100% init for 40 turns)

This is not going to be useful in this year’s standard. However, for potential future adventurers who become interested in using the Cup of 13s for pure stat gain, here is one accessible option for easy-ish substats in each stat.

• 100 MUS SUBSTATS: large cocoa eggshell fragment (via level 10 quest)
• 200 MYST SUBSTATS: savory crossbow (sinewy crossbow + dense meat stack + scrumptious reagent; 2 free crafts or knoll sign & 2000 meat, but interesting!)
• 100 MOX SUBSTATS: basic meat helmet (1 free craft)

Note that Myst is inherently “best” bang for the buck here, since you could feasibly get 600 mysticality from a single drink. It is still 2000 meat and some free crafts or a moon sign pick for 200 stats, which is a bit steep. Moxie is perhaps the preferred option for some, taking essentially 200 meat and one craft for each. Muscle is… pretty useless, frankly, but perhaps it will be useful in some weird path. I dunno.

So… what do you drink?

The buffs are strong enough that you probably want to generate as many of them as is reasonable. The number of times you sip from your cup will be somewhat dependent on the amount of turns you actually need to generate with your liver:

• Once, for a 13 adv/drunk drink (with a bat hat and two of the 4 adv/drunk items)
• Twice, for two 6.5 adv/drunk drinks (with three of the 4 adv/drunk items along with three buff-generating items in the other slots)
• Thrice, for three 4.3 adv/drunk drinks (with three of the 4 adv/drunk items along with six buff-generating items in the other slots)

Past that, you are essentially just trading off however many turns you’re getting from a marginal booze for some buffs or some stats. If you aren’t tight on your turn generation, this may be a good usage; if you are, you probably want to stick to 2-3 drinks and fill the rest of your liver with stronger stuff. (Notably, since you don’t get the +1 adventure per drunkenness from Ode to Booze on your Cup of 13s swigs, drinking it thrice is actually worse than drinking three 3.5 adventure/drunkenness booze, since you actually get (3.5 + 1)*3 turns from that. Something to remember if you’re tight on turngen.)

2026 In-Standard Synergies

• You may have noticed that a lot of the described items require free crafts; meatsmithing equipment you can shove into the cup is an important part of generating value from this IOTM. This inherently synergizes very strongly with taking one of the friendly Degrassi Knoll moonsigns (Mongoose, Wallaby, and Vole), as they all provide access to Innabox, who does turnless basic smithing for you. If you are in a Canadia or Gnomish sign, you will instead benefit greatly from your Leprecondo (2025) and its ability to generate free crafts via crafting plans. (You also would need crafting plans for any crafting recipes that require Armorcrafting or Super-Advanced Meatsmithing.)
• While it is not an IOTM, the PVP reward skill Generate Irony has major synergy here; summonable spoons are a 4-adventure add to your cup, so it’s a great way to load up your adventures.
• As noted, there is a bit of direct synergy with the Mayam Calendar (2024) — yams are a pretty easy four-adventure item, and one of your better sources of the +item% buff. I would argue that it is probably a mid-to-bad use relative to dripping meat staves, since yam martinis themselves are 5 adv/drunk… but you do you, boo.
• The Runneth Cold effect synergizes well with the last 4 months of the Sept-Ember Censer (2024). The fact that all it really takes is an early-run porquoise or a 600 meat expenditure is pretty good.
• The Runneth a Tight Ship effect synergizes quite well with the Chest Mimic (2024) and Cooler Yeti (2025). Both familiars can convert familiar experience into neat boosts. (I will grant that it will be much better this year than next year, as Chest Mimic does a much better job of generating turnsave from familiar experience and is about to cycle out. But it will still be useful.)

Overall Rating

We’d rate the Cup of 13s a tier 4 IOTM. This isn’t a major part of the speed set; the buffs are nice, but there’s only so much a handful of cool buffs can do for you. Still — these are pretty nice buffs. The familiar experience is probably worth half a turn or so over a full run, the meat drop is probably worth half a turn on nuns (… maybe? Honestly, maybe not; we have a LOT of meat drop) and the item drop is probably worth a turn or so given how freely available it is throughout your run. There is also some marginal benefit in how this IOTM allows you to fill two drunkenness per day with 13 turns, which is pretty good for turnbloat. Add it up and you get something that saves about 2 turns, maybe a skosh more, over a whole run. It’s certainly useful, but it’s just as certainly the weakest of the IOTMs released this year.

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Cool cats and hot dogs: Otori, one of KOL’s most famous clans, is finally able to drink in the United States — that’s right, they turned 21 this year! To celebrate, they are holding a fun Bad Moon contest. They’re providing accounts with zero IOTM access and will be awarding prizes based on performance in black cat bad moon runs performed on these accounts over the two weeks ranging from August 15th to August 28th. I will not be able to participate, as I am way too busy, but wanted to share it here both to say “happy birthday, Otori” and advertise it to the speed-interested community that reads these posts. (People do read these posts, right? I’m not just whispering truths into the wind… right???)

Article contributed by Captain Scotch