so, i thought i’d be clever and see if the order of covers repeated itself in the vaults. they do, until you actually tap your screen. then it just randomly picks a cover.
why bother with the animation at all?
Big money, big money, no Moonstone, no Moonstone, STOP!
If you open a multi-pack of vault tokens, the first one does the spin, and then the rest open like regular multi-packs.
Or like today for me it stuck on Moonpie for a good 3-4 seconds, and didn’t tic over! Ah another 250 ISO pie. It made going 32 straight DDQ events while earning at least one five pack of health all that more satisfying. 
So, is it insane that I’ve re-rostered her? And, while not the best pull, that I wasn’t angry to see one of her covers from a Taco?
I recently considered rostering and maxing her just so I wouldn’t have to get mad about it anymore. Then I looked at the progression thread and saw that moonstone gives hulk covers, who gives Totally Hotdog Hulk covers and I lol’d and moved on.
fixed.
Moderator edit: Please don’t do that. -DayvBang
I’ve noticed that slot 5 is almost always hp. But, the times I get hp, it is not in that slot.
That doesn’t mean that it not being there guarantees I pull hp (or, by extension, that any interruption in the pattern indicates the prize you’re getting). I don’t know what it means, but it’s there.
The animation is to distract you from the reality that your odds are still tinykitty.
I dont even watch it cause its too annoying seeing a cover you want sail by and you get that 2* once again. Two quick taps and see what I’ve got.
I wish they were actual Press Your Luck fans, because then we’d be able to manipulate our pulls just like Michael Larson did.
I don’t even try to time when I press the screen. Once the vault’s animation starts rotating through the prizes, I do something else for a little bit, be it a few seconds or a couple minutes, and then press the screen. Does it help? Not really but I don’t honestly believe there’s a method that would ensure the better rewards other than buying them all–something I could never do for any value except Deadpool’s two, and I am saving my Taco Tokens.
Buying them all ensures exactly average rewards. Is that really an exciting prospect? What are you going to do with hundreds of health packs at once?
You can game the system slightly by refusing to use tacos on a DDQ vault from which you’ve already pulled one of the thirty best rewards (assuming you get ten tacos per week, your EV per vault is exactly one of the top 30, and if you get it, then your EV goes down proportionately).
Tacos are also useful as a means of “storing” health packs so you can use the ones that regenerate first instead of last.
You can also skip using tacos on particularly low-value vaults in order to have more shots on the better-value ones, although this has rapid diminishing returns because of how your EV drops every time you get a good pull.
Saving your tacos to use them all at once is not an effective way to maximize value.
What will I do with all those health packs? Use 'em–eventually.
Honestly, I understand what you’ve written but it’s nothing that I didn’t think about in advance. I won’t just hit 300 and buy the active vault unless it’s one I really want. I’ll wait until there’s a vault that has a combination of 4 
and 3
that I can use and buy that one. Any cover that I can’t use directly becomes 
to level all the others and, boy howdy, do I need
! All those Hero Points mean that I won’t have to worry about slots for a good long time and I might even do a Daily Deal and buy a 40 pack for the first time.
In the meantime, it’s an exercise in patience. Lots and lots of patience. 
No, I mean, okay, you can do what you want with your tokens obviously, but you’re gimping yourself for no reason that I can detect. Saving up tacos forever costs you some measurable amount of resources that you’re never going to get back. It’s even worse value over time than just opening them all immediately (although that’s a weak strategy too), since once you buy out a DDQ vault, you stop yourself from regenerating health packs for a loooong time. That’s free value the game gives everyone that you’re just tossing out the window.
You can hoard tacos if you want to, though. Everybody does things for fun sometimes and it is going to be pretty entertaining getting all the max rewards at once on the same day. Just as long as you know that mathematically speaking, it’s the worst expected value you can achieve without actually just refusing to ever open the tokens at all.
Re: the OP, the animation is just window dressing. An RNG determines the reward as soon as you choose to pull the token and start the animation. This is per an interview that was on the Puzzle Warriors podcast with a MPQ producer a couple months back. So there is no point whatsoever in trying to time your stop of the animation.
I may have to listen to that episode again. (Ah, darn. Listening to a repeat of one of my favorite podcasts.
)
It was confirmed ages ago that the animation is just window dressing. The results are determined as soon as you decide to use the tokens. Anyone tells you they have a foolproof system in place is mistaken.
For the first event vault (I think it was independence?) the animation was actually what you would get. With 4 tokens I had the 3 4*s from waiting for it to cycle. That was ‘fixed’ for the second one so it now serves no purpose.