I’m really picky about which banners I pull on. This year I saved up my SQ for ages with the purpose of getting Koyanskaya, Oberon, and hopefully some summer characters. I saved up around 1300 SQand 60 summon tickets. The only time I’ve ever spent money on the game is for the twice-yearly GSSR. It was certainly painful to spend 900 SQ getting Oberon though… I’m now down to 469 SQ, and I’ve done every single available story chapter, interlude, strengthening, claimed every possible reward, so I’m at the mercy of whatever the game gives us between now and the summer event. And then I’ll probably end up with zero SQ…
During the lotto events I transfer my FGO account to an android emulator on my PC and run a program called “FGA” that auto-farms the nodes for me. It burns through apples pretty quickly, and it’s not unfeasible to end up with 200 lotto boxes worth of materials, and it’s a good time to use Lanterns of Chaldea to increase the bonds of your most-used characters. (My poor overworked Waver is now bond 15). You do tend to need high level/max skill meta characters in order to be able to farm automatically like that though. That’s probably why I now have the mountain of resources…