The Apothecary grind

Guy in Settlers linked 240 Apothecary cards.
Understand he probably got those from very lucky Horti gambling.
What i would like is what can i do to get 1 of those?
Running defiled cathedral 8 mod maps with div card scarabs but getting none.
Have run a lot so do i need to spec into some M/F gear?
Thanks.

POE loot is pretty exponential. It's possible to increase drop rates a lot from combining many factors that multiply together at the top end. They may be farming in a group, or also as you say that they may be gambled or bought through trade. There might also be some strategies with strongboxes or scrying. What ever the strategy is, you are going to want it to be as optimised as possible. If you are playing in settlers league it has been running almost a year, so people with this amount of high end currency may of done a lot of farming in that time.

If this is what you are trying to do, I would look into the very specific farming methods that are being used to do it. There should be some information available for apothecary farming, because it is fairly popular to do. You would want it to be a recent strategy as well, because often in POE strategies change between the leagues. Since the league has been going a long time, anything in the last 10 months is probably ok, but before then, there may of been changes in the best strategies for doing this.

It is very rare thought, so there are going to be massive swings in RNG on farming just 1 card. Even in just finding nameless seer on DC to scry it, there were multiple threads on the forum of people running hundreds of them and not getting him to spawn. So there is a lot of RNG involved if that is part of the strategy. If it is just running DC 8 mods as you are doing, it might be about optimising clear speed or your atlas passives to get as much density on the map as possible. If someone has juiced the map twice as much as you and clearing it 3 times as fast, they might be increasing their drop chance by a factor of 6.

I got from 98 to 100 in std doing mostly a scry'd map and even with div strongboxes rolled with quality haven't seen one since they still dropped in crimson and div deliriums were actual cards not just a single stacked deck.