They aren’t too rare from level 5 mines, I’d say you could probably get 2 of them within 10 to 20 mines. You cannot get them from level 4 mines or lower, though.
Im not really good at profiting but i guess you can try my strategy.
In my case i would spend a lot of byte coins on level 2 keys, when i play all of them and i sell the level 3 keys for bytes i would buy a pocketwatch and then just repeat the whole process or if you have enough bytes just buy 2 at the same time
That’s what i did to upgrade my epic pickaxe
grind mine 1, get 20 bronze keys, (2000 bronze nuggets) use 2 keys per mine 2 to get 1 silver key, use all 20 to get 10 silver keys, and sell the silver keys for 435. After that, you should have 4350 bytes, and with the gems you collected sell em so you can buy wls, and then use the (usually) 4 wls at the BC Exchange and then you should have 5k for one watch. This would take one day, so it should only take 2 days. Can be faster if you grind all day.