Hey everyone! While I very much enjoy the game of splinterlands, I also get a ton of enjoyment out of the meta-gaming aspects, such as what is the best bang for my buck investment. One question I've seen discussed a fair bit and wanted to explore myself was the question of renting vs. playing. In short, is it a better Return on Investment (ROI) to buy cards and rent them out (earning DEC) or to buy them and play them in ranked and collect those rewards (SPS + reward card + potions + merits + packs)? Unfortunately, this takes a fair bit of time to collect the data from my collection, so it wasn't something I could answer right away. But! I've now been keeping track of my rewards for a good period of time (many thanks to splex for the tools to keep on top of the data), and can post my results.

TL;DR: Playing nets ~60% APY, and renting nets ~20% APY

Playing the cards

With the rewards update a few months ago, I quickly brought my deck from Silver to Max to take advantage of the top-heavy rewards. I maxed out most of the CL cards for Dragon, Neutral, Death, Life, and Water (some if GF). At the time of writing, my deck is worth ~$4k (down from ~5K a month or two ago). If you want to see my deck in detail, you can see it here: https://peakmonsters.com/@badrag/cards.

With that deck, I have played in Diamond/Champ the last 6 or so seasons, getting as far as Champ II the previous 2 seasons (Runi + Lux + Arkemis have helped a lot recently).

Inclusive of all rewards and fees (I don't rent cards but I do use archmage, a bot), over the previous 4 seasons I have earned:
Season 98: $112
Season 99: $84
Season 100: $89
Season 101: $80
For an average of $91 of rewards per season.

With 26 seasons or so per year, this leads to a net of 2691/4000=59% APY* on playing with my max deck. I could probably squeeze a little more out of this (dropping some of the more expensive GF for RF), but I think the deck is pretty well optimized for climbing ranks without fully maxing out a lot of more expensive cards.

Renting the cards

Instead of playing with the cards, I could rent them instead. Renting my deck as-is, according to splex's quick estimate, would give an average of 1700 DEC per day to a max of 4000. At today's prices, that's between $0.85-$2 per day. At it's most optimistic, this would lead to 2x365/4000=18% APY.

But of course, my playing deck is not optimized for renting. I have another account with ~$1800 worth of cards which are optimized for renting which earns, at best, ~25% APY (usually closer to 18%).

Comparing the strategies

At first glance, 60% vs 25% is an obvious win for playing, and while I still think the final analysis is firmly with playing over renting, it's less clear cut than those numbers may indicate.

Scalability

The biggest disadvantage playing has vs. renting is how it scales. Every card I buy can immediately be rented for its full value. If I were to buy Countess Sinash every day with my proceeds, which rents for ~30% APY, and then rent it out the following day, my compounded APY from renting would go up to ~44% APY.

The same isn't true of playing. At this point, the only cards that would improve my deck are expensive cards which would marginally improve my win rate. So even if I put 100% of my playing earnings back into my deck, I don't think it would affect my rate the following seasons much at all. I could start building up a new duplicate max deck to then play with that, but it would take a long time before that deck was earning a similar amount and playing similar well.

Reward diversity

One interesting point of comparison is the type of reward. For renting, it is solely DEC, which will hopefully appreciate some, but I don't expect much upward movement. For playing, it's a combination of potions, reward cards, SPS, merits, and packs. Some of these will remain valueless (merits), some will be static (potions), and some have huge potential upside in the long run (SPS, cards, and packs). I generally prefer diversity in holdings, so I give some preference here to playing

Fun

One huge positive I find in playing vs. renting is that I actually get to play the game. Yes, I use a bot, but I still manually play occasional games, and even just watching replays is pretty fun to see my cards in action. This keeps me engaged in the game and the ecosystem and leads to more long-term engagement.

Conclusions

Based on all the above, I definitely give the benefit to playing with cards rather than renting

Referral

Want to participate in Splinterlands? Want to try renting out your cards or play with them to earn rewards? Use my referral link: https://splinterlands.com?ref=badrag