Bot Battles: Archmage vs Xbot, Part 1

The Beginning
I started playing Splinterlands about a year and a half ago with very little experience in crypto or Web 3 games. A friend knew I liked board games, Pokemon, D&D, and video games. He was super excited about this new game called Splinterlands. After about 3 months of telling me how awesome this game was, I decided to check it out. I bought some SPS, DEC, a spellbook, and a basic deck. I played manually in those days because I did not have the technical knowledge to code a bot. I experimented with different card combinations and had moderate success, but I was not really able to move up very quickly and leaderboards were a dream. I chatted with players, asked my guild for advice, and eventually was able to enter the fabled MAV chat! After card upgrades, strategy sessions, and lots of practice I made it to Diamond. I thought I was the king of the world!

My First Archmage Bot
A few of my guild mates were discussing how they felt a bot could help us play more matches and improve our win percentage. In those days you had to be able to code to use a bot in Splinterlands. I did lots of research but I could not find anything that fit my technical skills, which were pretty low. I was left to manually grind with mixed results. I almost rage quit a few times, and I could eke out a Diamond 3 finish on the last day of the season. My Chaos deck was close to max, and I was struggling. In the midst of my discouragement, Splex and Archmage burst onto the scene. I was so excited to try them. I joined Splex and immediately bought an Archmage Token to use the bot. It was free to use when I started, and that revolutionized my gameplay. I was able to play more games, increase my win percentage and eliminate my stress over earnings. I was so happy. Archmage eventually added a fee to use their bot; 35% was taken from earnings, chest, and EOS (that was later dropped). I was willing to pay because I earned more with Archmage than I ever did playing manually. I was consistently now in Diamond 1, winning enough to cover the cost of the bot. Archmage was meeting my expectations.

Card Upgrades
Then Splinterlands got tough and added a 3rd ruleset in battles. Archmage faltered; I was uncertain what to do. Like a good investor, I asked around and got lots of advice, but most people suggested I invest in better cards. I agreed; you give the bot better cards and you can win more! With the market slipping, card and pack prices were down. I was able to max my Chaos deck, along with the reward and promo cards. I even had Gold-Diamond level Rift cards too. I felt my deck was the strongest it had ever been. I watched my Archmage bot for about 2 weeks, and the winning % dropped from over 60% to just over 40%. I was crushed. I did everything right. I invested in better cards. I talked to OG players about game strategy. I had a bot to play my cards. What else was I missing?

Switching to Xbot
A friend said, get the xbot. I said, “a what bot?” He said, “xbot is better.” I was skeptical at first, but decided I needed to try something. Several others said xbot was working well for them, so invested. I paid just over $100 for the xbot. I decided to keep my Archmage token and try out the xbot for a few days. If it did not work, the token held its value well so I could resell it and recoup costs. I turned off my Archmage and let the xbot fly! Out of the box, it was quite a different experience from Archmage. Archmage plays 1-4 battles each hour, so you spread out your battles over 24 hours. Xbot is a burst approach where the bot plays as many battles as you like consecutively. You can blast 1-50 battles (and more if you buy energies). I also learned you can run both bots at the same time, but you need to turn off Archmage and undelegate your winnings to them because if you leave it on, they will collect your xbot winnings too (which may have happened to me at first!). Initially I did not notice much of a difference between the bots. The win percentages were about the same. I experimented with blasting xbot, recharging and then running Archmage for 12 hours. I started to notice that in Diamond xbot was slightly better. Over time, xbot got me to Champ for the first time, and I decided to stick with it exclusively. I have been able to achieve Champ 1 in Modern and Champ 2 in Wild. I am very satisfied with my xbot.

Archmage Has Utility
So what happened to the Archmage bot? Well, I did not sell it; I instead moved it over to my alt account. I was not ready to leave Archmage forever, and I did not want to invest in another xbot. So Archmage played my alt account, which was a Silver/Gold GF deck that I used for guild brawls and extra earnings. I was again pleased that I had 2 different bots running on 2 different accounts and each was achieving. Then something unexpected happened. I neglected my modern format on one of the accounts it dropped to a 0 rating, all the way back to Novice. I needed to recover my rating so I decided that I would take the first part of the season to get modern back up to Diamond/Champ. I changed my settings and ran xbot in Novice Modern. I checked back after like 10 battles and I lost all of them. What, 10 losses? How could this be? Time to bring Archmage off the bench. Archmage ran strong all the way through Diamond 3 where I started to have more losses again. Achmage went back to the bench and xbot was back on the team. Xbot again performed well in the Champ league. I resolved to keep both bots.

The New Experiment
This whole experience had me wondering, which bot is actually better? I decided to run an experiment to see which bot was superior. I proposed the following test to determine the top bot in Praetoria (Splinterlands). Here is the experiment:

• Start 2 new accounts
• One account will have an Archmage B and the other account will have xbot lite
• I will run at least 200 battles in Modern and 200 battles in Wild to see which bot performs better, and has a higher win percentage
• I will start in bronze and run the bots only in bronze
• I will rent every RF card in Splinterlands at the max bronze level (Except: Lux, Waka, Prince Julian, Archmage Arius, Mighty Dricken because these are max level cards and so renting them for bronze is not financially wise)
• I will track the win percentage for each bot
  Finally I will post the cards the bots used and their win percentage

! [Results in the Next Blog] One bot has a 10% lead in win %.
Any guesses? Find out soon!

At the end we will know which bot is superior and what cards are best used for Splinterlands domination. I plan to blog my journey, the results and cards, so follow along as we see which bot will reign supreme.
Cheers,

IGN: drzoom
Guild: Immortal Phoenix
Many thanks to Archmage, Splex, & Xbot for their great products.
I also want give shout-outs to splintercell-01, my guildmates, fellow players, and MAVs who encouraged me along the way!

My referral link to start battling is https://splinterlands.com?ref=drzoom

Photo credits to Xbot, Archmage, Splinterlands, and ddraw & vectorpocket at Freepik.