Leaderboard Climbing Journey as an F2P [10,000 DEC Leaderboard Reward]

TLDR: F2P Grinded Gold leaderboard with a 2000 DEC Capital, ended up rank 12 with 10000 DEC reward.

It's almost two months since I've started playing splinterlands. I went through ups and downs in my journey. Last season I tried competing for the Diamond leaderboards but I failed. I only ended up in Diamond 1. That climb costed me around 6K+ DEC which is around 35 USD. I've been wasting tons and tons of DEC for my rentals I never got anything with that much value from the money that I've spent on rentals.

Even though I made a lot of mistakes there's one thing that I got from those mistakes, which is knowledge.
Knowledge about the game will surely help us F2P players utilize our resources efficiently.

I'll share some of the things I learned to all of you that helped me in climbing the leaderboard.

1. NEVER do rentals you cant afford. Make sure that you can gain back the DEC you used for rentals through grinding ranked battles.
2. NOT all players in the leaderboard are good, they just have the advantage of having their own cards allowing them to grind anytime.
3. Renting for power at the end of the season is not worth it. I'd rather buy cards instead.

Here's how I did my grind.

I started the season (9 Days remaining) with 2500 rating since I was diamond 1 last season. I also started the season with around 2000+ DEC in hand. PS: I only grinded for two different days. On the first day of the grind I have 2 daily quests ready, and I rented 3 Splinters for a day that I can use in battling and to finish my quest. I rented Water, Death, and Dragon. Which costed me around 1800 DEC for the rentals. I quickly finished my first quest but the grind was a bit tough for me, it was a win-lose-win-lose situation. I managed to get 2900 rating and stopped at 50% ECR. the next day I continued my grind since my third quest is almost up and rentals are almost expiring. I grind till I finish my quest and till my ECR went down to 12%.

1st Day of Grind Results:
DEC = ~2400 including DEC from quests
Rating = ~2800

Since I drained my ECR to almost nothing I had to stop for 4 days to fully replenish it to 100% but I realized that End of Season is nearing so I waited till there's 2 days before EoS.

I realized that some of the rentals I made was a mistake. I removed the cards that I wasn't able to use on my previous grind to save money. These realizations made me tweak the rented decks I'm using to be able to win more games for my grind. This time I rented Fire, Water, Death, and Dragon. This time's rental was a bit cheaper because I was able to find good deals and this time I'm using 4 splinters. I drained all my DEC for this grind to help me win more games.

With 100% ECR and 2800 rating I started my grind...
I kept on winning... till I see my streak.

18 consecutive wins I suddenly jumped to 3.1k rating. That was an easy 300 rating jump for me. Because of that streak I was more cautious on playing my cards because one wrong positioning could lose me a lot of points. Most of the games I lost is because I don't have the cards suited for the rulesets. Ended Day 2 Grind with 3213 rating and 40 DEC because I had to extend most of the rentals I have to retain power for gold to be able to get the EoS rewards and DEC rewards aren't that great that time because I don't have ECR left.

2nd/Last Day of Grind Results
Rating = 3213
DEC = 40

I ended up on Rank 6 Gold on the last day of my grind. Many top players dropped due to consecutive losses which made me place higher than them. But on the last day many players were still grinding the leaderboards I kept on praying that they lose so I can sustain my spot XD. I ended up on the 10th spot 2 hours before EoS I thought I would be able to get the 20,000 DEC reward but players from Immortal Gods surpassed my rating pushing me down to the 12th which is the rank I ended up with for EoS with a 10,000 DEC reward.

This climb taught me that I should be playing in lower leagues next season since this grind was a bit expensive and risky. This grind also thought me to build my own deck, I've already thought of slowly building my deck for silver league as I wait for the Chaos Legion packs.

The only mistake I've done is I didn't make sure that my cards for battling will last at the end of the season which prevented me from grinding more rating points that will put me in the top 10 leaderboard. (I was like 9 points away from the top 10)

Questions:
Was this grind worth it?

• For me, yes since I only had around 2K DEC in hand when I started.

Do you recommend doing this?

• It's up to you if you think you can outplay players from the leaderboard.

A breakdown of the deck I've rented will be available on my next blog if many people requested.

I Appreciate the support from Splinter Skulls and No Sleep Gang, let's go strong together!