Splinterlands - strugling to survive like a small fish in the middle of the sharks reunion

Splinterlands is changing direction quite a lot, and often. As we often have limited resources, we struggle to keep up, and sometimes it seems like a money grab, but now and then they are doing a good move. One of the things that I did not agree with is the new decision to make the reward cards soulbound, and while I understand why they did it, as many of us could see bot accounts with an apparently incredible number of reward cards, and just the thought of selling them or exchanging them into DEC could get the market decreasing a lot, I believe that in doing this the whales are still getting a huge advantage, getting all the reward cards at a max level quite quickly, and by doing this, having a huge advantage over the other small and medium player who struggles to upgrade them as fast. One player can have a card or two dropping at bronze, maybe 5-10 as silver, and after that, the numbers can really matter. More than that, you can now receive more than one card in a chest, even if they are Legendary or Gold. A huge advantage for Diamond and Champion players.

That is one issue. Another problem that I have is keeping up with all the new cards that are coming upon us, one after another, and these new Legendary summoners from the airdrop are quite expensive by anyone's standards. While I make a point of upgrading every new summoner at max level, I am now lagging behind, not having Lux Vega and Waka, with Immortalis and Astral Entity only level 2, and all the Epic RW ones up to level 3. I am not happy about this, but Hive is having quite a good start now, and I would like to add more to the pile, leaving the summoners to upgrade for much, much later. So much for overpowered dragons of the old, like Daria used to be.

Still, I can see how after you maximize the reward cards level, you can burn them for DEC, and exchange that DEC into DEC-B in order to increase the profit and buying power. I am thinking to change my strategy, and pulling all my cards from rental, but in doing this I stop gaining daily DEC, and I cannot upgrade my remaining CL and RW cards. Hard to decide still. Maybe I play for one season and rent for another. Still do not know, I need to crunch some numbers to see what is the best. Selling all for Hive, and using the Hive rewards after upgrading the cards is also an option.

What will be? What will be? Until I know, I wish you a perfect night, and see you tomorrow!
George