Melon's Ultimate Rent-to-Play Guide

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Overview of the Strategy
3. Building your Deck
4. Optimizing your Strategy
5. Closing Statements

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Introduction

So you want to earn money in splinterlands but don't have thousands of dollars to invest in cards. How can you compete at the higher leagues without breaking the bank, and even scoring decent profit?

When I started playing Splinterlands a month ago, I fell in love with the game but didn't have so much money to throw at it. Naturally, I wanted to grow my account as fast as possible, so I dove deep into the game to try and maximize my returns. I found a bunch of youtube video guides on spending money to grind in bronze, and even to rent at the end of a season for those silver league season rewards. However, these strategies were not so profitable, and it was a tedious, boring way to play the game. No, I had to make my own strategy in order to get to where I wanted to be, and thus I embarked upon a journey to develop the rental strategy that you will read about in this guide.

A little bit of a disclaimer here: this guide alone will not be enough. You will need to understand the basics such as the DEC energy capture rate mechanism and autobid system on peakmonsters.com. You will also need to put the time and attention that is needed to learn the mechanics of the game and become an effective deckbuilder if you want to employ this strategy. That is precisely why I don't mind releasing this guide, even if it will surely reduce my own earnings if everyone starts using it. I'm certain that 99% of you are just trying to make a quick buck using "tips and tricks". Unfortunately, that's not how life works, and the same principle extends to this game as well. For the 1% of you who do take the time to learn to play the game using this rental strategy, congratulations! Let's build our wealth together in this wonderful game.

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Overview of the Strategy

There are 3 avenues that you can earn money from this game through play:

1. Ranked battle wins (in bronze 2 and above) will earn you DEC per win,
2. Completing daily quests will give you loot chests that contain cards, DEC, potions (aka. lotions), or credits (for bronze chests only),
3. The end-of-season rewards, which will give you loot chests once the season has ended.

Going to higher leagues nets you more DEC per win, more loot chests from daily quests, and more end-of-season rewards. Recently, they have changed the formula for DEC payouts to be even more favorable to higher rated players, and nerfed the rewards to bronze players. It's not even worth mentioning bronze chests, which have an abysmal card drop rate and can pay out in credits which are next to worthless. Clearly, we want to be playing at a higher level.

Thus the Melon Rental Strategy:

First, you want to determine which league you want to grind at. This will depend on your current rating and ability. I recommend a minimum of Silver 3. If you can play at Gold 1 but are starting the play session from a rating of 900 due to the season reset, it's highly unlikely that you will be able to reach gold in a single sitting. Plan accordingly. For reference, I rent for Silver 1 on the first play session, then Gold 1 for the second play session after season reset.

Second, you want to rent a card or two that allows you to advance to the league that you wish to play at. Rent the card for one day only. I know the auto-bid system for collection power (CP) has been released, but I don't like using it for two reasons. First, it can take a long time for the bid to fill, and if you're starting from a high energy capture rate then you want to begin as soon as possible since you're losing profit if it hits 100%. Second, you want to reset the daily quest as soon as you rent that card in order to guarantee that the next quest reset occurs in 23 hours. As such, I recommend manually renting the card. I usually go to peakmonsters.com and filter for gold foil legendaries/epics, which are 50-150k CP per card. The current prices that I aim to rent at are ~500 CP/DEC, which means 100 DEC for a 50k CP card or 300 DEC for a 150k CP card. If you can find a better deal, that's good because you'll be making more profit.

Note: the specific card that you select is not that important. This card is mainly to get you to the minimum CP requirement for the league you want to grind at. If it has use for your deck, that's just icing on the cake.

Note 2: remember that your deck will also give you CP, so you may be able to relax the amount of CP you rent during this step if you're willing to give up 1-2 daily chests for your quest.

Third, you want to hit that daily quest reset timer. This makes it so that your daily quest rewards will register your CP. If you don't do this, and grind from 900 rating to 1900 rating before you claim the quest rewards, you could be stuck with 1 bronze chest for a reward.

Fourth, you want to rent your deck. This is a complicated topic and I will cover it in the next section. The general guidelines are that you want to rent at least two splinters (i.e. fire and water, life and death, water and nature, etc...) that allow you to complete the daily quest and net you the highest possible win rate.

Fifth, all of that prep work is now going to pay off! That's the hope, anyway, if you did it right. Complete your daily quest, increase that rating, grind at the league you want to play at, and claim that quest reward. If you have the patience and time, I recommend trying to maintain your energy capture rate above 80%. However, if you have work and other responsibilities as I do, then grind down to whatever level you can in the alloted time you have. I usually grind down to 50% or so, which takes about an hour and a half of play.

Sixth, you want to wait until that quest timer resets. If you hit the reset button immediately after you rented your first cards for CP, then you should have approximately 1 hour to play before those cards expire. This is because your rentals are 24h and the quest resets every 23h. That 1h should give you enough time to complete your second quest and to grind your energy capture rate to about 30-40%.

In total, I spend about 2-3 hours employing this strategy, after which the account has about 3 days to charge back to a 95-100% energy capture rate. I have 3 accounts which allow me to stagger and rotate the accounts so that I am playing once a day.

At the end of season, rental prices are insanely high and I do not recommend renting to the higher leagues. The best deals at the end of season are maybe 100 cp/dec. This stops being profitable on average (using an estimated value of 56 DEC per loot chest as of today) at gold 2, and the margin for profit shrinks after silver 3. What I do is rent to silver 3, and just take those rewards for maximum profit.

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Building Your Deck

This part is just as fun as playing the game itself, in my opinion. Since we are renting to turn a profit, we want to minimize how much we spend in order to maximize our winnings. We need to be economical about our card choices, and also ensure that we have a deck that is competitive. I cannot go through all the decks that are possible, but I will highlight some key ideas that I use when building my decks.

Note: you can rent specific cards using the autobid system for cheaper prices, if you can wait. If my energy capture rate is close to 100%, I usually rent a few cards, play a couple matches, and wait for the autobids to fill. This helps to minimize costs of renting.

Synergies

Most importantly, you want a deck that does it's own thing, and does it well. Synergies are very powerful in this game, and therefore the best decks are pro-active. For example, Yodin and his crew of ranged attackers are very powerful because they set out to accomplish one task: blast the enemy to pieces.

Other examples include the all-powerful magic squad consisting of Alric/Valanor + Ruler of the Seas/Phantom of the Abyss/Lobstradamus/Coral Wraith/etc..., the degenerate Llama + Kron/Flesh Golem/Pelacor Mercenary combo, the sneak life build of silvershield knight + silvershield assassin + elven cutthroat/uraeus/cave slug/feral spirit, or the frustratingly hard to hit speed gang of Kitty + fast units + blind/slow. One thing that all these decks have in common is that they come into the game with a plan, and they execute.

Rulesets

The other important aspect to consider when building your deck are utility cards for the particular rulesets. In my opinion, the ones that you absolutely need to prepare are for:

These rulesets have very high potential to be a win for you if you are prepared and your opponent is not. An easy way to get around earthquake is to rent a Brighton Bloom (gives your team flying), but if your deck already has a ton of flying units, then you don't have much to worry about. Immunity and Scavenger are very powerful abilities that shine in Noxious Fumes. That means Harklaw, Kralus, Screeching Vulture, Cave Slug, and Gelatinous Cube (to just mention a few) are very good cards to have. For super sneak, retaliate/backfire/thorns on your backline unit is almost a must.

The other rulesets are important to consider as well, and you can try to balance out odd/even cards, low/high mana cards, high/low speed, etc...

Counters

I also believe that it is vital that you try to counter "the meta", as some decks will certainly have an advantage over others. For example, a speed team without phase will be vulnerable to magic teams that don't really care about speed and blast your monsters' face anyway.

The optimal counters will depend on your specific deck and splinter that you are using, but in general you want to make sure that you have the following capabilities.

1. Anti-magic. This means you have cards with void, silence, or -1 magic (looking at you Bortus).
2. Anti-thorns (aka. anti-Mylor). This means you have some strong ranged units, magic units with high HP (cause failed summoner will wreck your flimsy magic dealers) and strong tanks with shield.
3. Anti-Yodin. This is a hard one, but cards with return fire are your best friend here. Ideally you'd want Lil Deep Swimmer, but that's not usually possible with the budget.
4. Anti-heal. This means affliction. Undead archer is my best friend in death.

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Optimizing Your Strategy

As with any strategy, it's vital that you review and refine yours. I go through my rental expenses, ranked battle rewards, cards rented, and win rate every week to see where I could have improved. I've refined my deck lists (that I will look to blog about in the future) so that I am getting the most optimal cards for their intended function, and potential replacements if they are not available to rent for a reasonable price. It takes just a few minutes to do this, and it's made my strategy almost 5x more profitable since I started. Instead of earning 200 DEC per play session from ranked battle matches (not including daily quest or season reward chests), now I earn an average of 1000 DEC per play session. It feels really good to be rewarded for my hard work, and I hope that you can experience this too!

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Closing Statements

If you've made it to the end of this guide, thank you very much for your patience and interest. It's the first time I have written a blog post, and it was longer than I had originally intended. I will look to add to this guide whenever I can, so that it can become the best resource for those who are looking to become successful at rent-to-play in Splinterlands.

Please look forward to my future posts!