Season challenge: Playing with a spellbook and 1K+ DEC

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(Edited)

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Recently, there has been a lot of commotion about how you can't play Splinterlands without investing a ton. While I am quite sure that this is not the case (I mostly rent since the start), I still wanted to try how much a single account, WITHOUT any owned cards, can earn (or lose) in a single season.

My initial plan for this Season Challenge is to just turn the results into a single post by end of season. However, I eventually realized that it might be fun to record and update the results in detail. Here is my first entry for this challenge!

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Challenge Summary

  • Starting balance: 1,636.628

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  • Initial rating: 900

  • Owned cards: ZERO

  • Cut-off: End of current season

There is no proper reason as to why I set my initial balance to 1.6K DEC. It just happened that it was the carry-over balance in this account from last season. My estimate for a decent starting balance is around 500-800 DEC.

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No owned cards. Zero, Zilch, Nada

Notes:

  • For easier record keeping, everything will be expressed in DEC
  • Card rewards will be converted to USD value (based on PeakMonsters My Explorer), then converted to DEC depending on the rate as of writing.

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Strategy

  • To maximize rental costs, two quests will be stacked before each round of rentals.
  • ECR management
    • I will only rent when my ECR is at 100%
    • Stop playing at 45-60% ECR
  • Target league: Diamond II and up

    • Reason behind this is I am feeling lucky (LOL) with reward chest pulls this season. I never tried calculating which league gives the most efficient DEC reward vs. rental costs. So I'll just go with my gut feel on this one.

    • More than the rewards, it feels so good to open more chests for daily quest 😅

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First rental run results

Pretty sure that I overspent on this one. Normally, I can rent to Silver I with less than 400 DEC/day (a lot of people spend way less than that). It must be the post end of season hype, where each rental feels A LOT cheaper. I had fun anyway.

Current rating

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Current account rating

When my rentals expired, I was able to increase the account's rating by 982. This resulted to a current rating of 1,882, few ratings short for Gold III.

Ranked battle rewards

Rental costs: 595.076 DEC/day

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Ending DEC: 3,934.909

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Ranked battle rewards P&L: 3,934 - 1.636 - 12(from quest) = 2,286 DEC (ranked rewards)

Quest rewards

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First set of rewards

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Second set of rewards

Total cards value: $1.45 = 103 DEC
DEC rewards (Quest): 12 DEC
Total DEC from chest: 115 DEC (chest rewards)

Total profit (including cards): 115 + 2,286 = 2,401 DEC

This simply means that if we cash out now, we are already on a profit with our initial Spellbook investment of $10 or ~720 DEC. Since we had a boost of 900 rating at the start, we can cut our DEC profit to half to act as a buffer for that boost. This gives us approximately 500 DEC profit. Not bad for a start.

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Final Thoughts

Overall, I think that was a decent run despite the high rental costs. I am thankful that the DEC ranked rewards during this run went bonkers and was giving a lot more than usual. There is definitely a lot to improve when it comes to my rental efficiency.

I'll keep everyone updated with my rental round for this challenge account. I'm quite hyped for the next round, since I am expecting to open 6+ chests for each quest. See you on my next post!

EDIT: For those who are interested in following this season challenge, I made a collection in PeakD to make this series much more organized and reader friendly. Collections is my favorite @PeakD feature because it helps both authors and curators organize posts easily. Feel free to check my published collections to have a better idea how it works.

Since I am used to curating collections with a combination of my posts and other authors', it slipped my mind that I can also turn this series into a collection. I got the idea of turning my series of posts into a collection from @sjarvie5, after reading this post. Please check out the linked post, it is something to look forward to.

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CREDITS

  • Game-related images from Splinterlands
  • @flauwy for the cool-looking dividers
  • Cover photo made in Canva

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12 comments
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Interesting to see players with different playing styles and strategy. I am still trying to learn how to optimise my rentals to get to get Bronze II, without spending too much DEC.

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Great from-zero-to-hero research.
Thanks for the post.

One question, what's your win rate though?
Because most of the newbies (including me) will have a hard time for even reaching 50% win rate.
This will determine ranked battle rewards and win streak bonus.

Cheers.
!PIZZA

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Hey, tedus! Thanks for the compliment and reblog!

It's 59%. It was much more decent when I was moving up from 900 rating, then it went down heavily once I reached Gold III (I kept bumping down to Silver I).

For reference:

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I agree with you on that. I should have included it from the start, will likely include it in the succeeding posts to provide proper context. Thanks tedus!

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Really interesting. I'm spending hundreds of dollars buying cards and you're making 2000 DEC renting. I may need to re-think my strategy. Although I DO own a little land so I may need those cards there...? We'll see if you can rent for that as well.

My question to you would be how many cards you rented and which summoners? Did you try to field a full team? Or did you just try and buff up one or two splinters?

Followed as I will be very curious to see your season results.

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I don't think there's anything wrong with buying cards. It's just that I prefer waiting for the roll-out of Chaos Legion before buying more. But I will definitely stack up on cards in the future. There is so much advantage in being an owner vs. being a renter.

The total cards that I rented was around 50-55 (I can't export the exact number). Summoners: Lyanna Natura, Pyre, and Camilla Sungazer. I usually buff up two splinters then mix few dragon and neutrals (helped me survive if the other two splinters are not available).

Thanks for the follow! I hope you enjoy reading through my succeeding season challenge posts :)

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Interested to see how you use Lyanna Natura 😊
Care to blog about it?

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I don't mind! :) But I usually just rent the cheapest maxed level summoner available for the league that I want to go for that rental round.

^Had to mention it in case you are looking for high-level Lyanna Natura plays 😆

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Yay. I am glad that I inspired you to make a collection!

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Thank you for that! I'm looking forward to your next post for Crypto talk :)

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