Unlocking Modern Champion For The First Time And Third Place On Modern Diamond Leaderboard
Introduction
This is my first time unlocking Modern Champion since Chaos Legion went into Wild league. With moving up from Diamond One to Champion Three in Modern league I have gotten a pretty good number of chests, let's see if I will get something special...
Modern Champion Three Advancement Chests
As usual I have used both Legendary Potions and Alchemy Potions as I have thousands of those and am not very likely to run out of those in the forceable future.
These chests look pretty cool especially since the design has been modified for the Valentine Day event.
And as you can see I got a very common chest results. I am happy with additional energy as that is always good especially at the higher levels as each energy is 5,000 Glint tokens to buy at the Champion Level.
If we look at the results of the chest pull it becomes clear why I don't usually spend my Glint tokens on the Ultimate chests. The last four items came from the Ultimate chests. As you can see the results do not distinguish themselves from the Major chests as much as their Glint cost would imply.
Yes, it is nice to get over two thousand merits, except I have my gladiator cards completely maxed out and it has not been announced when the new gladiator cards are coming out as far as I know, so I am collecting massive amounts of merits right now:
Two hundred seventy three thousand merits is quite a bit... Well the jackpot card was nice, but the other two chests are really disappointing, three energy is less than the four energy I got from the major chest in this pull and five common cards is nothing to get excited about from the chest that costs in the glint store ten thousand Glint.
I think buying extra energy at the start of the season is a much better use of glint tokens for me than trying my luck in the Ultimate chests. Though all of us would like to pull something special like a land plot or a gold foil legendary reward card... That is the allure of the Ultimate chests.
Modern Diamond Leaderboard
With just under nine days to go in the current Splinterlands season I am currently at the third position in the Modern Diamond leaderboard. Things can definitely still change as there is a lot of time left in the season. I already see that Diamond Leaderboard in the Modern league is definitely a lot more competitive than the Silver leaderboard in Modern.
Top ten in the Modern Diamond leaderboard are all fairly close to each other in ratings. Me choosing to advance into the Champion league means that I will not be able to compete in the Diamond leaderboard in modern next season. I think that is the reason many stay in the Diamond league every season. Let's take a look at the Modern Diamond leaderboard from the last season:
Notice that after seventh place where @stever82 is at 3700 rating there are five players just one or two wins shy of the advancement into the Champion league. I think that was a deliberate choice to stay in Diamond to compete for the Diamond leaderboard this season.
And I can totally understand why they would choose to stay in Diamond. Advancement chests are not that big of a deal and for those at 3680 rating one more win would make them advance, but will not result in any additional glint tokens as places between four and ten all get 200K glint. For places eleven and twelve the call is a tiny bit harder to make as one or two wins (depending if they are on a win streak or not) will result in going up from 150k to 200K glint a difference of fifty thousand glint tokens.
So advancing to Champion means that you would have to compete for the Champion leaderboard next season and instead of the easy 150K glint in Diamond you have to place in top 50 in Champion to get the same 150K. If you look at the screenshot above you can see that to get into top fifty last season you had to achieve 4,620. That sounds like a hard thing to do, to get to the 100K glint you have to place in the top 75 in Modern Champion. That is also a challenging proposition as you have to be at the 4,200 rating.
To get fifty thousand glint tokens and to be on the Modern Champion leaderboard is a bit more feasible as you have to be able to achieve around 3,900 rating, which doesn't sound so bad.
Conclusion
Splinterlands remains a very top heavy game in Modern league. Competition for the top 100 is really hard, the next one hundred places are significantly easier and beyond the two hundred the modern decks become a lot less strong.
Which is the reason it is a smart choice to remain in the Diamond league every season and just collect the nice glint rewards without advancing into Champion League. I have made the decision to advance into the Modern Champion because I would like to experience what the Champion league is like as a part of my Modern experiment. I want to collect the data and have the definitive answer on the optimal strategy in Splinterlands at this time.
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