My Splinterlands play n' invest strategy. Sepone's Splinterlands Snowball Project ep. 2

Hey folks,

Welcome to the next episode about my Snowball project, where I am trying to become Splinterlands whale in 5 years horizon. This time I would like to describe my strategy on combining playing, renting, and reinvesting in Splinterlands to maximize revenue output and overall account value growth.

The principles
Splinterland offers a variety of earning possibilities, both active and passive and the great thing about the game is that you can combine both active and passive methods to create your financial model which is tailored to your needs and capabilities.

I suppose it's rather clear for everyone looking into play-to-earn aspects of the game, that Splinterlands follows some general financial rules, which basically can be summarized pretty easy in 2 sentences:
1. More assets you own, more lucrative passive income is available for you.
2. Money makes money.

If you just started your journey with the game, invested 10$ to buy summoner's spellbook, and started to play with ghost cards in novice/bronze, do not expect a shitload of money landing in your pocket from day one. Because card assets (and probably everything land-related in near future) are crucial in existing game mechanics, without owned (or leased) assets, forget about income.

As it was stated by aggroed in one of the Town Halls, the game founders intend to encourage players to build stronger card decks and progress within leagues. He also made clear, that Splinterlands is not free to play game, meaning that large asset owners will always have more in-game opportunities than minnows.

Moreover, cards in Splinterlands have ultra-deflationary nature due to combination and burning mechanism combined with league level caps, renting possibilities, and upcoming land expansion (as founders mentioned - higher level cards harnessed to work in the land will bring better outcomes).

The strategy
Noted all that facts, my strategy is built upon the following rules:

1. I am holding all cards (even not very useful ones, like cheap reward cards) so my collection power constantly grows up and within time I can be qualified to play in higher leagues without the need for CP rentals
2. Around 90% of my game time, I spent on active methods - mainly on progressing with daily/seasonal rewards and farming DEC by winning battles.
3. When my ECR is low (at least 24h for full recharge) or I don't have time for playing, I am renting out most of my cards for 24h, so during ECR charging or my absence, I am earning passive DEC income from rentals
4. When my ECR is high and I have a new daily quest to finish, I am renting cards that I do not own and reckon them as useful to progress with daily and DEC farming, but I am putting a hard volume threshold on DEC spent for rentals, to make sure I can farm back the amount spent from winning matches
5. I am reinvesting earnings to buy and level up cards which I am usually renting, so in the long-term, I will not need to rent them anymore and I could utilize my rental funds into other cards rentals, making my deck even stronger and my CP volume bigger. I am trying to spot cards with both usabilities in the battle for my element and league as well as good rental ROI.
6. All "extras" I receive like SPS airdrop or vouchers I treat individually, depending on my current feelings and market predictions. That means that either I am holding/staking it or selling in the market and reinvesting into card assets.
7. All opportunities like new booster pack sales etc. I am trying to finance using external funds to keep DEC balance high until SPS airdrop will end. However, if DEC is following a bearish trend, I am buying cards, which in my opinion are more stable in price and give a stable rental return.

As you can see, my strategy is calculated to obtain new cards assets and increase my overall collection power, so I can earn more DEC from playing and renting, ultimately allowing me to switch into full-passive mode by generating lucrative rental income and play the game only with the owned assets.

How does this strategy work in practice for me?

Currently, I own around 59k CP which gives me roughly 600-1000 DEC/day from rentals. I usually spend around 200-300 DEC on renting cards which are making my life in Silver easier and farm such amount from winning battles (sometimes, even more, when DEC rewards pool is not heavily occupied). All DEC collected from rentals and rewards I am reinvesting into new cards from the market. All cards dropped in daily/season rewards are building up my CP and ultimately increasing my rental income due to bulk CP rental introduced last month by Peakmonsters.
In the last month, using this strategy I was able to add around 7k CP to my account which I reckon is a pretty decent result, looking into the fact that I am still enjoying the game just by playing it, learning new strategies, planning upcoming card investments, etc.

Probably within time, I will move forward into more passive strategies based on the cash flow reinvestment gained from rentals, but for now, I am strictly focused on collecting as much collection power as possible.

Wish me luck! Stay tuned!