My Splinterlands Blog #36 - The Silver Dilemma, Another Mid-season Update
Welcome to another weekly update on my attempt to challenge the Splinterlands ranked leagues! Initially it was a self challenge, to see how far I could get with the initial set of cards plus whatever I could win. But, that kind of fell apart around week 30, with the game integrating with the WAX network and users being able to buy and sell cards on Atomic Hub.
There are an awful lot of things going on in Splinterlands at the moment, so let's start with some changes to the game! Because Untamed Packs have been flying off the shelf with the real possibility of them selling out in the next few months, the season rewards are being changed from Untamed packs to Dark Energy Crystals (DEC). I think this is a good move, as it lets people spend their winnings on what they want, and can allow for finer tuning to the leader board prizes.
Originally 1.5 million Untamed packs were put up for sale; less than 250,000 are left at the time of this writing.In my opinion, a lot of these sales are driven by speculation. People see how much Alpha and Beta packs sell for now that they've been out of print for a while, and are stocking up on Untamed packs to try to resell them. The developers have said that there will be at least a few months between when Untamed sells out and the next release is put up for sale.
This dovetails nicely into my own conundrum, about what I should be buying to improve my own deck! It has been stated that once the next set is released, there will be a split in the Ranked leagues. There will be one league with Untamed and later releases, and one with all sets. I was originally thinking of leveling up Daria Dragonscale, but she falls into the cards that will be in the pre-Untamed league. So, I haven't picked her up yet and have been trying to figure out the best option.
Note the different border on Daria Dragonscale when compared to the other Dragon Summoners.Some other updates to the game are the removal of Mystery Potions, removing the ability to combine Alpha and Beta cards, and removing the free card for referrals. The land reveal should be coming up in the next couple of months, where the "plots" people bought turn into actual cards. Plus, there is some "huge" announcement that they have teased coming next week. While there's been a lot of wild speculation on what that might be, there really hasn't been much in the way of clues.
I'll write a bit more at the end, but for now I'm going to move on to covering the events of this past week:
Daily Quest Rewards:
Daily Quest # 256 - Win 5 with Fire. I spent the first day getting myself back up into Silver I from Silver III over about 40 matches. When I finished the daily, I received 15 DEC (10 + 5), a Legendary potion, and a 20th copy of the rare Dragon monster card, Gloridax Summoner.
Outside of the game, @MarcusWahl was back streaming on Twitch again after taking a break. (He's one of the people who run cardauctionz.com.) I got 200 DEC from showing up early, and losing a game against him on the stream. He's essentially streaming daily, but I couldn't make most of them due to work or not being home when they happened.
Daily Quest # 257 - Win 5 with Snipe. For completing this daily quest, I received 5 DEC; a Gold potion; a 10th copy of the common Earth monster card, Barking Spider; and a 6th copy of the common Earth monster card, Harvester. I also noted that the DEC per win was quite high, giving about 25-30 per game won.
Daily Quest # 258 - Win 5 with Death… re-rolled to Win 5 with Life. Still not keen on the Death daily, so just re-rolling those to anything else. After finishing my Life quest, I got a Gold potion; a Legendary potion; a 6th copy of the common Life monster card, Chain Spinner; and a 2nd copy of the Legendary Death monster card, Ancient Lich!
Very exciting to get a Legendary reward card! The first one of these was back in week 8!Daily Quest # 259 - Win 5 with Sneak. For completing this daily quest, I got a Legendary potion and 62 DEC (45 + 11 + 6).
Daily Quest # 260 - Win 5 with Death… re-rolled to win 5 with Sneak. For completing this daily quest, I received a Gold potion; a 13th copy of the common Death monster card, Undead Rexx; a 14th copy of the common Death monster card, Nightmare; and a 9th copy of the rare Life monster card, Silvershield Sheriff.
Daily Quest # 261 - Win 5 with Death… re-rolled to win 5 with Fire. For finishing this daily quest, I received 2 Gold potions and 21 DEC (15 + 6).
Daily Quest # 262 - Win 5 with Earth. For completing this daily quest, I received 2 Gold potions, 5 DEC, and a copy of the epic Life monster card, Evangelist!
I mistakenly thought that I already had a copy of this card!Daily Quest # 263 - Win 5 with Death… rerolled to Win 5 with Snipe. For finishing this daily quest, I got 25 DEC (13 + 12), an 8th copy of the rare Water monster card, Captain's Ghost; and an 8th copy of the common Fire monster card, Charlok Minotaur. Outside of the game, I lost to Marcus on his Twitch channel again and got another 100 DEC consolation prize.
Tournaments:
There were a lot of tournaments this week, and I even missed one due to not being around for a real-time tournament. Among tournaments that I will be missing, they have announced the Beat A Pro tournament. This was back from the DygyCon 2.0 event, where various long-time players were available for Bronze matches. I beat a few of them, so I technically qualify, but since this is a Gold league tournament with all of the same "pro" players in it, I'm not going to even bother to enter with my Bronze league cards.
Thursday Bronze Blunderbuss, no legendary cards, all sets allowed tournament: I started off strong with a 10-1 record on day one. I finished 17-4 to come in 7th place for 1,000 DEC.
Friday Spring Training #9, Silver League rules tournament: I went 6-3, the same as last time, to come in 24nd place. I got the free WAX NFT packs, which are the prizes for participating in these tournaments.
Saturday Astral Entities, Bronze league rules, Untamed, Dice, and Reward sets only tournament: I went undefeated day one going 9-0. I finished 17-1 to come in first place, winning 5,000 DEC.
It feels like it has been a while since I came in one of the top 3 spots!Sunday Astral Entities, Bronze league rules, Untamed, Dice, and Reward sets only tournament: I went 8-1 on day one. I finished 17-1 to come in fourth place, winning 400 DEC. My one loss was also annoying, because we both had healing monsters that couldn't kill each other, so my opponent won off of random turn ordering.
Sunday Bronze Blunderbuss, no legendary cards, Untamed set only tournament: I went undefeated again on the first day of this tournament, with an 11-0 record. However, I had a poor day two, finishing 12-5-1 to come in 17th place for 266.666 DEC.
Thursday Bronze Blunderbuss, no legendary cards, Untamed set only tournament: I went a more typical 9-2 on the first day. I finished 16-5-1 to come in 22nd place for 500 DEC.
Friday Spring Training #10, Silver League rules tournament: I went 4-5, getting beaten up by actual Silver league level cards, to come in 48th place. I still got the free WAX NFT packs, which are the prizes for participating in these tournaments. I personally didn't appreciate several Gold league players joining this tournament, as well as the Gold league one.
Guild Brawls:
In guild news, there was a purge of members that had never joined the Discord, contributed DEC, or participated in brawls. This currently has us with 4 empty spots, though it seems like a lot of guilds are recruiting at the moment. We've also had more trouble getting people to participate in Brawls lately.
Guild Brawl #12, playing Gold foil Bronze, Untamed set only. I had no opponents. I should have switched to an open regular match, but I wasn't around the computer when the timer was running out. With unfilled spots we didn't have a great showing, though I didn't record the actual placing.
Guild Brawl #12, playing Gold foil Bronze, Untamed set only. This time I had a single opponent, and once again should have just done a regular slot. On the bright side, the guild came in 2nd place in our group overall!
Trading & The Rest:
There has been quite a drop in a lot of cryptocurrency prices this past week. WAX has shed about half its US dollar evaluation. I pulled a Cthulu, Poseidon, and Magnor off the WAX market and into my deck, along with the copies of Mylor Crowling I had up for sale. Someone did buy a number of my Alpha cards, including my Swamp Thing, several Rexxie's, and a Tyrus Paladium.
I decided to get away from holding a lot of WAX, and picked up several land plot claims instead. Hopefully this will pan out once the functionality is released and the original land sales run out. At the time of this writing, there still are about 27,000 of the original 150,000 plots for sale from the in-game market for $20.
Putting me at a nice Baker's Dozen.I'm thinking I may filter future WAX profits from other games into improving my collection. I'm not sure how much more land I'll pick up, though individual card prices on the WAX markets tend to be higher than the DEC markets. As an aside, the US dollar price of DEC has held up quite well during this latest price crash of more major cryptocurrencies.
In other news, DygyCon 3.0 happened this past weekend. As far as I know, there was no Splinterlands related challenge this time. I barely was able to attend due to real life responsibilities on the same day, so I certainly might have missed something. There is a giveaway taking place, that I signed up for. We'll see how that turns out!
At this point, I'm continuing to just sit around in Silver league doing my daily quests. I do have a decent chunk of DEC saved up, but am not sure what to throw it into. Higher level summoners are the first thing I would need to start improving my decks actual capabilities, but they can be quite expensive.
This has already been quite a lengthy article, so I'll just wrap it up here! If you made it this far, thank you for reading! If you have any thoughts on how I should approach improving my deck, or any general comments, suggestions, or feedback please let me know in the comments below!