My Splinterlands Self Challenge #10 - 999 Games, Seasons End, & The Price of Potions

Welcome to another update on my attempt to challenge the Splinterlands ranked leagues with only the initial set of cards!… Plus, whatever I can earn or win. The season just ended and there's a ton of things to cover from the past week! I learned a few more things about the game this week as well, mainly from asking questions on the game's Discord channel.

The big thing that I found out, is that you can play cards as lower level versions. I hadn't been combining any of my cards, because I didn't want to block myself from using them in Novice tournaments where the level is capped at 1. It turns out, you can use higher level cards and they will just rank down to the limit. So, after my first daily quest this week I combined my Pyre, Kobold Bruiser, Delwyn Dragonscale, Serpentine Spy, Magma Troll, Exploding Dwarf, and Goblin Mech cards up to level 2.

Here is a breakdown of my week's daily quests, with rewards, plus other items of note that happened on those days:

Daily Quest #55 - Win 5 with Fire (This made a few days of Fire in a row!). It took 9 games to win 5, though I won one off a surrender before I could submit a deck - so it didn't count for the quest. For completing the daily I got a new Life common card, Baby Unicorn.

The Baby Unicorn gives all friendly monsters extra health.

Daily Quest #56 - Win 5 with Life, which I re-rolled to Win 3 without Neutral Monsters. This took 6 games to complete and the daily reward was 26 Dark Energy Crystals, or DEC.

At this point, I also decided to blow DEC on potions to open the two Dice packs I had received the previous week. Purchasing 10 Gold Potions cost 495 DEC and Legendary Potions cost 292 DEC. I also bought the Untamed Epic Death card Darkest Mage, putting my card power over 5,000 - to push me into Bronze 1!

Continuing to build up my Novice Epic card collection for the Kobold Tournaments.

Here is what the packs contained:

The 2nd copy of the Lorna Shine summoner was nice to find.

A better pack with a new Epic monster and two new Summoners.

Daily Quest # 57 - Win 5 with Water... re-rolled to Win 5 with Earth. This took 7 games to complete and I received a 4th copy of the common Neutral card Sand Wurm.

Daily Quest # 58 - Win 5 with Life... re-rolled to Win 3 with no Neutral. This took only 4 games to complete and I received a Gold Potion for finishing the daily. Also of note, I won a third copy of the common Neutral card Gelatinous Cube from @cryptofiloz's Peakd giveaway. This was enough copies to combine them for a level 2 version of the card!

Daily Quest # 59 - Win 5 with Life... re-rolled to Win 5 with Fire. This took 8 games to complete and I won 10 DEC for finishing the daily.

Daily Quest #60 - Win 5 with Fire. This took 9 games to complete, though I did win one with Earth instead of Fire due to match rules. For completing the daily I won an Untamed booster pack! I then also got another free Dice booster pack from @clove71's twitch stream.

I went ahead and blew another 388 DEC on Legendary Potions and 437 on Gold potions. Here is what I got from these two packs:

A 2nd copy of Vera Salacia. Otherwise, nothing too exciting.

Happier to see a 2nd copy of the Epic Sporcerer card. He has gotten some play since I picked him up.

Daily Quest # 61 - Win 5 with Earth. This took only 6 games to finish and I received a 5th copy of the common Water card Wave Runner. This was enough copies to combine them to get a level 2 version of the card.

Daily Quest # 62 - Win 5 with Fire. This took 6 games to complete and I got 57 DEC for finishing the daily.

Outside of the dailies, I entered 3 tournaments this week. I missed the sign-in timer for Monday Madness Bronze rules tournament by 1 minute. I was trying to race back from walking the dog and the tournament just started as I got to my computer. The other two tournaments were Untamed Kobold Mining Expeditions, which are Novice rules and no legendary cards.

In one tournament I did exceedingly well, with an 18-4 record, coming in tied for 4th place. This turned my 10 DEC entry fee into an 1800 DEC prize! This was a big reason why I decided to go ahead and spend DEC on potions to open packs. For the other tournament, I did exceedingly poorly, with a 4-7 record, finishing in 204th place.

In this tournament that I did well in, I actually didn't lose any games until Round 2!

I did attend a couple of @MarcusWahl's twitch streams, where I won 100 DEC in a random giveaway. He gives away DEC to people who beat him in a challenge during his stream, but I didn't win the game against him this week. I did contribute 50 of that to the guild I joined, to not be the only person to not contribute towards upgrading the guild hall.

With my current collection power of 5,380, I was able to finish out the season in Bronze I - without needing to rent any cards! The best place I got during the season was 57th, though after losing a few games I got knocked down several hundred places. I eventually finished up the season in 140th place in the Bronze League.

Still quite far away from winning a pack in Bronze, even if I had stopped here.

By my count, I've played 999 ranked games at the end of this season! Technically, it's 1,000 now, but the season ended as the last match was in the queue. So, not counting tournaments or streaming challenged, I'm playing about 100 games a week with a win rate of about 67%.

My Bronze 1 rewards for finishing the season.

For the new season, my goal will be to work on finishing my Untamed Epic collection for the Kobold Mining weekly tournaments. There's one coming up this weekend! There's also a Novice rules Halloween tournament, but it has a minimum 20,000 card power to enter - which seems like a mistake, as it means it is only open to Silver League, or higher, players.

I'm fairly confident I can finish in Bronze 1 again, though top 100 is going to be fairly uncertain. I'm missing a lot of expensive Legendary cards and getting level 2 Summoners for each element is also fairly pricey. I'll just have to keep trying to win stuff on streams and continue to build up my collection!

Speaking of which, as I was working on writing this, I won another Dice pack from @clove71 by popping in to another stream that she was doing! I'm going to save it for next week, to see if I get more potions from the daily quests. I'll be back in about another week with another update on how things are going!