My Splinterlands Self Challenge #11 - Mid-Season update, Twitch Still My Biggest Source of Packs

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. With the new season starting, I was back to 400 rating in Bronze and ready to start climbing my way back up. With the season half over at this point, I'm doing surprisingly well considering how much goofing off I started with.

Here's my breakdown of the past week:

Daily Quest #63 - Win 5 with Water. Usually I would re-roll this, but since we're just starting off the season I decided, "Sure, why not at this point?" It took me 10 games to win 5, but I was happy to get a new Epic Death card Shadowy Presence as my daily reward!

This got a fair amount of use this past week!

After the daily quest, I played 10 more games just for fun/ranking/Dark energy crystals (DEC), only playing my stronger sets Fire, Death, and Earth. I also hopped onto a Stream that @clove71 was doing and randomly won an Epic Life card Lunakari Princess! With an upcoming Untamed Kobold mining Tournament, I spent the bulk of my DEC (1742) on picking up the Epic Earth card Mitica Headhunter, the Epic Life card Light Elemental, and the Epic Water card Coral Wraith to improve my deck options.

This latest purchase putting me at 8 out of 12 of the Untamed set Epic cards.

Daily Quest #64 - Win 5 with Life. This is another one I would normally re-roll, but decided to play out anyhow since it's so early in the season. It took me 9 games to win 5, and I received a Gold potion for my daily reward. I played another 11 ranked games to get my rating back up to 900, putting myself back into Bronze 1. However, I also beat @MarcusWahl on his Twitch stream, where he accepts challenges and gives away random prizes, winning an Untamed pack!

Daily Quest #65 - Win 5 with Water. Not wanting to drop out of Bronze 1, I re-rolled this and got Win 5 with Fire. This took 7 games to complete and I received a 4th copy of the common Death card Phantasm.

I also beat @MarcusWahl on another Twitch stream, winning a second Untamed pack! They're not a common prize, but I hit the uncommon pack prize on his random prize wheel both days! Earlier in the stream, I also won 200 DEC as a random giveaway.

Daily Quest #66 - Win 5 with Death. At this point, Death is one of my stronger sets, as I got that Legendary card a couple weeks back as a daily reward. It only took 6 games to complete this daily quest, and I got a Legendary Potion for finishing it.

Looking back, @MarcusWahl was doing almost daily Stream's at this point in the week. I lost against him, but still ended up picking up a total of 700 DEC in random prizes he gave away to viewers. At this point, I spent 314 DEC on 8 Legendary Potions and 245 DEC on Gold Potions to open the two Untamed packs I had won the previous days.

The rare Summoner card Pyre is a nice pull from this first pack.

Three rares out of pack two, with two of them being Summoners, was also quite nice.

Daily Quest #67 - Win 5 with Death (again). Technically this only took 5 games playing Death, though I played Earth 3 times when certain rules came up like 4 max monster cost and no magic. For finishing the daily quest I got a third copy of the common Life card Baby Unicorn.

Daily Quest #68 - Win 5 with Fire. This also only took 5 games to complete, though I played one with Life in between for an Earthquake rules set, where flying monsters are best. For finishing the daily I got 8 DEC, which was about what I was getting per win on my current winning streak.

Daily Quest# 69 - Win 5 with Death (sensing a theme here). It took me 8 games playing Death to finish the quest, though I won and lost a few playing other sets as well for various rules. For finishing the daily I got a Gold Potion. I still have an unopened Dice pack I won from @clove71, so happy to get more potions at this point!

Around this point I noticed that I was somehow in the top 30 on the Bronze leaderboard.

Daily Quest #70 - Win 5 with Death. Yes, this came up a lot this past week! It only took me 5 games playing Death to finish the daily, though I did win and lose some playing other sets due to various random rules. For finishing the daily I got 13 DEC.

There were also 2 Untamed Mining Kobold Expedition tournaments, where the Novice rule set applied and only non-Legendary cards from the Untamed set can be used. The first one was on Halloween where I went 6-5 to not make the 2nd round, eventually coming in 122th place. I did much better in the 2nd one at the start of November, going 8-2-1 the first day.

I did a little worse day 2, though theoretically playing against better opponents - since they made it to the 2nd round. I ended up going 12-6-2, which was enough to end up in 25th place and win 400 DEC. I also had matches against a couple of players I recognized from Discord, Twitch, or their blog's posts about Splinterlands.

Halfway through the season and I'm in 50th place in Bronze.

Earlier I was looking through the top 30 Bronze players, and most of them have 3 to 5 times the card power I currently do. There's a few players with 20 or more times that, who are likely just trying to farm packs rather than move into Silver or higher leagues.

As I've noted before, I hope that they modify the rewards in the Bronze league to decentivize this behavior - as well as making Novice into a real league for newer players. I still don't have a highly competitive collection under Novice rules, unless you exclude Legendary cards. My success in Bronze feels heavily due to the large number of newer players, and bots, playing in it with similarly low power collections.

I have a bit under 1,500 DEC at this point with one unopened Dice pack. I'm leaning towards continuing to work on completing my Untamed Epic card collection for Untamed Mining Kobold Expedition tournaments, and then start to work on collecting more copies of Summoners to level up for Bronze league play.

To wrap things up, I did not participate in the land pre-sale that took place in Splinterlands, as I didn't have the 10,000 DEC (minimum) needed. There was also an airdrop of a new Legendary summoner. However, my single pack purchase was not lucky enough to get randomly selected to win a copy of it.

My goal for the rest of the season is to just try and finish my dailies without losing too many matches. I'm more willing to not play the deck for the daily now, if the rules don't favor it. Attending giveaways seems to be the biggest source of improving my collection, so I will also be trying to catch Twitch streams. I don't really expect to play in the top 20 by the end of the season, but hopefully I'll be in the top 100 - if I don't screw up too many matches!