My Splinterlands Self Challenge #14 - The End Of Another Frustrating Season

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. Well, to spoil the ending, I took another frustrating run at making the top 20 in Bronze and didn't make it. With only a couple of days left in the season, I found myself at 23rd place. This may be due to players deciding to just jump into Silver III, rather than try to grind up enough points to win a pack.

I'll talk a little bit more about what I'm thinking about for the upcoming season at the end. But first, here's a breakdown of the past week:

Daily Quest #85 - Win 5 with Water... After losing one game, I re-rolled to Win 5 with Life. I surprised myself by finishing this in five games, getting a Legendary potion for the daily reward. I guess my Life set is getting better, or I just had bad opponents!

As usual, outside the game is where I earned the most rewards. I beat @MarcusWahl on his Twitch stream getting 500 DEC. Someone anonymously gifted me a subscription to @Clove71's channel, so I ended up winning 5,000 DEC from her Twitch stream! It's worth subscribing to her channel, as the rewards she has been giving out are worth more than the monthly fee.

Daily Quest # 86 - Win 5 with Water... re-rolled to Win 5 with Life (again)! This took 8 matches, where 2 were instant surrenders when I did not get a chance to submit a deck and one was a loss to the #1 Bronze league player. For completing the daily quest, I received 10 DEC.

Outside the game, I picked up a lot bigger rewards again. I won an 8th copy of the Water common card Wave Runner from @cryptofiloz daily Peakd giveaway. I beat @MarcusWahl on his Twitch stream again getting another 500 DEC. However, once again the biggest prize came from @Clove71's Twitch stream, where I won a Land Plot token.

This article has gone a while without a screenshot!

Land is part of an upcoming planned expansion to the game, estimated to be out late 2021. Basically, you will be able to accumulate resources from land to craft new spell cards that are going to add another layer to the game. The details are still in the works, but these are worth about $10 right now!

Daily Quest # 87 - Win 3 with no Neutral monsters. This took 6 matches, where ones was an instant surrender, I played a Neutral monster in one that I did win, and I lost again to the #1 Bronze league player. For completing the daily quest I received 8 DEC.

I also finally decided on what to spend all that DEC I had picked up from various Twitch prizes. I picked up 3 more Mylor Crowling Earth summoner cards, for about 3652 DEC, and 3 Lorna Shine Life summoner cards, for about 2787 DEC, in order to combine them with the ones I already had to create level 2 versions. Level 2 is the max for these summoners in Bronze league. With my previously getting Dragon, Water, and Fire summoners up to level 2, I now had at least one for almost every card type.

These Dice set summoner cards have gotten a bit pricey!

Daily Quest # 88 - Win 5 with Water... re-rolled to Win 5 with Life (again)! This took 6 games to complete, and for finishing the daily I received 15 DEC. @MarcusWahl did another Twitch stream, where I picked up a total of 900 DEC for showing up early and beating him in a match. I also won a second copy of the Death summoner Contessa L'ament from him as well.

I won a 5th copy of the Earth common card Barking Spider from @zeruxanime's Peakd giveaway, combining them to level it up. I also went out and spent 1652 DEC to buy 3 more copies of Contessa L'ament, in order to combine them as well. I now finally have one max level, for Bronze league rules, Summoner card for each element!

However, once again the biggest prize came from @Clove71's Twitch stream. For Thanksgiving, she was giving away gold and regular copies of the rare neutral card Furious Chicken. Since I had been gifted that subscription, I won a gold copy! This silly card is worth 3,000 card power, which pushed me over into qualifying for Silver III without rentals, though I stayed in Bronze for the time being.

In Bronze league it is capped at level 2, where it has no attack.

Daily Quest # 89 - Win 3 with no Neutral monsters. This only took 3 games and I received a 6th copy of the common Earth card Barking Spider for finishing the daily.

Outside of the game, I picked up a 4th copy of the Neutral monster Gelatinous Cube from @cryptofiloz daily Peakd giveaway; I beat @MarcusWahl on his stream, but he got distracted and forgot to do prizes. I also ended up spending 704 DEC to buy 5 copies of the rare Earth cards, Unicorn Mustang, in order to level it up.

This card is the tank for my Earth team, which I tend to play quite often.

Daily Quest # 90 - Win 5 with Life. This took 6 games, where one surrender from a bot didn't give quest credit. I did play a lot of other sets around the Life games, to avoid fielding what I felt was a sub-optimal team for some rules sets. For completing the daily, I received 14 DEC.

Daily Quest # 91 - Win 5 with Life (it really wants me to play Life)! This took 5 games and I got 12 DEC for finishing the daily quest. I lost to @MarcusWahl on his Twitch stream and got 100 DEC as a consolation prize. I then spent 400 DEC picking up 2 Serpentine Mystic cards, 2 Sea Genie cards, and 5 Goblin Thief cards - all to level them up.

Serpentine Mystic is rare, while the other two are common cards.

Daily Quest #92 - Win 5 with Earth. This only took 5 games to complete, as Earth is what I usually have been playing in Bronze. For completing the daily quest, I got a Gold potion.

Outside of the game, I lost to @MarcusWahl on his Twitch stream again and got another 100 DEC consolation prize. From @Clove71's Twitch stream I won two Legendary cards, the Water card Kraken and the Death card Gloridax Guardian, and 1,000 DEC! This doubled the number of Legendary monster cards I own!

@Clove71 and @MarcusWahl are basically funding people playing the game! As a new player, you can get way more from their channels than you earn playing Bronze.

Since the seasons stretch for 15 days, I ended up playing in 3 Kobold Mining novice rules tournaments. The first was at the start of the week, and I had a terrible 4-7 record to not make round 2. I did better in the one starting on this past Monday, going 9-2 in the first round. In the 2nd, and final, round I finished 16-5-1 to come in 14th place and won 800 DEC.

For the third tournament, I had an okay showing on the first day of 8-3. It was good enough to make the 2nd round, where I ended up going 16-5-3 to come in 36th place winning 100 DEC. Yup, three draws where we both played identical teams. I also entered a free-to-enter Silver league tournament, where I predictably did quite poorly.

That about wraps up my past week. At the end, I was in 21st place for quite a while, and tried to win enough games to make it to 20th, but failed. Wins were worth 3 rating points, but losses were costing me 36. In the end, after getting way too tired and losing too many games, I just took the advancement to Silver III to earn a few additional season rewards, 12 chests instead of 9.

My season rewards. A nice restock on Legendary potions, plus an epic Death card and a good rare Fire card.

For this season, I'm debating just going into Silver III and trying to do the dailies there, as you get two daily rewards instead of the one in Bronze. My deck is in no way viable to compete in the Silver leader board, but I expect there's enough bots with bad decks to still be able to finish doing the dailies. The other option would be to take another swing at Bronze, but it seems like an awful lot of work to try to win a pack.

The bronze league ended up pretty much the way it did the last few seasons.

Here's where I jumped into the tail end of Silver III.

I probably played at least a hundred of those games in the last day and was kind of burnt out at the end of it. At the end of the season I've got about 2,000 DEC left to improve my deck further, my rentals expired a day ago and I have yet to renew them, and I've got 18,445 card power putting me over the 15,000 for Silver III. It's 40,000 card power to Silver II, which is quite a long way off at double my current collection.

As to what I should pick up next, there's a few other summoners that might be useful to level up. Though, there's also plenty of monster cards that I still need to get up to level 2 or 3 as well. Please let me know what you think I should focus on, and if you have an opinion on my plans to try to farm dailies at the tail end of Silver or if I should try to win a pack in Bronze league yet again!