My Splinterlands Self Challenge #15 – 99 Days & Giving Up On The Leaderboard

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. After some polling on the game's Discord channel and in my guild chat, the general consensus was that unless you are in the top 3 of the Bronze league then it's better to move into the Silver league if you have the card power to do so. Since I gained enough card power, mainly through Twitch giveaways, to move into Silver III at the end of the last season, I went ahead and played a bunch of games on the first day of the season to move back up from Bronze to Silver.

To expand a bit on the benefits of Silver over Bronze, you get about twice the Dark Energy Crystals, or DEC, per win and you get two daily rewards for finishing the daily quest in Silver III. The daily quests actually increase for each part of a league after Bronze, but I don't have the card power to qualify for Silver II. Here is a reward breakdown that I copied from a post in the Discord channel by @blackheart1, however I am not sure if he created the image originally.

Playing in Silver III is tougher than Bronze I, as people with cards appropriate to the Silver card levels tend to wipe the floor with me. Fortunately, there's also a lot of bots who are fielding similarly weak decks that I can typically beat to finish daily quests. Here is a breakdown of my week so far:

Daily Quest #93 - Win 5 with Earth. My count for this first day is quite off, as I played about 50 games to get into Silver III again, some of which counted for my daily quest. Anyhow, when I did finish it, I received a Gold potion and 23 DEC.

I also attended @Clove71’s Monday Twitch stream, where I won 3 Golden Battering Rams, a common Dice set neutral monster card. Gold cards have a larger than normal card power rating, which is equivalent to the DEC value of the card. So, these 3 goats are worth 1,500 card power.

The card price on Monday was about 85 cent, but has jumped to $1.48 on the following Sunday, at the time of this writing.

Daily Quest # 94 - Win 5 with Fire. This took 14 games to complete, which felt much longer than it typically would take in Bronze. For completing this daily quest I received 1 Gold potion and 1 Legendary potion.

Daily Quest #95 - Win 5 with Fire. This only took 5 games to complete! I think that a lot of the players with better cards had moved up to Silver II at this point. I definitely played against a lot of bot accounts. For completing the daily quest, I got a Gold potion and 47 DEC. I also attended another of @Clove71’s Twitch streams, but didn't end up winning anything this day (see, I don't always win prizes)!

Daily Quest #96 - Win 3 with Neutral. This only took 5 games, and one of those was where my opponent instantly surrendered that resulted in no quest credit. For completing the daily quest, I received a third copy of the common Fire monster card Ettin Spearman and a 2nd copy of the rare Water monster card Captain's Ghost.

I also won 1,000 DEC on @Stever82's Peakd giveaway. I believe it is intended to be a weekly contest, though I think it's been held every few weeks. As I have noted in the past, the best way to progress in the game for free seems to be giveaways outside the game itself!

Daily Quest # 97 - Win 5 with Fire. This took a long 17 games to complete. All of the extra games were losses, where I typically had no chance of winning with my Fire cards. When I did finally finish the daily quest, I got a total of 40 DEC (9 + 31).

However, on @Clove71’s Friday Twitch stream I won both an Untamed pack and a Splinterlands t-shirt! This more than made up for a tough daily quest. I had the option of taking 10,000 DEC instead of the shirt, but I think the shirt will make a nice surprise present for my wife (who doesn't read my blog, so it will still be a surprise).

With a bit over 3,000 DEC I had been debating what to spend it on. I happened to catch what I felt was a good deal, and picked up a level 2 copy of the Dragon summoner card, Daria Dragonscale, for 2,247 DEC. I also spent 97 DEC to pick up 2 Gold potions and opened the pack:

The new legendary card by itself would make this a great pack, but the Gold common and Epic were a really nice bonus!

Level 2 epic rarity summoners are the only ones that let you summon level 3 rare cards in Bronze league play.

Daily Quest #98 - Win 5 with Water. This took 13 games to complete. Some were just blowouts, while others I might have been able to win if I had played different cards. At any rate, for completing the daily quest I received a total of 62 DEC (55 + 7).

@Clove71 did a surprise Saturday morning stream, as a couple of users had complained her weekly evening stream was at a time they could not attend in their country. I won another Untamed pack, as did most viewers that were there for the entire show. After the good luck with the prior pack, I spent 78 DEC to get 2 more Legendary potions and 243 DEC on 5 Gold potions to open it:

No gold or legendary cards, but an epic with two rares is far from the worst I could do.

Daily Quest #99 - Win 5 with Fire. This only took 7 games, one of which I got no quest credit for winning when my opponent surrendered before decks were submitted. For completing this daily I received 13 DEC and a 6th copy of the common Life monster card, Warrior of Peace.

Outside of daily quests, I participated in 3 tournaments this week. The first was a free Bronze rules tournament sponsored by an upcoming card game Synergy of Serra. Since it was free there were over 1,000 entries, which I'm sure included a lot of bot accounts. I went 13-6 the first day, mostly due to opponents not submitting a deck, and managed to make the top 30% that went into a 2nd, and final round.

However, in day 2 there were a lot of real opponents with large collections. I lost a lot of games against players from higher leagues, who owned legendary summoners, ending up 21-17 in 240th place. Only the top 32 spots won a prize, and most of these spots seem to be filled by Gold league players.

I played in the Bronze rules, with no legendary cards allowed, Friday Night live tournament. I showed up in time to play (this time), but managed to lose the first round and get eliminated. @Clove71 set up this tournament, and I was watching the stream at the same time. Since I ended up winning prizes on the stream, I'm not too upset about losing terribly. I also did like this rules set, and hope that they use it for some non-single elimination tournaments.

Finally, there was a Novice rules Kobold Mining tournament. I did okay the first round, going 7-4. This was just enough to make it to the 2nd, and final round. I had an odd day two, and ended up 12-7-2, finishing in 49th place for 100 DEC. The draws were not too surprising, considering the low manna rules, and a couple of matches came down to which monster happened to attack first.

One item of note is that the Kobold Mining tournament entry fee tripled in price for the upcoming month, from 10 DEC to 30 DEC. Since this is the only tournament that would be open to new players, it seems an odd decision to raise the price on it as low level players would have the hardest time actually earning the entry fee. The prize structure does not seem to have changed.

The last two tournaments had about 250 entrants, while the first one following the price increase only has about 160. It's unclear if this is due to the price increase, or just random, from this single tournament. But it will be interesting to see if the attendance remains lower for this month.

Anyhow, for myself, having given up on the Bronze leaderboard this season is a bit of a mixed bag. There's a lot less stress in trying to climb the rankings, but there's also not a lot of call to play the game that much outside of completing the daily quest. There's no way I'm going to be able to compete in the Silver league with my current cards.

Where things stand at the time of this writing.

With my various Twitch stream winnings, my card power is now slightly past the halfway mark to Silver II. I actually didn't have too much trouble winning enough to qualify on rating, which is only 1,300 for Silver II. But card power is the main blocker, unless you are willing to put more money into the game.

Overall, it does seem quite feasible to farm more in-game rewards in Silver III with my current cards, especially compared to missing out on the top 20 spots in Bronze. At this point, there are only really 3 non-legendary summoners that I would still like to level up to 2, mostly for specific rule sets. However, that is still about 10,000 DEC at the current market prices.

At some point, I may try to take another run at the Bronze leader board. I still need to level up a large amount of monster cards, which are typically cheaper than summoner cards. I probably should also try to either trade or sell some extra cards. I don't really need 3 copies of the Gold Battering Ram, even though they do provide a nice boost to card power.

To wrap things up, Silver III has been more profitable than Bronze I by far. I'm planning on just continuing to farm daily quests, and trying to improve my collection via contests and giveaways. I don't expect any big surprises when the season wraps up in 8 more days, but maybe that will give me some more space to write out some other thoughts about the state of the game!

Thank you for reading, and please let me know any comments or thoughts in the feedback below!