My Splinterlands Self Challenge #16 – End Of A First Silver Season

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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, I decided to spend this season in Silver III. I had managed to accumulate enough card power, mainly through Twitch and Peakd giveaways, to qualify to move out of Bronze and I wanted to take a break from trying to grind my way into the top 20 with hundreds of matches. It also didn't hurt that you get twice the daily quest rewards and noticeably more of the games currency, dark energy crystals (or DEC), per win in Silver.

As I alluded to in my last article, it did feel a bit like giving up on Bronze to move out without having placed in a pack-winning position. I think it was the right choice, but now that I've accumulated a few more cards, I am once again questioning what I should do with the upcoming season. But, before I get too much into that, let me break down what happened this past week:

Daily Quest #100 - Win 5 with Life. I managed to complete this in 8 games and received a Gold & Legendary potion. Outside of ranked play, I won a 2nd copy of the rare Earth monster card Centuari Mage from @cryptofiloz daily Peakd giveaway.

While she has a lot of health, I rarely actually play this card due to the relatively low damage.

Daily Quest #101 - Win 5 with Water. This took 9 games to complete and for finishing the daily quest I got a 6th copy of common Earth monster card Screeching Vulture and a 6th copy of the common Fire monster card Ant Miners.

Daily Quest #102 - Win 5 with Fire. This only took 5 games to complete and I received 2 Gold potions for finishing the daily quest. In a bit more exciting news, I won a copy of a new card, the rare Fire monster Flame Imp from a giveaway @robinsonr810 did on Peakd.

I've tried using him occasionally for no-melee Fire deck builds.

Daily Quest #103 - Win 5 with Life. This took 9 games to complete and for finishing the daily quest I received a Gold potion and a 9th copy of the common Water monster Wave Runner. I also went out and spent my stash of DEC! I picked up a level 3 rare Life monster card Luminous Eagle, for 914 DEC, and two copies of the rare Fire summoner card Malfrics, for 2,541 DEC, to level him up to level 2.

They seemed to really improve my Life and Fire decks.

Daily Quest #104 - Win 5 with Water. After getting 1 win with no quest credit, due to them immediately surrendering, then losing 4 games trying to play Water, I rerolled this quest to Win 3 without using Neutral cards. I was able to complete that after 5 games and got another Gold potion as well as a 7th copy of the common Fire monster card Ant Miners. Outside of ranked play, I won a 3rd copy of the rare Water monster card Kelp Initiate from @cryptofiloz daily Peakd giveaway.

Daily Quest #105 - Win 5 with Life. This took 9 games to complete and for finishing the daily quest I got a Legendary potion and 46 DEC.

Daily Quest #106 - Win 5 with Life. This took 5 games to complete and for completing the daily quest I received a 10th copy of the common Water monster card Wave Runner and a 1st copy of the rare Death monster card Grim Reaper.

The high attack damage makes it a useful card for the summoning cost.

Daily Quest #107 - Win 5 with Fire. This took 8 games to complete, though one that I lost was due to problems with the block chain and it failed to submit my deck - even though I had clicked to enter it. For finishing the daily quest I received a Legendary potion and a new rare Dragon monster card, Gloridax Soldier.

Outside of daily quests, I've been playing a lot of the Dragon splinter after picking up the Daria Dragonscale summoner. I noticed that Gloridax Soldier was the cheapest rare card on the market, so I picked up 13 more copies for a total of 614 DEC to level him up to level 3. Reward cards tend to be the cheapest to buy more of, as everyone ends up getting them.

I have not used him a lot, mainly in matches with the earthquake rule set.

Also, outside of playing the game, I won an Untamed set pack from @Clove71’s Monday Twitch stream. I attended one earlier in the week as well, but didn't win anything. Apparently I forgot to mark that in my notes! I didn't open the pack until the end of the season, as I expected to get a lot more potions from my end of season reward chests.

Daily Quest #108 - Win 5 with Dragon. I can't remember the last time I got this quest. I was able to complete it pretty easily in 5 matches, getting 12 DEC and a 4th copy of the rare Water monster card Kelp Initiate.

That wrapped up my first season playing in Silver III! So, how did I do? Without taking it too seriously and playing 10-20 matches a day on average, I ended up coming in 64th place in the Silver league with 2,140 rating points. This seems pretty good considering my card collection is just starting to get high enough to compete at max level Bronze in some elements.

Realistically, this is likely due to a high amount of bots in Silver. Particularly near the end of the season, it seemed like I was playing a lot of accounts just barely qualifying for the Silver league and earning only +3 rating for a win. This felt a bit like the same Bronze situation, where I would occasionally lose a game and drop 20-30 rating points.

Even though I would only need about 300 more points to make it into the top 25, which wins 2 packs in Silver, I decided not to put myself through trying to grind it out at the end of the season. I would likely have to win about 100 games, and for every one I would lose it would add about 10 more. Since my deck is actually relatively weak for what can be played in Silver, I think it was the right decision.

For season end rewards, I got a 7th copy of the rare Fire monster Fineas Rage, a 6th copy of the common Fire monster Flame Monkey, a 4th copy of the common Earth monster card Nectar queen, a Gold potion, a Legendary potion, 62 DEC, and an Untamed pack. I spent 294 DEC on 6 more Gold potions and 235 on 6 Legendary potions to open both the season reward pack and the one that I had won from Clove. For anyone keeping count, I did accidentally buy 2 more Gold potions than I needed.

The pack from @Clove71 had a nice golden copy of Maggots in it.
I either now have 1 extra Bortus for Bronze league rules, or now only need 19 more copies to get him up to Silver league level.

I also participated in 4 tournaments this season. 3 of them were the Untamed Kobold Mining Expedition tournaments using the Novice rules set with no legendary cards. In the first one, starting last Sunday, I went 7-3-1 the first day. I ended day two at 15-5-2, coming in 19th place and winning 600 DEC. For the second tournament, starting the following Monday after the first tournament, I went 9-2 the first day. I ended day two at 16-5, coming in 8th place and winning 2,800 DEC.

The final Kobold Mining tournament was the following Saturday. On the first day I went 7-3-1 and ended up the second day at 10-7-3 coming in 39th place and winning 100 DEC. I am glad that I was able to make day 2 in all of them, and more than made back my 30 DEC entry fee per tournament.

The 4th tournament was a player-organized Bronze rules set, with no legendary summoners. More importantly, it also didn't have a card power restriction, as I tend not to qualify for official Bronze tournaments. It was only one day, but I went 7-1 to come in 7th place and won 300 DEC for my 10 DEC entry fee.

Here is the top of the Bronze leader board from the last season.

The above makes me think that staying in Silver III to continue to try to farm more rewards might be the saner thing to do. The top 5 players all played over 600 matches over 15 days. Out of the top 10 in Bronze, only 2 players had less than 600 matches - and they both had slightly above 96% win rates.

Still, I feel like I might be able to make it if, I put in the time over the upcoming holiday break. It might be nice to place in a pack winning spot once in Bronze, before abandoning it completely to just work on Silver. I feel like I should decide early in the season, as not to miss double the daily quest rewards if I choose Silver.

Either way, my goal for the upcoming season is to continue to build up my collection of level 2 and level 3 common and rare cards, the max for Bronze rules. Even in Silver III, a lot of bots seem to be playing a lot of level 1 cards. With my current card power of 25,355 I'm still about 15,000 short of being able to qualify for Silver II rewards, and anything I pick up will move me closer to that total.

This has gone on a bit longer than I thought it might, so I'll wrap things up here. Thank you for reading this! Please let me know what you think I should do for the upcoming season, if there's any topics about Splinterlands that you would like me to write about in more detail, or any other thoughts you might have on my writing in the comments below!



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