My Splinterlands Self Challenge #19 - Slogging in Silver, First Legendary Summoner

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. As I mentioned in my last update, I decided to give the Bronze ranked grind a rest for this season and plowed my way back into Silver III at the start of this season. Also, before I forget, happy New Year!

As usual, let's start with a breakdown of the week. If you have been keeping up on my articles, you may have noticed that I left off how many matches it took to finish the daily last time. In Bronze league I was losing very few matches, and didn't feel like it was necessary to repeat that it only took 5 games to finish the daily a bunch of times. In Silver, since I don't have max level cards for the league, I lose a bit more regularly.

Daily Quest # 124 - Win 5 with Life. I started off back in Bronze II, and while I completed this in 6 matches playing Life, I played about 30 games all told to cement myself solidly back into Silver III before claiming my quest rewards. When I did open my two quest rewards chests, they contained a Gold potion and a 7th copy of the rare Water monster Kelp Initiate.

Daily Quest # 125 - Win 5 with Earth. This took 7 games to complete the daily quest. I was pretty happy with the rewards, as I got a 3rd copy of the epic Death monster card Shadowy Presence and a 9th copy of the common Fire monster card Ant Miners. I also won a 5th copy of the common Fire monster card Ettin Spearman from @CryptoFiloz's daily giveaway on Peakd.

Shown here in order of card rarity.

Daily Quest # 126 - Win 3 with no Neutral Monsters. This took 7 games, one of which was because I played neutral monsters and my win didn't count for quest credit. For completing this daily quest I got 5 Dark Energy Crystals (DEC) and a 10th copy of Ant Miners.

I got the biggest prizes this week outside of actually playing the game, which isn't that unusual. There was a big cross promotional tournament with Gala Games, and even though I lost terribly to someone with the legendary Fire summoner Yodin Zaku, I still got a random prize of 2 Untamed packs and a copy of the legendary Water summoner card Lir Deepswimmer! @MarcusWahl also returned to streaming on Twitch after the holidays, and I picked up 500 DEC from his giveaways as well.

This has a market value of a bit above $10 at the time of this writing.

Daily Quest # 127 - Win 5 with Fire. This took a long 13 games to complete. When I did finally complete the daily quest, I received an 11th copy of Ant Miners and a 6th copy of the common Neutral monster card Sand Wurm.

Daily Quest # 128 - Win 5 with Earth. This took 6 games to complete, and for finishing it I received 7 DEC and a 7th copy of the common Life monster card Warrior of Peace. Outside of Splinterlands, I also won a 2nd copy of the rare Fire monster card Cerberus from @Clove71's Twitch stream. I also dropped 194 DEC for 4 Gold potions and 194 DEC for 5 Legendary potions to open one of the packs I got from the Gala Games tournament.

No summoners or legendary cards, but at least it had two rares!

Daily Quest # 129 - Win 5 with Life. This took 8 games to complete, and I received 2 Gold potions for completing the quest. I had a bit over 3,000 DEC at this point, and spent 2,868 of it to pick up 4 copies of the Death summoner Owster Rotwell in order to level him up. Summoners seem to keep going up in price, especially the ones from the Dice expansion, where Owster Rotwell is from.

He gives all of your monsters the ability to reflect magic damage back at the attacking monster, which can be useful.

Daily Quest # 130 - Win 5 with Earth. This took only 5 games, which was part of a 34 game winning streak I went on. For completing the daily quest, I received 10 DEC and a 7th copy of the common Fire monster card Flame Monkey. I also picked up a 6th copy of the rare Fire monster card Living Lava from @Clove71's Twitch stream.

Daily Quest # 131 - Win 5 with Earth. This took 7 games to complete. For finishing the daily quest, I got 9 DEC and an 8th copy of the Kelp Initiate card. I also won a rare Life monster card, Truth Seeker, from @CryptoFiloz's on Peakd -- not from his daily giveaway post, but from a video he had posted a couple of weeks back, that I had forgotten had a giveaway tied to it.

One of these cards is not like the others.

There were a lot of tournaments over the past week as well! I didn't track my matches in some of them, as I didn't expect to do well enough that it would matter. All told, there was the Bronze league Gala Games tournaments. Pionerbank, the #1 Bronze league player, put on a free-to-enter Bronze league rules tournament over New Years with a few small DEC prizes. There were 2 Bronze leagues rules with no legendary cards tournaments; 2 Kobold Mining Novice league rules with no legendary cards tournaments; and a Bronze league with no legendary summoners real time tournament!

I mentioned that I lost terribly in the first round of the Gala Games tournament, but still got the best prizes for the week. I didn't expect to need to mention the Pionerbank tournament, since it had over 500 entries due to it being free. However, I ended up going 23-5 over the two days of 14 matches and ended up in 9th place, winning 33 1/3 DEC. I was pretty surprised, as I initially lost my 2nd match due to network errors and it failing to submit a deck. To be fair, it only cost me 76 2/3 DEC.

There was a big tie for the 9th and 10th spots, so the prizes were split up instead.

The real-time tournament using Bronze league rules, without legendary summoners, was the only one where I didn't win something, as I lost in the 2nd round, to misses, and got eliminated from the tournament. In the New Year's Eve Bronze rules tournament, with no legendary cards, I went 12-9 to come in 38th place and won 200 DEC. Almost all of my losses were on the 2nd, and final, round. In the second Bronze league rules tournament I ended up coming in 87th place, with a poor 6-5 record that didn't make day 2, but that was still enough for 100 DEC.

I did fairly well at the Novice tournaments. I went 15-6-1 in the first one, coming in 21st place for a 75 DEC prize. In the last one, I went 17-4, finishing in 3rd place and earning 850 DEC. The tournament prizes, as well as entry requirements, seem to have been reduced at the start of this year.

Two months ago, I won 800 DEC for 8th place and 100 for 36th.

Silver league has a much wider disparity in player power than Bronze. In Bronze league, common cards cap out at level 3, while rare cards typically cap out at 2, as do epic cards, and legendary cards can only be used in their 1st level variation. These level maximums roughly double in Silver, with common cards going up to level 5, rare cards up to level 4, epic cards up to level 3, and legendary cards up to level 2. With the entry to the league primarily being gated by card power, it is fairly easy to get up to the 15,000 needed for Silver III while being nowhere near a set of max level cards for Silver.

A lot of this is related to the jump in cards that are needed. To get a level 2 rare summoner, you just need 5 copies of the card. To then get a level 4 summoner, you need 20 more copies of that card. For the common monster cards, you might need 14 copies to get them to level 3, but then it's another 46 copies to get to level 5. There are games where I play against opponents with level 1 cards and tend to wipe the floor with them, and games against opponents with level 4-5 cards that I have no chance of winning.

My current rating and card power.

Over the past week I have made a little progress towards the 40,000 card power needed for Silver II. This is mainly due to getting Lir Deepswimmer as a random prize, as well as the various other giveaways I won over the week. At this point I feel that I have a very strong Bronze league set of card, but a fairly weak one for Silver league.

I did go on a brief winning spree, mostly against bots I expect, which propelled me into 35th place on the leaderboard. I then proceeded to lose a handful of games and fall back about 100 spots. Right now, I'm a bit outside the top 100. I feel like trying to play a ton of games to make the top 25 is unlikely to end well, since it would heavily come down to my being lucky and getting lots of matches against weaker bots.

My plan for the upcoming week is to just roll along doing my daily quests and accumulating DEC. I get about 10-15 per win, which does start to add up, since I tend to play about 20 matches a day on average. Granted, I was getting about 10 DEC a win at the top of the Bronze league last season, while winning matches at a much higher rate. But, it was more stressful trying to force in hundreds of matches to cinch a top 10 slot.

This was the most appropriate card image I could find for rolling along.

For deck improvement goals, I feel that I need to level up my Untamed set summoners to 2. I got the, arguably better, Dice set summoner cards at level 2 currently, with the exception of the Dragon type Brighton Bloom (who recently shot up in price) and the relatively useless Fire and Water ones. There are a number of Untamed only Bronze rules tournaments, where I am at quite the disadvantage by playing Earth, Dragon, or Life right now. On the plus side, these are the relatively less expensive summoner cards.

Phew, this has been a long midweek update! If you made it through this far, thank you for reading! If you have any questions, feedback, or suggestions on future updates then please let me know in the comments below!