My Splinterlands Self Challenge #31 - The End Of The Challenge?

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. At least, that was the original idea. At this point, I don't know if that really still applies. I've been trading cards between the, WAX network based, Atomic Hub market and the Splinterlands market, which I feel may be invalidating my original premise.

To be fair, I've also made quite a bit of WAX tokens from the Alien Worlds boom, and there's a lot of temptation to funnel it into Splinterlands. My guild could use more people with Gold foil cards for the brawls that require them, or I could get my deck into more competitive shape for the Silver league. At any rate, let's go through a breakdown of the past week, and the end of this season, then we'll revisit how to spent my small windfall of cryptocurrency later.

Daily Quest Rewards:

Daily Quest # 220 - Win 5 With Fire. A strong start to the week in daily rewards, as I got a Gold foil Ant Miner, a Gold potion, and an Untamed Pack for completing this daily quest.

The contents of the pack were not that exciting.

Daily Quest # 221 - Win 3 With No Neutral Monsters. For completing this daily quest, I got 2 Legendary potions and a 13th copy of the rare Earth monster card Centauri Mage. Outside of the game, I won a 2nd copy of the epic Earth monster, Mitica Headhunter, from @robinsonr810 on Peakd and won a 5th copy of the common Neutral monster, Gelatinous Cube, on CardAuctionz to combine with my other copies to make a level 3 version!

Mitica Headhunter, the first in this set, is a card that I get a lot of use out of.

Daily Quest # 222 - Win 5 With Death. For finishing this daily quest, I received 2 Legendary potions and a 4th copy of the common Fire card, Charlok Minotaur.

Daily Quest # 223 - Win 5 With Earth. For completing this daily quest, I received 37 Dark Energy Crystals (DEC), a Gold potion, and another Untamed pack! I also won another auction for a 6th copy of the rare Water monster card, Ice Pixie, for 18 DEC.

Daily Quest # 224 - Win 5 With Death. For finishing this daily quest, I got a Gold potion, an 18th copy of regular Ant Miners, and an 11th copy of the common Life monster card, Warrior of Peace.

Daily Quest # 225 - Win 5 With Life. For completing this daily quest, I got 2 Gold potions and a whopping 255 DEC!

Daily Quest # 226 - Win 5 With Snipe. For finishing up this daily quest, I received 1 Legendary potion and 72 DEC (59 + 13). Earlier in the week, I also bought 8 Legendary potions for 307 DEC and 9 Gold potions for 432 DEC to open packs #5 and #6 of the fifty I had gotten in weeks prior.

Nice to see an epic card, instead of a rare, in this pack.

A summoner and second rare card put this slightly above average.

Tournaments:

Thursday Untamed Bronze Blunderbuss, Untamed Set only: On the first day I went 9-2, starting off well. I finished up 17-3-1 to come in tied for 8th place and getting 350 DEC.

Spring Training #4, Silver League rules tournament: The next event in the continuing series put on by @monstergames (aka, Dave Mccoy in the Splinterlands Discord). Instead of the giant matches in Novice of Bronze, this time he split the tournaments up into simple single round tournaments. I expected to do terrible, but still managed to go a respectable 6-3, winning more WAX artwork cards.

The rewards were packs, and I got some lucky low "mint" cards out of them.

Sunday Bronze Blunderbuss, no legendary cards, all sets tournament: I did terrible day one going 5-6, to clearly not make day 2. Sadly, I came in 138th place, still part of a massive tie for 128th place, earning 20 DEC.

Guild Brawls:

In brawl #2, a lot of guilds in our bracket failed to submit teams. I only got matched up against 3 other people. I once again played in a Bronze, Untamed set only set of fights.

Versus LoopyLoop of Anti Social Club

Versus TILIUS85 of Monster Nest

Versus Monster-Grinder of Legendary Dragons

For brawl #3, we had a few less people sign up, and didn't fill out a few of our slots. At least, I got to play a lot more matches than the previous brawl.

Versus Elminho of •ëL•Adÿsurâ•Jä•

Versus Bandogge of Digitspin FuriousChickens

Versus Angelito26 of Team Possible Power

Versus CYFC.Prometheus of ZZ9PZA

Versus Xploragamer of The Chasers

Versus JeffAndHisGuitar of Legendary Dragons

We didn't do as well in these last two Brawls. I didn't record the final standings, but we are up to 20 Crowns at the time of this writing. For reference, it takes 150 Crowns to upgrade the Arena to level 2.

Outside The Game:

As noted, I continue to mess around with buying and selling on Atomic Hub and the in-game market. I managed to sell my Chtulu for a small profit over what I had bought it for, as well as one of the Krakens. The Alpha commons I picked up have not resold, and I'm considering just pulling them off the WAX market. I have had some luck bundling up rare Summoners and selling them for a small profit.

I picked up a Lensmaster and Diamond Dragon and put them up on the WAX market. I also won an auction on Atomic Hub for a Kron the Undying, picking him up at a few dollars under the Splinterlands price. He didn't sell for a week at market price, so I'm probably just keeping him at this point.

I did the math, prior to my most recent purchases, and even with the couple of Legendary cards that I've added to my collection, I am still up about 40 WAX tokens from my Splinterlands card trading across the markets. Sales seemed to boom briefly after the Alien Worlds listing on Binance made people a lot of WAX from that game, but seem to have cooled off again a bit since then.

Most of this is from selling Alien Worlds cards, and it doesn't count the WAX I used to get Splinterlands credits to get cards to sell, so my Bought is a bit higher - but, still making profit on trading.

A few more people than usual also seem to be trying to sell off their collections. With prices going up, I guess I can't be that surprised since they theoretically have thousands, if not tens of thousands, of dollars worth of digital cards. It looks like @UnitQM might be exiting the game, which is too bad for Splinterlands since he had been running the New Boost events for new players and doing a lot of work on the Wiki.

To wrap up my actual season report, I finished up in Silver II with enough rating to be in Silver I, but not the card power. I was thinking about trying to make top 25 to win a couple of packs, but then got beaten up by actual Silver level decks and decided against it. I finished in 53rd place, getting the 15 rewards chests that contain the same potential items as the daily rewards.

Two epic rewards cards were a nice find at the end of the season!

The Silver league leaderboard at the end of last season.

There have been a lot of complaints from one of the users tied for third place that the top two accounts are bots that are able to play hundreds of games much quicker than human players. This may well be the case, as Splinterlands is simple enough that it can be botted with some solid programming skills. I've noted that a lot of the Bronze league is certainly bots, though it's hard to tell how many of the top players might be.

The number of games played in Bronze is equally ridiculous on a couple of accounts, but can realistically be done by a dedicated human.

At any rate, I don't particularly want to put myself through trying to play that many matches again next season. I'm planning to just continue to farm up extra rewards in Silver. If I do use my WAX tokens to pick up some cards, I could probably easily make it into Silver I for even more quest rewards.

If you have an opinion on what I should do, invest my crypto from other games into improving my deck or try to stick to my original limits on outside funds, please let me know. If the former, maybe I'll need to rethink the title of this series. Either way, thank you for reading, and if you do have any comments, suggestions, or feedback please leave a comment below!