My Splinterlands Self Challenge #5 - End Of The Season, Another 120 Tough Games

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. This marks the end of the first season with the revised ranked Leaderboards, where the top players in each league will win a prize. Previously, only the overall top-ranked players would win prizes at the end of a season.

The change, combined with the ability to decline moving on to the next league, made competition in the Bronze league particularly tough. There were certainly a number of players with the card power and ranking points to move into Silver, who instead decided to stay in Bronze and fight over the top spots for the packs. Unless this gets changed, I feel like it's going to be tough to make much progress in the Bronze league with my current set of cards.

Anyhow, here's the breakdown of my daily quests and rewards for the past week:

Daily Quest #25 - Win 5 with Life. It took me 11 games to win 5 playing Life, though I did play one using Fire due to a rules set of odd casting cost card only - so technically I went 50/50. I won the extra game playing Fire, but then played on more after winning the daily, also playing Fire, and lost. The reward for completing the daily was the common Death card Phantasm, which I was fairly happy to get.

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Not a terrible Death tank, at least for what I have in my collection.

Daily Quest #26 - Win 5 with Fire! I've said it before, but Fire is one of the strongest sets I have. It also seems to be the most popular deck to play in Bronze. As a rough guess, I'd say that I play against it more than 60% of the time. I was able to complete this in 9 games, though technically I only lost 3. My first game was against another Fire deck and it immediately went to a draw when we both played the same cards. I played one additional game to make it 10 for the day, which I also won using Fire. For finishing the daily, I got a Gold Potion, kicking off another potion collection.

Daily Quest #27 - Win 5 with Death... rerolled to Win 5 with Earth. It took me 13 games to finish the daily quest. My Nectar Queen's flying ability didn't seem to translate into it being missed all that much. I played two more games to round it up to 15 in total, winning one using Fire and the other Dragon/Water. For finishing the daily, I got another Gold Potion.

Daily Quest #28 - Win 5 with Water. This was at the start of a couple annoying days of Splinterlands. It took me 22 games to win 5, and there was a particularly annoying one where my entire team missed every attack the whole game. I then played 8 more games, free from the constraint of the daily, winning 6 of them, mostly with Fire. I did lose one playing Dragon/Earth and won one playing Dragon/Death. For finishing the daily, I got a Legendary Potion.

Daily Quest #29 -Win 5 with Water.. . after yesterday, I rerolled to win 5 with Death. I decided to give it a shot and it took 14 games to finish the daily. I then decided to go ahead and play 16 more games to see what sort of ranking increase I could get. I won 9 of them, including ending with a 5 game winning streak. I noticed that they seem to only give double ranking in Bronze 3 on win streaks. For finishing the daily I got a second copy of the common Fire card Flame Monkey.

This guy does not see a ton of play from me.

Daily Quest #30 - Win 5 with Earth. Feeling pretty good after the additional games the previous day, I knock this out in 7. My win streak caps out at 8 games and due to real world stuff, I just call it after finishing the daily, which was another Legendary Potion.

Daily Quest# 31 - Win 5 with Death... rerolled to Fire! Not my best run with Fire, but I finish the daily in 11 games. One of these I played Death due to rules constraints, so 50/50 with Fire. For completing the daily quest, I got 10 DEC. I am getting 2-3 DEC per win at this point for a point of comparison.

I played 6 more games before the season ended, being silly and trying to end up in 666th place, as I was in 668th place going into the season's end. The best placing I got was a little over 500th place in the Bronze league ranking. I played several games against opponents with Rank 2 cards or multiple epics and a legendary card, which I feel is probably needed to get close to placing in pack range for Bronze. I lost a few games at the end, officially ending up in 823rd place. I also noticed that it seems like I would always lose more points than I win, unless my opponent was ranked much higher or lower than myself.

Due to my card power, I finished in Bronze II. I'm about 3,300 card power away from being able to make it to Bronze 3, even though I had the ranking to place in it. Speaking of the end of the season, here is what I got for rewards:

33 DEC, 2 Legendary Potions, a second copy of the Earth common Screeching Vulture, and a new Life common Warrior Of Peace.

Going into this next season, I don't feel a strong urge to do more than what is needed to finish the daily quests to see what I find. I may try to sign up for a Novice rules tournament, if the timing works out, to see how badly I get beaten up there. But, I don't feel that I have a shot at being competitive in Bronze league without a substantially larger collection of cards. We'll see if they end up making any more rules adjustments, but I can see why new player retention might be difficult.

I'll be back with a mid-season update in about a week!