Splinterlands Rental Experiment : Season Report and Redux

Well that was a bit of a surprise. I finished the season by scraping into Diamond III with a final rating of 2800 (hitting a high of 2920) and without even realising I’d made it onto the Modern Silver Leaderboard to finish 8th. That has earned me an extra +50,000 Glint. Very nice, however I can only attribute that result to starting with a low rating which was a one-off. So for the purpose of my experiment I am not going to count it.

Having a look at the Season Report Card it has my account earning 642.225 SPS from Ranked Rewards and 141.384 SPS from Brawls. At todays prices that’s about $6.82 USD worth of SPS value. The same report has me spending 7,862.461 DEC on Rentals, but I don’t think that is quite right. I originally was spending just under 8,000 DEC but then I also picked up Bera Dallin, Endless Ape, Mad Kaboomist and Fithe Bladestone mid season to try and balance up my playing deck so I think my overall expense was more like 8,500 DEC which is worth about $8.02 USD.

Not counting the 141,316 Glint Rewards I earned, that puts me at a slight loss for the season. I’m not too concerned and I should have kept better records, but that brings me to my next point. I am going again this season because I think I can do a lot better…

I am now quite confident that I can get this coming season into profit for 3 main reasons :-

1. I learnt the meta and cards so I can rent synergistic lineups
2. I’m starting from Gold II Tier so rewards will start higher
3. I am more experienced playing Modern now and know how to win

I’ve stuck with the Archons I had success with last season and that includes bringing in Fithe Bladestone for Nomos to cover Fire Splinter. I’ve padded that splinter out with solid Dwarves to empower that bloodline. I’ve also dropped a few under-performers and under-utilised monsters while picking up a couple of heavyweights that I think can push me deeper into Diamond Tier.

These bad boys will do some serious damage and I have already been favoring Cryptic in the big Mana battles so they’ll be getting a lot of action when Water and/or Death splinters are in play. I also really wanted to pick up Rage but he was just out of budget. Overall to start this season I’ve spent :-

That’s a total of 9,170 DEC on rentals for this coming season. Plus I’ll likely spend another 700 DEC x 2 (7 days each) for 100,000 SPS. So that’s my break-even target. See you on the battlefield!