Welcome to another weekly update on my attempt to challenge the Splinterlands ranked leagues! Initially it was a self challenge, to see how far I could get with the initial set of cards plus whatever I could win. But, that kind of fell apart around week 30 (with the game integrating with the WAX network and users being able to buy and sell cards on Atomic Hub).
The start of the August season has seen a continued influx of players, which is causing things to start to fray a bit at the edges. There have been multiple times, usually around when the governance token air drop happens, that the game has become more or less unplayable. The handful of support staff have been bombarded with requests, and have essentially moved out of the Discord server to only answer e-mail support tickets.
That’s not to say that the developers aren’t trying to address these issues. The land revel has been pushed out while they work in improving the infrastructure of Splinterlands. They have also recruited several people from the community to act as volunteer support staff, answering questions on the chat channel. Rental prices have also been moving up, with all of the additional demand and fairly limited supply.
The Dice set of packs, which are the only ones still available in the in-game store, are starting to sell out. The last Dice air drop card was released, which is a 1 cost Fire monster card. I didn’t receive any copies, only having bought maybe a dozen Dice packs or so.
Ranked play this season seems like it’s a lot more challenging. It seems like there’s a lot less bots, and a lot more people with high-level rented cards. My rental account has struggled to get into Gold, while I’m losing a lot more matches in Silver. Granted, my collection was never really at Silver level and I haven’t rented out cards for it since I can still get the dailies done.
Anyhow, on to the usual breakdown of the past week:
Daily Quest Rewards:
Daily Quest # 332 – Win 5 with Life. I completed this quest, after playing a lot of games to get back up to Silver I. For doing so, I received 10 Dark Energy Crystals (DEC), 2 Legendary potions, and a Gold potion.
Daily Quest # 333 – Win 5 with Fire. For completing this daily quest, I got 30 DEC; 2 Legendary potions; and a 4th copy of the rare Fire monster card, Efreet Elder. Outside the game, I also won another copy of Efreet Elder from @cryptofiloz‘s Peakd giveaway, finally getting enough copies to level it up to 2.
Daily Quest # 334 – Win 5 with Water. For finishing this daily quest, I received 2 Gold potions; 15 DEC; and a 28th copy of the common Fire monster card, Ant Miners.
Daily Quest # 335 – Win 3 with No Neutral. For finishing this daily quest, I got 2,018 DEC (2,000 + 18) and a 28th copy of the common Death monster card, Phantasm.
Daily Quest # 336 – Win 3 with No Neutral. The No Neutral monster quests had nice rewards this week, as I got another 2,000 DEC; a Gold potion; a 9th copy of the common Earth monster card, Harvester; and a 26th copy of the common Water monster card, Demented Shark.
Daily Quest # 337 – Win 5 with Death… re-rolled to Win 5 with Water. For completing this daily quest, I received a 60 DEC; a Gold potion; a Legendary potion; and a 6th copy of the rare Death monster card, Dark Ferryman.
Daily Quest # 338 – Win 5 with Earth. For completing this daily quest, I got 302 DEC (291 + 11); a 29th copy of the common Fire monster card, Ant Miners; and a 27th copy of the common Water monster card, Demented Shark.
Daily Quest # 339 – Win 5 with Sneak. For finishing this daily quest, I received a 10th copy of the common Earth monster card, Harvester; a 4th copy of the rare Life monster card, Temple Priest; a 29th copy of the common Death monster card, Phantasm; and a 13th copy of the common Life monster card, Chain Spinner.
I also opened two Untamed packs with all the potions I had gotten. Though, with the prices Untamed packs are selling for, I’m thinking it might be smart to sell them and save the proceeds for when the new Chaos Legion set releases.
Tournaments:
Thursday Bronze Blunderbuss, no legendary cards, all sets tournament: I went 8-2-1 the first day. I had a bad day two, finishing 13-6-2 to come in 46th place for 150 DEC.
Saturday Novice rules Sit-N-Go tournament: @Stealthtrader has been putting on small real-time tournaments irregularly for quite some time now. He started doing a bunch for SPS, the new governance token. I came in 2nd place in this one to win 50 SPS!
Thursday Bronze Blunderbuss, no legendary cards, Untamed set only tournament: I went 8-3 the first day. I finished 17-5 to come in 20th place for 200 DEC.
Sunday Bronze Blunderbuss, no legendary cards, Untamed set only tournament: I had a better start, going 10-1-1. However, I finished 17-4-1 to come in 19th place for 200 DEC.
I also played in a couple of @MarcusWahl’s Bronze tournaments, but have almost no chance of winning since I don’t have the legendary Yodin Zaku and Scarred Llama summoner cards.
Guild Brawls:
Guild Brawl #26, playing Gold foil Bronze, Untamed set only. I only had two matches this time around, and for some reason missed copying the link to the 2nd one. The guild, as usual, came in third place overall.
Vs LOVINGTHEMOO of SammySnakeSplinterlands
Vs PACHU4 of Spanish Elite
Guild Brawl #27, playing Gold foil Bronze, Untamed set only. I had three matches this time around. I didn’t do particularly well, but the guild finally filled all the brawls and everyone submitted teams. This led us to finish in first place, which we hadn’t done in quite a while!
Vs ROKUGATSU of Immortal Gods V
Vs MONSTERMADNESS of Loot Raiders
The Rest:
The price of DEC has been holding around $5 = 1,000 DEC this past week, which I find a little surprising. The SPS token has slowly been losing value, though they did introduce staking it in the game to earn additional SPS tokens. The developers have said that SPS ownership will be needed to participate in the Chaos Legion pre-sale, but no details have been provided on that.
My rental account, InvestYGator, hasn’t had any big rewards of note. Managing rentals, and playing the account, has been fairly time consuming due to frequent rental cancellations and price increases. I’ve also been slacking on putting up extra cards on my main account for rent. I did put up my level 2 Daria Dragonscale for rent, but that was as far as I got.
I’ve also been spending some time in the Discord channel answering questions, as there are a lot of new people and the chat channel doesn’t have information about playing the game in the easiest places to find. Well, that and people like to just come in and ask questions, without checking if it had already been answered previously. Granted, the game has been having a lot of technical issues, as I mentioned at the start.
My plan for the rest of the season is to just hang out in Silver I doing my daily quests. I don’t have high enough level cards to compete for the leaderboard, and I don’t want to manage renting across two accounts. I’m going to try to struggle up to Gold I or Diamond III with InvestYGator, provided rentals don’t get too expensive to maintain a deck.
That’s about it for this week! Thank you for reading and if you have any comments, suggestions, or feedback please let me know in the comments below! I’ll be back next week with the season wrap up!