Welcome to another article where I write about my journey playing Splinterlands! At the time of this writing we are about halfway through the season, as usual, and there has just been an update released replacing the Dark Energy Crystal (DEC) rewards in battle with Splintershard tokens (SPS)! The price of DEC had dropped to almost half of its soft-pegged value of 1,000 DEC = $1, but as the news of this change started to get released, the valuation has rebounded to about a quarter below the soft-peg.
Purchasing and renting cards, as well as updating Guild buildings will still require DEC. A new mechanic of burning $1 of SPS for 975 DEC has been added to allow players to still get DEC. One important item of note with this change, is the SPS you get starts off as Staked SPS. This means that you have to unstake to spend it, and unstaking only gives you 25% of your total a week, i.e., it takes 4 weeks to unstake the total amount.
It will be interesting to see what impact this has on both bot farms, as well as new players actually sticking around in the game. Other items in this update were the initial release of a voting system, where your staked SPS counts as your voting power, and a shop page to buy tickets to the Splinterfest convention in October. Seems a little late to be releasing the store page, but better late than never.
It has been a fairly quiet week for me, just grinding away at daily reward chests. I did finally rent out some extra cards, which are surprisingly profitable right now. Here’s the breakdown of my rewards from the past week, before the SPS changes were patched in:
Daily Quest Rewards:
Daily Quest # 702. Got Death Focus… re-rolled to Anti Magic Focus. Starting off the new season back in Gold league, I got 128 DEC, 230 Merits, and a Venari Heatsmith (common monster).
InvestYGator, my alternate account, got Life Focus. I quickly went from Bronze I back into Silver league, and received 40 (14 + 14 + 12) DEC, 108 (32 + 76) Merits, 3 (2 + 1) Gold Potions, 3 Legendary potions, and a Pelacor Mercenary (common monster).
Daily Quest # 703. Got Life Focus. I received 96 (16 + 80) DEC, 211 Merits, 12 Legendary potions, 5 Gold potions, and a Blood Maker (common monster).
InvestYGator got Healing Focus. I got 48 (20 + 6 + 10 + 12) DEC, 54 Merits, and a Pelacor Deceiver (common monster).
Daily Quest # 704. Got Healing Focus. I received 640 (136 + 32 + 472) DEC, 13 (6 + 7) Gold potions, and a Pelacor Deceiver.
InvestYGator got Stealth Focus. I got 104 (16 + 50 + 18 + 20) DEC, an Ever-Hungry Skull (common monster), and an Exploding Rats (rare monster).
Daily Quest # 705. Got Life Focus. I got 200 DEC, 7 Gold potions, 10 Legendary potions, an Ever-Hungry Skull, a Merdhampir (common monster), a Venator Kinjo (legendary monster), and a gold foil Uraeus!
InvestYGator got Water Focus. I received 8 (2 + 6) DEC, 12 (6 + 6) Merits, 5 (3 + 2) Gold potions, a Pelacor Mercenary (common monster), a Dhampir Infiltrator (rare monster), and a Venari Seedsmith (rare monster).
Daily Quest # 706. Got Anti Melee Focus. I got 144 (16 + 80 + 24 + 24) DEC, 7 Gold potions, 8 Legendary potions, and a Venari Heatsmith.
InvestYGator got Defend Focus. I earned 18 (2 + 16) DEC, 2 Gold potions, 2 Legendary potions, a Venari Heatsmith, a Pelacor Mercenary, a Merdhampir, and a Blood Maker.
Daily Quest # 707. Got Exploits Focus. I received 823 DEC, 22 (11 + 11) Gold potions, a Blood Maker, a Pelacor Deceiver, and a Lava Launcher (epic monster)!
InvestYGator got Defend Focus. I got 106 (60 + 26 + 4 + 16) DEC, 5 (3 + 2) Gold potions, and a Venari Crystalsmith (rare monster).
Daily Quest # 708. Got Defend Focus. I received 160 DEC, an Ever-Hungry Skull, a Venari Seedsmith, a Naga Assassin (rare monster), a Twilight Basilisk (rare monster), and a gold foil Dhampir Infiltrator!
InvestYGator got Disable Focus. I got 60 (6 + 44 + 10) DEC, 2 Legendary Potions, 3 Gold potions, a Pelacor Bandit, a Pelacor Deceiver, a Merdhampir, and a Vampiric Blossom (rare monster).
A good week for gold foil cards! I also opened up 2 Chaos Legion packs as well:
Guild Brawls:
Guild Brawl #98, playing Bronze League Gold Foil Only. The guild did decently, coming in 4th place. I wasn’t much help.
Vs. CHAOSCOMMANDER of Black Lotus
The Rest:
No trading or tournaments, though renting out a bunch of extra level 1 cards is making me some decent extra DEC per day. Will see how the change to SPS impacts that as well, since it will be a bit trickier to get DEC together, with SPS being paid out. I do have some tiny stakes in liquidity pools, which are also earning me a small amount of DEC per day.
It will be interesting to see how things go with this new reward change. I expect SPS will continue to decrease in value until people start burning a lot for DEC or additional places to spend it are added to the game. The next mini-set Riftwatchers is going to be sold for SPS only from what has been said about it.
That’s about it for this week. If you made it this far, thank you for reading! I’ll be back next week with the season wrap up. And, if you have any questions or comments, please let me know below!