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. As I mentioned in my last update, I decided to give another big push for placing into a prize-winning spot in the Bronze League this season. At the halfway point in the season, when I wrote my last article, I was at the 6th place spot in the Bronze ranking.
Before getting into how the season wrapped up, here’s a quick breakdown of the past week:
Daily Quest # 117 – Win 5 with Life. For completing the daily quest, I received a Gold potion. Since I had playing about 40+ matches a day to accumulate ranking, I also had built up some Dark Energy Crystals (DEC). I spent 452 to pick up an epic Earth monster card, Brownie; 235 for the rare Earth monster card, Mushroom Seer; 280 for the epic Water monster card, Torhilo The Frozen; and 710 for 4 more copies of the common Fire monster card, Kobold Miner to level it up to 3.
Daily Quest # 118 – Win 5 with Death. For finishing the daily quest, I got a 5th copy of the rare Water monster card, Kelp Initiate, and combined them all to create a level 2 version. I also won a rare Fire monster card, Pit Ogre, from @Clove71’s holiday Twitch stream and a Dice pack from a giveaway she did on Peakd. I spent 155 DEC for 4 Legendary potions and 97 DEC for 2 Gold potions and opened the pack, as ones from Clove71 have tended to be lucky.
Daily Quest # 119 – Win 5 with Fire. For completing this quest, I received a Gold potion.
Daily Quest # 120 – Win 5 with Earth. For finishing the daily quest, I received 40 DEC.
Daily Quest # 121 – Win 3 without Neutral Monsters. For completing this daily quest, I got a Legendary potion.
Daily Quest # 122 – Win 5 with Water. For competing this quest, I received 261 DEC. For reference, at this point I’m getting about 10 DEC for a win on average.
I also got a couple of packs from @UnitQM. He was trying to test out live streaming on YouTube, playing Splinterlands, and I was the only one that showed up. I spent 349 DEC on 9 Legendary potions and 485 DEC on Gold potions to open the packs.
Daily Quest # 123 – Win 5 with Death. For completing the daily quest, I got a 6th copy of the rare Water monster card, Kelp Initiate.
I played in 4 tournaments of note this past week: 2 Kobold Mining Novice rule tournaments, a Bronze Rules without Legendary cards tournament on Christmas Eve, and a Live Bronze Rules Without Legendary cards tournament on Christmas. The Kobold Mining tournaments got created with what I believe were some mistakes. One allowed Legendary cards, while they typically do not, and both cut to only 15% moving on to the final second round, leading to a very small number of players.
Due to the reduced Day 2 cutoff, I didn’t make it to the second round in either Kobold Mining tournament. I went 7-4 in one and 7-3-1 in the other. Both of these were good enough to win prizes, 100 DEC each, and in previous tournaments the latter would have made it to round 2.
In the Christmas Eve Bronze tournament, I started off strong with an 8-3 record and made it to the final round. But, I ended up with a poor 12-10 record, tying for the last place prize and getting 54 DEC for my 10 to enter. At least it was still a profit!
In the Live tournament on Christmas, I actually did the best in terms of prize payouts. It was single elimination, with best 2 out of 3 games each round. I had a bye the first round, but still managed to make it into Round 4 before getting knocked out. I came in 38th place and won 500 DEC.
Anyhow, back to how the ranked season wrapped up! By playing a large number of games, mostly against bots, I was able to maintain a spot in the top 10 of Bronze League. I finished in 7th place, winning 3 packs. I could have pretty easily pushed up to 5th place, but there’s no prize difference and I liked leaving my matches total at 699 for the season.
Out of the almost 700 games that I played this season, maybe about 10 of them were against other people from the top 20 list, at least that I recognized. So, as I noted last time, if you can beat the bots with a high degree of consistency, you can place up in the top of the league by playing a ton of games over the 15 day season. And you don’t necessarily have to be better/have better cards than the other top players in Bronze.
I spent 549 DEC on 14 Legendary potions and 686 DEC on 14 Gold potions and opened all the packs. I probably should have waited on one, but I was hoping to get something good after the previous mediocre pair. Here’s what I got:
This season was a bit exhausting. I think for the upcoming season, I’ll go back to my Silver III farming and not stress over the rankings. I feel that I could pretty easily get the ranking for Silver II, but I’m still shy about 10,000 card power. Granted, 3,000 of my card power is the Gold Boogeyman card that got delegated out to me.
I’m debating trying to sell/trade a couple of my Gold Battering Ram cards, since they are selling for a good price on the market right now. I might be able to push up my card power a bit, but it’s still a long road to 40,000. Thank you for reading and please let me know if you have any thoughts, questions, or feedback in the comment section below!