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. For the second March 2021 season, I decided to stay back in Bronze and do the leaderboard grind once again. Or, at least try to find enough time to get in the crazy number of matches needed to be competitive in the Bronze league.
A lot has happened this past week! But, first off I’ll do my normal rundown of daily quests & tournaments. By staying in Bronze, I’m now eligible for quite a few more Novice rules tournaments. I haven’t done quite as well in them as in some past weeks, but overall things are coming along pretty well in Splinterlands.
Daily Quest Rewards:
Daily Quest # 197 – Win 5 with Life. For completing this daily quest, I got a 3rd copy of the common Life monster, Chain Spinner.
Outside of this, I also won an auction for a 3rd copy of the epic Life monster card, Thunderbird. Basically no one else bid on it, so I got it for about 19 Dark Energy Crystals (DEC). I could burn it for 200 DEC, but that would be silly as they sell for more than that on the market. I’ll toss in a plug for the site where the auctions are posted by @MarcusWahl – though the bidding seems to be getting more competitive.
Daily Quest # 198 – Win 5 with Death. For completing this daily quest, I received a Gold potion.
Daily Quest # 199 – Win 5 with Snipe. This is one of a set of new quests, where you need to play at least one card with the specific ability. For finishing this quest, I got lucky and received an Untamed pack! Having potions left over from my prior season farming in the Silver league, I went ahead and opened it.
Daily Quest # 200 – Win 5 with Fire. For finishing this daily quest, I received a 7th copy of the common Earth monster card, Nectar Queen.
Daily Quest # 201 – Win 5 with Snipe. For finishing this daily quest, I got a Legendary potion.
Daily Quest # 202 – Win 3 with No Neutral. For finishing this daily quest, I got a Legendary potion. I did get lucky outside the game, and won a 2nd copy of the legendary Life monster card, Bila the Radiant, from @pacolimited on Peakd!
Daily Quest # 203 – Win 5 with Snipe. For finishing this daily quest, I received 5 DEC.
Daily Quest # 204 – Win 5 with Earth. Always happy to get one where I can play Earth cards! For finishing this quest, I got a 2nd copy of the common Earth monster card, Harvester.
Tournaments:
Sunday Bronze Blunderbluss, no legendary cards, all sets allowed tournament: I went 8-3 on the first day, and finished up 13-9 to come in 36th place. This earned me 150 DEC.
Summoner Awards Festival #3 with Novice rules; no legendary cards; and Alpha, Beta, and Untamed sets only tournament: This is a player-run series of events put on by @marianaemilia. I went 9-2 the first day and finished up 18-4 to come in 6th place for 400 DEC and an Untamed Pack! I picked up 2 Legendary potions for 77 DEC and 2 Gold potions for 96 DEC to open it.
Thursday Bronze Blunderbluss, no legendary cards, all sets allowed tournament: I went 7-3-1 to not make day two. However, I still came in 70th place for 100 DEC.
Friday Spring Training, NFT Giveaway, Bronze rules, no legendary summoners, all sets tournament: This was basically a just for fun event put on by @monstergames (aka, Dave Mccoy in the Splinterlands Discord). He gave out WAX NFT’s to the participants. I went 24-4 the first day, as it was designed to be a lot of matches each round.
I ended up 36-16 day two, but I actually missed submitting some decks. I was driving for about 20 hours and then had to rush to submit teams for both this and the following tournament. I actually did the other one first, and didn’t have enough time to get in all my matches for this event. I did get a bunch of WAX network badges though for participating.
Saturday Brave tournament (no legendaries and Novice rules): I went undefeated on the first day going 14-0. I didn’t do quite so well the second day, after driving all night and ended up 21-6-1 to come in 27th place. This was still a 1,500 DEC prize, so not bad all things considered.
Saturday Kobold Novice, Untamed set, no legendary cards tournament: I went 7-3-1 to not make day 2 once again. I still came in 50th place for 50 DEC.
Outside The Game:
With the game expanding into outside markets, like the WAX network and CUB decentralized finance liquidity pools, there’s a lot going on that has made my goal of not investing additional outside funds into the game a little murkier. Technically, I also include what I can earn as a viable way to build up my collection, by which I meant winning things in the game. But, it also could include trading around cards. We’ll start with CUB, since that’s a little more straightforward.
I won’t get too deeply into what decentralized finance is here, but essentially people pool DEC and another cryptocurrency, BUSD in this case, into one big pot. People can then use this pot of coins as a way to trade their BUSD for DEC, and vice-versa. This has been done on other sites, like Uniswap, for DEC and ETH. Since the barrier to entry with BUSD is currently much lower than with ETH, I decided to toss a few of my virtual dollars into this project. I took out 5,000 DEC from my Splinterlands account and used that, along with some other cryptocurrency funds I had gotten from blogging on Peakd, to provide liquidity for the pool.
WAX is another cryptocurrency heavily focused on non-fungible tokens, or NFTs. Basically these are cryptocurrency trading cards, to use a rough analogy. Since Splinterland cards fit well into that mold, they built a bridge over to the WAX network and started letting people sell cards on that network. Alien Worlds, which I wrote about previously, runs on the WAX blockchain and I had been slowly accumulating a little bit of WAX currency from that “game”.
With the recent cryptocurrency boom, the roughly $1 in WAX that I had accumulated was suddenly worth about $10! Since Splinterlands lets you buy Credits, which can be used like DEC, with cryptocurrencies I made up for the 5,000 DEC I had withdrawn by buying $5 in Credits. However, since Splinterland card prices on WAX were going crazy, I decided to try to do some trading back and forth, at least partially encouraged by a video from @stever82 on the topic.
There were only 13 copies of the legendary Water monster, The Kraken, on the WAX network. I picked up the cheapest one available in Splinterlands for 4,000 Credits ($4) and moved it over to the WAX market. I put it up as the cheapest on WAX at price of 56 WAX (~$13). At the time of this writing, it has not sold.
A couple of other people then put up cheaper Kraken cards for sale on WAX, including one for only 17 WAX (~$3.50), which I proceeded to buy myself. At this point, the cheapest Kraken cards on the Splinterlands market are about $6. I put the copy I had bought for 17 WAX up for auction over on the WAX network. It has yet to get any bids at the time of this writing, but is still in-progress. The other Kraken cards also seem to have been removed, leaving only one slightly cheaper The Kraken still on the WAX market.
I did pick up a Gold Naga Brute for about 600 Credits ($0.60) and sold it for 7 WAX ($1.50). I also sold my Orb pack for 29 WAX ($6.50). The token to dollar price keeps fluctuating, so these numbers may be off slightly from what they were at the time of buying/selling originally. The WAX market does seem like it may be getting flooded with Splinterlands‘ cards, and that the demand may be waning at this point. There are still sales happening, and a few more people seem to be coming into Splinterlands from the WAX market.
To finally get to the story behind the title of the article, I happened to stumble into an issue with the WAX integration where cards could incorrectly be duplicated when being moved over from Splinterlands. Rather than exploit it, I quietly let the developers know so that they could address it. In thanks, they sent me 50 Untamed packs.
This happened right after I had taken out most of my DEC for the Cub pool, so I didn’t have any to buy potions with. I haven’t opened any of them at this point. I did also win one more Untamed pack in a random giveaway on Peakd by the Splinterlands community team. I bought 3 Legendary potions for 115 DEC and 5 Gold potions for 240 DEC and opened that one.
Before wrapping things up, I should probably mention how things are going in Bronze league. Prior to my very long drive, I was in 4th place. However, after missing a day of playing, I was back in the teens on the Bronze leader board. There is still a week left, but I need to start playing a lot of games to get back into the top 10.
The other big news is that Pionerbank seems to have moved his account into higher leagues. For the first time last season, he wasn’t in the top spot of the Bronze league. Still, first place played over a thousand games last season, which is either a bot or just someone with a lot of free time to put into the game.
I would like to place in the top 3 at least once before fully moving on to the Silver league, but that might be tough given how many matches the top 4 people in Bronze put in last season. I should get back to improving my deck instead of messing around with various side projects, but I have been getting my card power up a little more.
Well, that’s about it for this week! A pretty long update, but it seems like there’s been a lot happening of late! If you made it this far, thank you for reading! And, if you have any suggestions, feedback, or questions then please let me know in the comments below!