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Splinterland Self Challenge

My Splinterlands Self Challenge #29 – End Of Another Bronze Season & Incoming Brawls

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 of ranked, I decided to stay in the Bronze league of Splinterlands and fight over ranking on the leaderboard. For anyone unfamiliar with this, it means playing hundreds of games, while trying to lose only a very small percent of them.

To be fair, while I technically qualify to play in the Silver league, my collection is actually more appropriate to the Bronze league level of cards. There were a lot of tournaments this past week, and I opened a few of those packs I had gotten last week. Anyhow, as usual, let’s start off with a breakdown of the past week!

Daily Quest Rewards:

Daily Quest # 205 – Win 5 with Death. For completing this daily quest, I received a Legendary potion. Outside of the game, I won an auction for an 11th copy of the rare Water monster card, Kelp Initiate, paying a cheap price of 20 Dark Energy Crystals (DEC).

Daily Quest # 206 – Win 5 with Life. For completing this daily quest, I got 48 DEC. Outside of the game, I won a 4th copy of the common Life card from @cryptofiloz on Peakd. This was from a contest a few weeks back that I had forgotten even entering.

Daily Quest # 207 – Win 5 With Earth. For completing this daily quest, I received a Legendary potion. I bought 8 more Legendary potions for 307 DEC and 10 Gold potions for 480 DEC to open 2 of the 50 packs that I had gotten the previous week.

The gold Biceratops was a nice find in this first pack!
The second pack was less exciting.

Daily Quest # 208 – Win 5 with Earth. For completing this daily quest, I got an 18th copy of the rare Dragon monster card, Gloridax Soldier. Outside of the game, I won another auction for a 12th copy of Kelp Initiate, for 16 DEC, and my first real copy of the rare Neutral monster card, Tower Griffon, for 18 DEC.

At this point, I had played hundreds of matches this season and accumulated a bit of DEC, so I picked up a few more cards from the market to fill out my Bronze league card set. I got 2 more copies of the rare Fire monster card, Pit Ogre, to level my copy up to 2; I got 6 more copies of the common Water monster card, Feasting Seaweed, for about 44 DEC each to level it up to 3; I picked up 10 more copies of the common Water monster card, Demented Shark, for about 87 DEC each to level it up to 3; I bought 3 copies of the rare Earth monster card, Child of the Forest, for about 80 DEC each to level mine up to 2; and bought a level 2 copy of the rare Earth monster card, Centurai Mage, for 240 DEC.

Daily Quest # 209 – Win 5 With Earth. For finishing this daily quest, I received a 15th copy of the common Fire monster card, Ant Miners.

Here’s the reward cards, cards won at auction, and cards I bought. The screenshot was taken at the time of writing, so some card amounts are higher here.

Daily Quest # 210 – Win 5 With Earth. For completing this daily quest, I got a Legendary potion. I then went ahead and spent 346 DEC for 9 more Legendary potions and another 480 DEC on 10 Gold potions to open packs #3 and #4 out of the 50 I had gotten. I also won an auction for a 6th copy of the rare Death monster card, Death Elemental, for 14 DEC, and a 4th copy of the rare Dragon monster card, Serpentine Mystic, for 16 DEC.

A 2nd copy of Tower Griffin, but nothing too exciting.
Two rares in this one!

Daily Quest # 211 – Win 5 With Water. For completing this daily quest, I got 12 DEC. This was also the end of the season!

Tournaments:

Thursday Bronze Blunderbluss, no legendary cards, Untamed set only tournament: I went 9-2 on the first day and finished 15-7 to come in 15th place for 280 DEC.

Saturday Brave tournament (Bronze rules with no legendary cards): I went 9-2 on the first day and again finished 15-7, this time coming in 91st place for 150 DEC.

Saturday Kobold Novice, Untamed set, no legendary cards tournament: I went 10-1 the first day and finished in 2nd place with a 15-1-3 record earning 1,000 DEC.

Saturday Spring Training Bronze Tournament (no legendary summoners, Reward and Untamed sets only): This was another lengthy player created tournament put on by @monstergames (aka, Dave Mccoy in the Splinterlands Discord). I went 22-3 the first day and finished in 4th place with a 42-6 record. The prize for this tournament was a selection of WAX NFT’s based on Splinterlands‘ cards.

Sunday Bronze Blunderbluss, no legendary cards, all sets allowed tournament: I went 9-2 on the first day, which I seem to do a lot, and finished up 16-4 to come in 7th place. This earned me 1,120 DEC.

Monday Kobold Novice, Untamed set, no legendary cards tournament: I went 8-3 the first day and finished with a 13-4-2 record, coming in 11th place earning 200 DEC.

Outside The Game:

I already mentioned the auctions, but I feel like I should toss @MarcusWahl another plug for his auction/card store site. I’ve been picking up cards well under their market value, though usually the less exciting ones. Hopefully he’s making something off the more contested golden card auctions!

I am still trying to do a little trading between the regular Splinterlands market and the WAX market, but there hasn’t been a lot of movement there. I still have two “extra” copies of the legendary, The Kraken, reward cards that haven’t sold. I did pick up a legendary Life summoner, Chanseus The Great, in a WAX auction at about half the dollar value that he is going for on the Splinterlands market. I would add him to my deck, but am conflicted about if this counts as putting “outside” money into the game.

I did put up a couple bundles of common cards, and some of those sold for a few pennies over what I had gotten them for. Most of the WAX that I’ve gotten is from selling currency from another game, Alien Worlds. This article is about Splinterlands, but that boring mining simulator has paid off with the increase in the value of WAX tokens.

The big news for Splinterlands is that Guild Brawls are finally being added to the game. This is the start of a new set of enhancements for what are essentially guild-versus-guild tournaments. Technically this was added after the season ended, and I’ll probably write about it more next week.

At the time of this writing my guild has yet to pool the DEC to buy a level 1 Arena to participate. I put in 1,000 DEC, but don’t quite have the funds to pay the total 10,000 DEC myself. Something about burning a lot of funds on potions for opening packs!

This has been a pretty lengthy article, perhaps from all the pack opening screenshots, so to wrap things up let’s go back to the end of the season. Even with missing a full day of being online, I still managed to put in 600 ranked matches this season. Out of those, I lost 31, which is quite a few points when wins are +3 and losses are -32.

By the end of the season, I didn’t have the time or energy to try to compete for one of the top 3 spots. I would have had to win over 300 additional matches to try to compete for a top spot, which is hours upon hours of time that would have needed to be committed to playing matches. Out of those 600 matches, only 2 were against opponents that ended up in the top 10 at the end of the season.

I can’t say that it was all that fun playing hundreds of matches against, what I presume, was mostly bots. I feel like I was mostly doing it out of stubborn pride, trying to prove that I can top 10 in Bronze if I set my mind to it. On the bright side, I did pick up a fair amount of DEC playing that much! While I had burned my collection rate down to about 30% at the end of the season, for the most part I was getting about 10 DEC per win.

My season rewards claim glitched out, but I pulled it off Peakmonsters.

I was a little disappointed in not making the top 3, but it’s not like I can’t try again in the future – if I want to put myself through another two week grind of beating up bots. For the next season, I’m definitely taking a break and farming the extra daily rewards in Silver. It will cut down the number of tournaments I qualify for, but I’m fine with taking it easier for the couple of weeks. I did drop another 543 DEC on 14 Legendary potions and 631 DEC on 15 Gold potions to crack open my 3 reward packs from coming in 5th place:

The first pack set a high bar with a Gold common and a summoner card as the rare!
The second pack was less exciting, but at least still had a summoner card as the rare.
My first golden rare card from a pack! And, one I actually play at times!

At the end of this season my card power was around 51,000 – still 19,000 short of being able to get into Silver I. Still, it’s now a lot higher thanks to some new gold cards! Outside of the legendary cards, my Untamed set collection is starting to hit the max level for Bronze. With prices going sky high on older sets, I may not end up getting the cards for them anytime soon – if ever.

Another long update, but if you made it this far, thank you for reading! I’ll be back next week with another mid-season update and hopefully some initial thoughts on Guild Brawls. If you have any suggestions, feedback, or questions then please let me know in the comments below!

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