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. This is the first season with the revised ranked Leaderboards, where the top players in each league will win a prize. Previously, only the overall top-ranked players would win prizes at the end of a season.
To start off, here’s a quick rundown of my daily quests for this past week:
Quest #17 – Win 5 with Death… Nope! As my Death set is fairly weak, I utilize the new quest button and get Win 5 with Fire. With the league reset, I am back down to Bronze III. It takes me 10 games to complete the daily, which earns me a 5th Gold Potion for my collection. Since this is the new season, I decide to play another 15 games to try to build up rating and my DEC per win. With the reset, I am back down to earning a fraction of a DEC per win. I go about 50/50, playing against some components with considerably higher card power.
Quest #18 – Win 5 with Life. Bronze league has a lot more strong players in it, or I just don’t have a great day. It takes me 21 games to manage to win 5. I actually win the first, moving up to Bronze II, before losing a bunch and moving back down to Bronze III. For completing the daily I earn 7 DEC. I then play 9 more games to try to round out my number of games, as well as get a chance to play some other splinters. I still don’t do particularly well, but better than when I was only playing Life.
Quest #19 – Win 5 with Fire. I’m happy to be able to play one of my stronger sets, and am able to complete the daily in 7 games! Well, technically 8 games. I used Dragon/Life in one match where the Earthquake rule was in play, as I do not have a lot of flying Fire monsters. My first win put me back into Bronze II. However, I was much more excited when the daily reward turned out to be an Untamed pack! I played 2 more games to even, winning both and finishing on a win streak where I was getting 3 DEC a win.
Quest #20 – Win 5 with Earth. I have another rough day, taking 14 matches to win 5. I didn’t fall back to Bronze III, as some of my opponents were ranked much higher than myself, so that I would only lose a few ranking points. For finishing the daily, I got a new rare Water card, Kelp Initiate. I played, and lost, one more game to round out my matches for the day.
Quest #21 – Win 5 with Fire. While initially excited, I still ended up needing to play a dozen games to win 5. To be fair, one of those games I played Dragon/Earth due to match restrictions. Finishing the daily earned me a third Legendary Potion, which I was happy to get now that I had a pack to open. Apparently you need a potion per card when opening a pack, so 5 Gold and 5 Legendary potions, in order to have the best odds of getting something of higher value.
Quest #22 – Win 5 with Water. I had a really bad run, and ended up playing 20 games to win 5 with Water. Two of those games I played other splinters due to the Earthquake rule, and won both of those. I remained in Bronze II at the end of the day. For finishing the daily, I received a third copy of the Earth common, Barking Spider.
Quest #23 – Win 5 with Earth. Either I was back to having a good day, or the higher powered players were now getting paired against one another. It only took 7 games to finish the daily, for which I earned 15 DEC.
Quest #24 – Win 5 with Earth (again, yay!) This time it took me 9 matches to finish the daily, earning a fourth Legendary potion. Impatient to see what I would get, I bought a fifth Legendary potion and opened the pack. Here is what I got:
A little disappointed with the results.
I ended up playing 5 more games, in part because I had miscounted my total and was trying to end on a 5 or 0. After winning most of these additional games, I ended the first week with a 956 rating. In the old system this would be enough for Bronze I. However, with my current card collection power of 1,450, I will be stuck in Bronze II for a while under the current power restrictions.
At the time of this writing, my rating puts me in 1081th place in the Bronze league. The 100th place has 1,205 rating points, meaning that there’s almost a thousand players floating around the 1,000 rating point range. The #1 player is currently at 2,000 rating – well above 2nd place’s 1,815 rating. Overall, I like the direction of this latest set of changes, though it still feels like there is room for improvement.
Of the top 10 Bronze league players, all but one has the card power and ranking to move into the Silver league. Several have the card power, if not always the ranking, to be playing in the Gold league. Allowing players to stay back at low levels seems a bit off, and hopefully this is something that they will address in the future. From my personal experience this week, I have played against far more opponents with 2nd rank summoners or legendary monsters than in the prior season.
I also ended up winning 100 DEC in a random giveaway on the Hive forums! So, thank you to @drazeus! This made dropping 40 DEC on a 5th Legendary potion a lot more palatable. Speaking of giveaways, a friend of mine is trying to create a crypto & gaming based contest site. I got him to put up a DEC one. It’s free to enter, and you don’t even have to sign up on the site. You can just put in your Splinterlands account name to enter. If you play Splinterlands and want to try to get some free DEC, go over and check out his site TBD Sweeps.
Finally, since I had picked up multiple copies of the epic Pyromanic Fire card to get into Bronze II, I went ahead and put one up for rent on PeakMonsters. I am not about to make it up to 5,000 power soon, so it doesn’t really impact my play. Happily, someone rented it out! Granted, it’s only a tenth of a cent a day. Still better than it just sitting around in my collection!
I may take a run at cracking the top 100 list for Bronze, provided I don’t take too much of a beating trying to finish my dailies. 300 points doesn’t seem impossible, but the competition has been more fierce. Either way, I’ll be back with another update in a week, once this season ends!