I’m now 2 weeks into my Splinterlands Experiment : Renting for Champion League and so far I’ve had some pretty ordinary results. Even though I am learning and enjoying the experiment, it’s also a bit frustrating. I feel like I am at about the half-way mark and with the current Splinterlands Season finishing up in just over 10 days time I reckon that will be about enough to make a judgement on the success of my experiment overall.
So far I’ve managed to set up some Rental Decks with PeakMonsters which have been very useful tools that I’ve used to manage my rentals so far. I’ve been renting cards in short 2-3 day sprints where I am trying to maximise value by spending all my energy in Wild Ranked play while also having the cards available to compete in the Brawls. I’ve noticed that card prices can fluctuate a little bit so my rentals do change slightly each time, but nothing too drastic. My Summoner Set hasn't changed and so my overall play strategy is consistent while also evolving slowly.
In Ranked play I’ve really struggled. Basically I’ve been stuck in Gold League and haven’t been able to even get close to Diamond League so far this season. Since I’m renting Diamond level cards for the Brawls this is a bit of a failure because my cards aren’t playing to their potential. I could rent Gold level cards instead to try to optimise my Ranking but then I’d be under-powered for the Brawls where I need to be competing at Diamond level. I’ve used Xbot and played some Manual games too without any real success so this aspect of my experiment has been a failure to date. Maybe I’ll be able to claw my way into Diamond later in the Season and get my Ranked and Brawl play in alignment so I’ll persist a bit longer to see if I can do that.
With the Brawls I’m reasonably happy. I opted out of the first Brawl last week because I just wasn’t ready and I didn’t want to let the team down with a poor performance, but I played the Brawl this week in Fray #12 and finished with a result of 4 Wins and 4 Losses. This was enough to see my Guild finish 5th instead of 7th so there was a slight bump in Rewards across the team, but the difference between 5th and 7th is not substantial. I will likely get to play in 2 more Brawls this season before my experiment runs its course so if I can get a 50% win rate across those Brawls I’ll be fairly satisfied that this aspect of the experiment has been a success.
Overall though, I am not particularly optimistic that the Rewards from the experiment will end up covering the cost of all my Rentals. At the end of the day that is likely to be the deciding factor towards whether I’ll keep going with renting cards longer term. I know that the game is likely going to change again significantly in the next couple of weeks with the Land functionality coming out so we’ll just have to wait and see. Adapt and Evolve! Maybe I’ll be inspired to come up with another experiment to try after this one….