These last couple of days I ran an experiment to see how much I could earn playing Splinterlands with a low investment on rentals. I have a deck worth 133 USD and have 23 of the cheapest cards in the market leveled up to max for Silver league.
I had never measured anything before, I just played and rented to win as many battles as possible. Through this little analysis, I found out that many times I had lost quite a bit of money renting, as I would put all my hopes on the chest rewards, which often ended up being crap.
First rule I used was to place a max of 10 DEC per rent. My intention was to play on Silver, but due to my rating and the CP rented I went immediately to Gold. I begin by renting as many different summoners as I can because I wanted to be able to adapt to different scenarios and play strategically, rather than overpowering opponents.
First I looked for summoners on max Silver league levels that were 10 DEC or less, and kept lowering the levels to get others that were too expensive under these demands. My final list of summoners was this:
That's an insane amount of strategic possibilities, but I didn't end up using them all, so next time I need to do some following on which are the ones I'm actually inclined to use.
I spent a total of 125.368 DEC on the summoners.
I added another 125 DEC of Silver-level maxed out cards which were be the cheapest available in the market. I excluded all the cards I already own. A total of 500 DEC since you can rent for a minimum of 2 days in PeakMonsters (roughly 36 cents at the moment of writing) .
My plan was to measure:
- My win rate
- Rewards (chest and SPS) vs rental cost
Time to battle!
My first match made me fear this was going to be a complete failure. I had to face a very overpowered opponent that had Lir Deepswimmer and Yodin Zaku among his set.
I gave it a chance with Ilthain, assuming I would face Yodin because of the high mana battle, but I was wrong. Lir Deepswimmer came up and I was rekt. Maybe would of stood a chance against Yodin because of the return arrow skill.
I thought I would have to battle till my rating went down a bit. Yet, things begin working better than expected!
On my first win rate measurement of the last 20 battles my I had 10/20, a 50% win rate and was managing to stay comfortably on Gold league.
I have been taking note of my mistakes in each defeat which has led me to learn a lot, or sometimes remember basic stuff I had forgotten. I'll share those notes on another post. There are however some battles where I'm simply overpowered or don't have enough mana for the battle.
I think it's safe to say that if you want to profit from this game, you must accept defeat. There is no way you can just win against everyone without spending more than you earn. If you want to beat everybody, it's pay to win. Though, if someone wants to prove me wrong, please do so! I would love to learn from you.
The adventure continues and looking at my last 20 battles, I've won 13! That's a 65% win rate which is pretty good. I could settle for a 70% really, with my current cards and the DEC spent on renting. Perhaps with some optimization its possible.
As for the SPS, I've gathered 6.235 which rounds up to 25 cents. That only pays for one day of the cards...
However, I got lucky on the chest rewards:
Normally I'd be hyped on opening the pack, but this time I'm not on gambler mode, I want tangible profits.
I'll probably hold on to the pack and sell it if I need money some day or when the price rises. It's a solid 2 dollars for a 22 cent investment. Seems like a nice profit to me, despite how exciting it is to clutch your hands and repeat in your mind: "c'mon give me a legendary gold foooooiiiilll".
I think gambling with packs can be a good idea when you have many, like 200 of them or so. But otherwise, you just might end up with much less value on your account.
In the end I wasn't able to make all the SPS necessary to pay the rentals. I mean, I could keep going but I'm happy and grateful for the content of the chest rewards. Tomorrow morning I'll still have a few hours of rent time so I might grind it a while before it's over.
Last win rate check: 11/20. So overall I was mostly over 50%, sometimes better. I'll see in future occasions if I can tweak the rents to improve this.
To wrap this up, look at this sweet victory against a higher level Yodin using low level cards and Ilthain as summoner. These kind of wins are what make the game special, as you can't really pay to win your way out of everything 😉