Hi everyone! This was the first season I've been invested enough and had a high enough rating to consider renting to a higher rank. I was interested in figuring out whether the cost is worth it, so I ran the numbers and wanted to share what I found.
To determine the value of ranking up, I needed to fully tally the costs and rewards of doing so. Although there was a great post yesterday detailing the threshold CP/DEC renting to make it worth it, the factors were incomplete, so I hope to make a more detailed account here.
Costs
There were 2 costs associated with going from Silver III -> Silver I. The first was the rental costs to do so, and the second was the lost profit I make off of renting my excess CP.
Renting
I own ~30k CP, so to get to Silver I, I needed to rent ~40k CP. I used peakmonsters' new rental bidding feature, and was able to automate most of it as a result. In the end, I rented the 40k CP at 40CP/DEC, for a total cost of 978 DEC.
Cost: 978 DEC
Opportunity cost of not renting out
This one is a little trickier. Normally, I rent out the difference between my owned CP and the 15k threshold for Silver III. So I own 30k CP, I usually rent out 15k of it, as unless I am actively using those cards in battle (I'm not) they're not doing anything for my league.
During the season, I was renting these cards at an average of ~100CP/DEC and getting around 150 DEC/day. However, given the spike in rental prices during EOS, if I calculate this from the price I rented things at (40CP/DEC), I gave up 366 DEC in rental fees I would have otherwise gained.
Cost: 366 DEC
Rewards
The rewards are also in two categories: chests and DEC rewards for each win.
Chests
Although the calculation here was easy, maximizing this for the one day was not trivial. I wanted to 1) get my daily quest, 2) stack a second daily quest, and 3) make sure I got EOS Silver I rewards.
To do so, I did not complete my quest from the day before, and waited until I had my 70k CP to claim either daily quest. Doing so netted me 10 more chests (2 and 2 from the daily quests and 6 from the EOS chests) than I would have gained had I stayed in Silver III. At the time, splintercards.io pegged a chest at 74 DEC, so these 10 chests had an expected value of 740 DEC.
Reward: 740 DEC
The other way to do this is to look at observed, rather than expected chest rewards. In my case, I got kind of lucky this season and pulled two wavesmiths, which more than doubled the expected value of the chests. So using what I actually got, I earned 2174 DEC from chests.
Reward: 2174 DEC
Per-win rewards
An additional reward for being in Silver I vs. Silver III is the extra DEC per win due to the higher ranking. In Silver III, with 1300 (the max) rating, I earn ~5.5 DEC/win. I made sure I was at 100% capture rate in Silver I, and did battles until I got bored/was earning only 2x my silver gains. This resulted in 22 wins grossing 333 DEC and netting 212 DEC.
Reward: 212 DEC
Putting it all together
When we sum it all up, the value of renting from Silver III -> Silver I was -392 DEC, or about a cost of $4. If we instead use what I actually got from chests instead of what I expected to get, I netted 1041 DEC, or about $10.
Net value: -392 DEC in expectation, +1041 DEC in actuality.
Conclusions
So what do I made of all this? In expectation renting for a higher league loses money. Not a lot, but a couple bucks. But as you can see in my experience, you can do better than this if you get lucky (don't need to be super lucky, as I didn't get anything better than a rare). And the unvalued part of all this is that opening chests is fun. That fun is certainly worth the potential loss of a few bucks.
The other unexpected fun aspect was the cards I rented. Since the bid feature doesn't care about the actual card, I got a lot of unexpected stuff. A level 3 GF Malric. A GF Sea Monster. A Unicorn. This let me play with some cards and leveled up stuff I don't normally have, which again, was fun.
So in the end, was this overwhelmingly worth it? No. Was it enjoyable enough that I'll do it again? Absolutely. I won't bend over backwards to do it, but if I have the time it was worth it to me.