Prologue
The Survival-Mode went online, and there are many fun articles to read about it. Since I personally only have one deck that is somewhat advanced, without any spare cards, I didn't really pay any attention to it until today. I played all my ranked first, so I don't need any of my cards for the next 48 hours (since it is End Of Season, the suicide-cards will be revived tomorrow).
Then I cautiously clicked on "Survival". And found myself in Wood. I first thought that was related to Land 1.75 coming up in 4 days (oh boy! SO many new things coming up these days! We live in exciting Splinter-times...), but no, it was just the League.
I have an XBot, so I used it as it is permitted in Survival mode - I think it will be forbidden in a while. It was still fun, but I think having real players invest real time (that includes me) will make it more fun. More to that in Conclusions.
First Experience
As I used a bot, I just sat and watched. It was a little watching soccer, but more fun as it was short lived. First battle, won easily. Maxed monsters against Lvl 1 was the main theme for the first battles. I went on to get some work done, and came back later.
The bot marched my account up to a 800 rating in no time, almost without losing cards - but then I lost one of the best summoners, and the cascade began. As I said, I don't have any back-up. So having the choices limited gave the opponents an advantage over me. The same way I had an advantage before, as I was late to the game and many had already used up all their better cards, now others had the advantage over me.
So, I stopped when I only had very few summoners left. I think the Matriarch max. level survived, so did the Astral Entity. The rest was bygones, as where most of my best monsters.
Results
The best rating it got was 900, only 20 shy of a Top100 account. There are many whales in the Top100 right now, since everyone is in the Bronze League. After losing a few more battles, I had almost no summoners left, so I stopped the machine. I'll start in bronze league next time.
I got around 230 SPS out of the Survival Mode. That's pretty good. Out of 50 Energy I usually get something like 100-120 SPS in Wild-Mode (the last one was more rewarding, as you can see), so having an extra 230 SPS per season with no extra cost is nice.
Also, having all the SPS coming together and forming up to a claim of 440 - that is pretty cool, I never had as much to claim.
Conclusion
The Survival Mode has a lot of potential, that's for sure. There are several points that I like:
Chaos Legion
This is the perfect deck to play in Survival Mode, and the mode is a great way to restore some value to the overprinted and hence incredibly cheap deck.
No Energy
Away goes the pressure! I don't play modern because I always feel the pressure of having to use all my energy (yes, I'm a bit perfectionist that way), so I bot in wild and do tournaments and brawls by brain. In survival, I think I don't feel the pressure of having to play, it's an extra fun mode that I could play around with. Or bot, but...
Bots
It's cool to be able to use it somewhere else than Wild, and the value has appreciated a lot since the release if Survival, but even though I do use it as well, I have the feeling (no real arguments, though, haven't actually dived into the topic) that it would be better to keep it real. What do you think?
Matches
I like that one does play against very high level accounts, and with chance to win against them (if they already lost against other high levels). That's another point not to use a bot, as it can provide interesting teachings for brawls and so on.
Sometimes it's a little tedious, though, when I have to play against someone wi
Earnings
They seem quite high. It makes sense, it just started, there's more of the pot than players, so winning 10 SPS in one battle isn't even that bad - the once up there make around 300 SPS per win. But those are whales with a lot of cards:
Whales on the top
As you can see in the picture above, it's basically Bravetofu and Vugtis playing against each other all the time. If you check BTs survival battles, you'll see that the last 10 (!) battles were against Vugtis. When BT isn't online, Vugtis plays almost exclusively against Dejota - 18 battles in a row. It's lonely up there it seems.
The mode is definitely made for whales, and I think that's okay. They have a substantial investment in the game, and just renting out the cards might be somewhat boring after a while. I mean, BT delegating whole Splinters for a month to every referral speaks to that.
Will I buy more cards?
I could use the 220 SPS (or an equivalent) to re-invest and buy max-cards for the survival mode, and see if I get a return on them. But I doubt it. My main goals (saving for CA and Tofu) are still far away, even though I am currently buying 1000 DEC and 100 SPS every day.
On the other hand, it might actually be worth it. At least the cheap summoners and monsters, there are plenty of options. But no, bad Beelzael, you are saving for CA and Tofu. I just wished I had become active sooner, so I would have more reward-summoners from the CL-set. That would make survival so much easier!
Post Scriptum - My favorite battle from today
For one, it's against an account that has 21,000,000 Power. I have 875,000. So it felt a little like my David-Bot against Goliath. Then, it includes one of my favorite strategies - super-fast Coeurl Lurker with scattershot to go behind enemy lines. When I play it, it usually fails hardcore for some reason, chances are for some reason against me on this one. But here, it works incredibly well, preventing the enemy Rage from hitting and therefor not giving him any extra life.
Thank you very much for reading, I hope you enjoyed it at least as much as I enjoyed writing :-D If you have any comments or feedback - please let me know! And don't forget to leave your own posts for me to curate. Thank you very much!
If you don't play the game yet, you can use my referral: Click here for referral :-)