After deciding this week to do a Splinterlands Experiment and try to rent some cards to compete at Champion level for my Guild Brawls I’ve been thinking a lot about HOW I might actually do that. I have no real experience playing at Diamond or Champion level and after writing that post I realized I really needed to come up with a methodology to help me decide which cards I should rent. I’ve poked around a few places and flirted with the SplinterStats Battle Data and while I can see the win rates for popular cards there it didn’t really help me much in deciding how I should construct my teams.
Philosophically I am more of a MoneyBall type of guy. (Damn, I love that film!) I like to get value. Find that under-rated pick and make it pay off. So I threw away the Battle Stats and went over to PeakMonsters to see if there were some tools there that could help. I found the Deck Builder feature and started playing with it. First up I just picked a Splinter to start with and using my knowledge of the game in Silver League I picked a cheap but effective Summoner as a starting point...
I then went to the Rental Section of PeakMonsters, Filtered the cards by the chosen Splinter at MAX Level and sorted it by Name before going through each card of the Splinter to see firstly whether the card would have good Synergy with my chosen Summoner and secondly to see what level the desirable Abilities kicked in. I had to decide whether I would want to pay for MAX level or try to save some DEC by dropping its level back 1 or 2 places to make it more affordable and get better value. I then added the card at the appropriate level to the Deck I was constructing for my Summoner.
(NOTE – Configure your Deck for THEMATIC and not the default FIXED BATTLE LINEUP or you’ll max out at 6 monsters)
Once I’d done that for the Splinter I wanted to construct I could then open up that Deck I’d constructed and see all the Rental Costs for the cards I’d selected AT the Level I’d selected them for. Then it was a simple case of sorting that rentable list by Best Price (in ascending order) and picking up all the cheap ones plus the big ones that made the most sense. By doing this I can get a feel for the value APR by comparing the Buy and Rent prices and I can also easily check my shopping cart to make sure the selections were all adding up to a number that was under budget.
I figure I can maintain a deck for each Splinter to get started and if I want to switch Summoner at some point then I can make additional decks for new Summoners and swap between them quite easily. It’s been a bit of work to get it all set up but I’m confident now that I can manage my rented cards pretty conveniently by sorting and choosing from the Decks that I’ve built. I haven’t started battling with them yet, that’s the next step so I’ll find out soon whether this methodology will actually work...