Aww Crap I overslept.. What time is it? Wait.. No more DEC generation? Modern and Wild Formats? Focus chests? What the heck happened?!
Well, only one way to find out I guess, but first, I suppose introductions are in order.
Hi! I'm Nora, I had stopped playing around the time Chaos Legion released and decided to come back to give the game another go. Back then, the decks I normally played was Life attrition decks (before the ranged summoner was a thing) and anti-magic decks (because Alric and Llama Kron were a really common thing)
So sit back, relax with a nice cup of tea, and join me as I climb my way back up from 0.
My Experience
Alright, first things first, I was already aware from discord that DEC generation was gone and replaced with SPS for battle rewards. However, the new focus system really threw me for a loop. But we'll get to that, first we got to make it out of novice.
So first thing I noticed is that my opponents are a hell of alot higher rating than I was. I can deal with it, just found it strange. Now, I knew the bots were a thing, but.. I dunno, maybe I was just expecting my opponents to be closer in rating. As a comparison, back before Chaos Legion I had made a couple of alts just to grind out more season chests, but when I was climbing out from novice and bronze 3, my opponents were usually in the 300 rating, not 1000.
That said, I DID get a taste of the new heroes during my first few battles in novice, I did win, but My God I want them. You can watch the battle here: https://splinterlands.com/?p=battle&id=sl_7526795ab7ca72407ea4e64b431981dc&ref=eldrenora
A couple of battles later and I made it to Bronze 3! WOOO! Got myself a fire quest, so I thought 'alright, lets jump right in, win a battle, and...'
I'm sorry, THREE?! I already knew you could get much more than this since I saw the bots get at least 50 times this. But even so, this was a hell of a shocker. Another thing I noticed was the starter and low level card penalty. No idea if it stacked, or if I would get a 100% (200%?) penalty if I used all starter cards, but that's what I'm here to find out I guess. (Spoiler: I never found out if i can get -100%. I lost every battle I used purely starter cards)
Feel free to watch the battle though, was rather amusing due to my horrible positioning. No spoilers this time, just watch it here: https://splinterlands.com/?p=battle&id=sl_b5f664492f89146ffec1b2cea5447b8a&ref=eldrenora
Well.. Fire was never my strong suit anyway, so I rerolled and got Earth.
Ahh.. Much better. For those considering returning to Splinterlands, please save yourself the trouble and climb at least to bronze 2 before you try and do focuses. The amount of points you gain seems to go up the higher your rank.
Okay, enough battles for now. If I'm gonna avoid the horrible penalties, I need to go shopping, onto the marketplace!
WAO They've gotten cheap. Djinn Oshannus used to be about 60 USD, and Biljka was 30 USD. Glad to see Oshannus is still more valuable compared to Harklaw and Biljka though. Didn't end up buying them, I just bought some cards for Earth and Water to flesh out my collection to avoid penalties.
Wait.. what happened to Mylor?
Oh how the mighty have fallen.. Mylor at 1 BCX used to be viable even in Silver 1 or even Gold 3, used to be near impossible to rent him for anything below 200 DEC per day, which was about 1 to 2 dollars at one point.
Honestly, I like it. I play this game for fun and things are now so much more affordable compared to before when the prices were steadily going up. Trying to put together a good deck was hard enough trying to rent everything, never mind actually buying it. For reference, I have a gold evangelist that was once worth almost 400 USD at one point. No one was gonna buy it for that insane price obviously, but still, slight twinge of sadness it never sold before the price tanked.
Focus Chest Opening
This post has gotten WAAAYY too long, so to cut a day's story short, I climbed to bronze 1 and opened my 6 focus chests.
Ehhh..... Better than 1 potion honestly. I did notice something interesting though
So you're telling me.. Not only is everything stored away and can't be immediately used, you also need to wait until you have 1 SPS till you can get a payout? that's not... particularly bad, but I can see this being a huge problem in bronze where the payouts are lower by quite abit compared to silver.
So What's Next?
Tournaments I suppose, I joined a couple of tournaments so I'll talk about how much has changed on that front in another post. Thanks so much for joining me on this return trip and hope to see y'all again in the next post! If you wanna try out Splinterlands for yourself, feel free to use my referral link and give it a try yourself. Its a hell of a lot more affordable now compared to a year ago.
Special thanks to 
Posted using Splintertalk