One of the new features that Splinterlands team rolled out in the latest update this Tuesday is Fortune Draws. I must admit, that while I read the The Conclave Arcana Reward Set: A New Era of Ranked Rewards and Distribution I was still kind of fuzzy on how to best optimize my play and my resources to put me in the best position to get the most Weekly Fortune Draw entries.
Now that I had a few days to experiment with Fortune Draw entries I feel fairly confident about my understanding of this new way of getting ultra rare Black Foil and Arcane Variant versions of Conclave Arcana cards.
General Mechanics of Getting Entries into Fortune Draws
There are tree main ways of getting entries into Fortune Draws:
- Ranked Play
- Loot Chests
- Buying Entries in the Glint Store
Number one way of earning entries into Fortune Draws is Ranked play. You can earn up to three pulls of entries per day. To earn one pull you have to win five battles, once you won 15 battles you have maxed out your number of pulls and it will looks something like this:
Notice an exclamation mark next to my Fortune Entry x20. That means that my entries are limited by the amount of SPS I have and we will get into that in the next section.
I also have to mention that I already bought a Fortune Pass that is required to participate in the weekly Fortune Draws. It costs only 125 DEC per week so it is well worth the cost.
There are total of 53 weeks that these draws will be active for:
Another way of earning the Fortune Entries is Loot Chests. In order to increase my number of the lottery tickets in this first draw I am going to buy some loot chests:
In Minor loot chests you always get just one entry per chest and the chance of getting an entry is only 10%, higher level chests have higher percentage of entries in the chests.
But you also have to account for the fact that there are more Minor chests than Major or Ultimate loot chests. In the Minor chests I would expect a total of 30 entries based on the probability of 10% and 300 Minor loot chests:
In the first 100 minor loot chests I got 12 entries so my luck was 20% better than expected. In the second set of 100 chests I got 10 entries so exactly as expected dropping the overall luck to just 10% better than expected and in the final 100 minor chests I got 11 entries. This means that in the 300 minor loot chest that are part of the first Batch I got 33 entries instead of the expected 30 so overall 10% better than expected.
In the Major Loot chests I got 30 entries from opening 75 chests, so at that rate we have a total of 150 chests in the first batch so you would expect to get 60 entries from the Major Loot chests or double that form 300 Minor chests. The expected drop rate for the Fortune Draw entries in the Major chests is 12.5% but you can get up to five entries in the loot chest so that is where you can get more Fortune Draw entries than indicated by the 12.5% drop rate. If you just take the 150 chests and multiply those by 12.5% drop rate that would give you an expected number of 18.75 entries.
I believe Major Loot chests are the best value in terms of spent glint and earning Fortune Draw entries among all the chests. Ultimate Chests are really expensive at 10,000 Glint each and there is only 30 of them and while the drop rate of Fortune Draw entries increases to 15% based on my past experience with the Ultimate Chests they are just too risky, you might get a great draw or you might get really bad one and my luck has proven to be really bad...
The final way to earn Fortune Draw entries is to simply buy them at the Glint store. Each Fortune Draw entry is 2,000 Glint, so that is 20,000 for the first batch of ten entries and that seems expensive:
Now that we know the basic mechanics and ways of earning fortune draw entries, lets take a look at how staked or delegates SPS plays into the first way of earning the Fortune Draw entries.
SPS Fortune Draw Caps
When I first saw the table below I was wondering if there is any kind of scaling of the entries into the Fortune Draw based on your SPS stake or delegated SPS. I can now confirm that these are hard caps. There is no difference if you have 500,000 SPS staked or 999,999 SPS staked you will still be limited to 16 tickets per five daily wins.
This means that if you want to get more Fortune Draw entries and you are playing at Gold league or higher you probably don't have enough SPS staked to get maximum Gold league entries.
This also means that if you are close to any of these SPS stake numbers it makes sense to rent some SPS to reach it and get more fortune draw entries. For example if you are playing in Gold and you have 240,000 SPS staked it makes sense to go to the market and rent just 10,000 SPS to reach 12 entries per pull instead of having to settle for just 8 entries.
The cost of renting SPS is really minimal it is 0.001 DEC per SPS, which means that you can rent 10,000 SPS for just 70 DEC! The rental requests are filled fairly quickly and at this rate you can go a whole level up.
The cost of renting a quarter million SPS is only 1,750 DEC for seven days:
Before increasing SPS stake in Champion I was limited to 16 Fortune Draw entries per five wins:
After increasing SPS stake in Champion I was limited to 20 Fortune Draw entries per five wins:
Another thing to note is that you could get Fortune Entries in both Modern and Wild play modes so you can get more Fortune Draw Entries by participating in both!
Conclusion
We have three main ways to accumulate entries for Weekly Fortune draw: ranked play, loot chests and buying in the Glint store. The main way and the one we have most control over is ranked play. We can rent SPS at very good rates in the Splinterlands Market and increase our entries into the weekly Fortune Draw.
Another thing to consider is that there are a lot of entries into the first draw. We have 108,352 entries already and there will be only 78 lucky winners who will win Black Foil, Gold Arcane or Black Arcane.
The chances of winning a prize approximately are: 108,352 / 78 = 1 in 1,390, if I have 239 total entries that chance is approximately 1 in 6. That is not a horrible chance, but is not huge either. You will need some luck to win even the most common prize which is a Black Foil.
With less than sixteen hours remaining and last reset coming up in about three hours don't miss your chance to improve your winning odds by utilizing the information I have shared above as well as winning the last fifteen battles of the current week's Fortune Draw to get your three pulls of the entry tickets!
Disclaimer: The cover image for this post was created using ChatGPT.
If you have some staked SPS please vote for my SPS Validator Node HERE
I am also a Hive Witness and would really appreciate your vote for me as a witness: https://vote.hive.uno/@seattlea
If you wonder what is the best way to get involved you can use my link to begin your Splinterlands and HIVE journey.