Welcome to another article where I write about my journey playing Splinterlands! This is a longer than typical season, lasting about 17 days this time around. It seems like it's been a while since the season ended, though that may be because this season has been something of a grind.
In terms of news, the 5th anniversary event has been running for about a week and almost 500 million Dark Energy Crystals (DEC) have been burnt. I have not personally participated, as I still need several hundred thousand DEC for land. The rewards are pretty nice, but the odds of getting them are fairly low considering the amount of DEC burnt.
The leaderboard at the time of this writing.
There have not been a lot of other game play updates of note. An option to lock cards as you earn them was added, some market code cleanup was done, and the period where you could purchase land survey boosts expired. The Monday Town Hall meeting, where the team streams with the community, is also moving from a weekly event to only happening every other week.
To be fair, there's usually not a lot new week to week, so moving to a less frequent schedule makes sense. We did get a new quarter 3 roadmap update, which is mostly stuff that wasn't finished in the previous quarter. Hopefully most of these changes get done this time!
That's about it for the game related news. Let's move on to a breakdown of the season so far:
Daily Quest Rewards:
Daily Quest # 976. Got Anti Melee Focus on my main account, which was still getting Diamond chests from end of last season. I got 1.423 Splintershard tokens (SPS).
InvestYGator, my Silver league alternate account, got Death Focus. I received 0.178 (0.068 + 0.11) SPS, 20 Merits, 1 Legendary potion, 3 Gold potions, and a Musa Saline (legendary monster)!
Daily Quest # 977. Got Flying Focus and back to Gold chests. I got 4.381 (2.486 + 1.895) SPS, 4 Gold potions, a Terraceous Grunt (common monster), and 8 (1 + 7) Dumacke Orcs (common monster).
InvestYGator got Flying Focus. I received 0.508 (0.107 + 0.068 + 0.333) SPS, 88 Merits, and 2 Fungus Flingers (common monster).
Daily Quest # 978. Got Exploits Focus. I got 2.955 (0.655 + 1.631 + 0.669) SPS, 56 Merits, 9 Gold potions, and a gold foil Terraceous Grunt.
InvestYGator got Healing Focus. I received 16 Merits, 2 Gold potions, 1 Legendary potions, and a Dumacke Orc.
Daily Quest # 979. Got Fire Focus. I got 10 Legendary potions, 6 Ferox Defenders (common monster), 4 Madcap Magus (rare monster), and 2 gold foil Drybone Barbarians (common monster).
InvestYGator got Anti Melee Focus. I received 1.233 (0.079 + 0.111 + 0.94 + 0.103) SPS and 1 Legendary potion.
Daily Quest # 980. Got Anti Melee Focus. I got 6.198 SPS, 5 Fungus Flingers, 3 Helios Matriarch (rare summoner), an Aves Sturgis (legendary monster), 2 Ferexian Heroes (legendary monster), and a Chaos Legion pack!
This was a ridiculously good set of rewards. I was able to get both Aves Sturgis and Ferexian Hero up to level 2.
InvestYGator got Life Focus. I received 0.409 (0.168 + 0.107 + 0.134) SPS, 3 Dumacke Orcs, and 2 Ravenhood Wardens (rare monster).
Daily Quest # 981. I got Stealth Focus. Got 4 Gold potions, 17 (9 + 8) Legendary potions, 4 Gobson Bombers (common monster), and 4 Franz Ruffmane (rare summoner).
InvestYGator got Earth Focus. I received 0.506 (0.138 + 0.135 + 0.088 + 0.145) SPS, 1 Gold potions, and 1 Legendary potion.
Daily Quest # 982. I got Life Focus. Got 2.861 (2.28 + 0.581) SPS and 4 Gold potions.
InvestYGator got Stealth Focus. I received 0.217 (0.106 + 0.111) SPS, 5 (3 + 2) Drybone Barbarians, 2 Fungus Flingers, and 2 Possessed Puppets (common monster).
Daily Quest # 983. Got Disable Focus. I got 7 Gold potions, 4 Firecallers (common monster), 5 Swamp Spitters (common monster), and 7 Imperial Knights (common monster).
InvestYGator got Defend Focus. I received 0.16 SPS, 16 Merits, 4 (2 + 2) Gold potions, and 4 (1 + 3) Legendary potions.
I also opened a couple more Chaos Legion packs:
A nice epic card for a change of pace from the past few weeks!
And a gold foil legendary! This more than makes up for the 8 mediocre packs over the past four weeks.
Guild Brawls:
Guild Brawl #152, playing Bronze League Gold Foil Only. The guild came in 5th place, which isn't terrible all things considered. We did have one new person join, though they didn't get to participate in this brawl.
Vs. CAM488 of CRYPTO RATS - opponent fled
Vs. STANLEAFS of KAIZEN BROTHERHOOD - opponent fled
Vs. STEEMMONSTERSGOLD of GUERREIROS DOS CEUS
I opened up one more Gladiator pack:
A couple of rares, which is always nice. No gold foil cards for my brawl deck, but still nice to keep building up my regular collection for ranked.
The Rest:
No tournaments or trading this week, as usual. I have been jumping back and forth between Wild and Modern this season. If I start to do badly in one, I'll jump to another. This has probably led to me not advancing as well in either league, but that may also may be due to just a generally lower win rate.
It seems like a few seasons ago it was a relatively easy task to get up to Silver I and Gold I on my two accounts, but now I've usually been struggling to get out of the Silver II and Gold II respectively. It seems like there a lot of max level decks out there. Or, I just get horrible random rolls and lose to arguably worse decks.
Still a ways to go in this season, and I was feeling a bit down about it until seeing how many legendary cards I actually got this week. The SPS rewards from chests is almost always worse than what I get from battling, at least most noticeably in Silver. The cards are still nice to get, as I'm a good ways off from hitting max level with any of the new cards.
That’s about it for this mid-season update. Thank you for reading! If you have any comments or questions feel free to post them below!