I was renting always to silver and trying to get the rentals paid and with the recent decline in DEC price and pool rewards, it never occurred to me that I was playing the game wrong.
I realized it when I see my DEC declined from 560 to 480 and somewhere around 300+ at the time of this writing. You now cannot rent to silver from 0 power. Renting that whole 15 000 power is now not applicable. Now, you may be thinking,
"Is Splinterlands not profitable then now?"
Not really.
Due to rentals, our normal thoughts is renting to silver then playing it. It's the most efficient since the silver has higher reward chance of getting a card, capped at 50%. But this is not true now. This is not efficient now.
If you have extra funds to invest, that's better. But other than that, if you're all li'l poor people like me, just play what you're capable of. That means, don't rent. If your cards are applicable in Bronze 3, so be it. If the power is only 1000+ and you can only play in Bronze 1 max, do so. Once you get sufficient DEC/Credits then you BUY cards for power.
I think this is what the devs intended it to do in the first place. The only issue is it isn't the norm since the rentals are there.
Is the rentals making Splinterlands bad then?
On the contrary, no. If you're lacking like 100 power or something to get to Silver or the league you wanted, then go rent. However if you need to spend 100 DEC per day to get to silver, I think you need to think twice.
The point of this blog is that...
I may be wrong in this and there are others who might contradict what I'm saying but this is what I believe in and this is what I'm going to do now, play, get DEC/Credits, then buy to get power.
And again, if you don't agree to some or all of the things I said, tell me in the comments and let's discuss it. There's no price in voicing out your opinions. (Just don't curse, please.)
And as always, have fun playing Splinterlands.