Intro
Each season of Splinterlands ends with a bounty of rewards for ranked play, but not all rewards are created equal. Players who don't own enough cards to increase the collection power (CP) of their account will need to rent cards to qualify for more rewards. With the end of season comes increased rental prices, which eat away at how much a player can gain.
I have heard many players complain about how it is not possible to rent efficiently at the end of a season. Being new to the game, I have taken it upon myself to optimize my season rewards. By leveraging my software development experience, I made a script that helps me find good deals on cards (currently this script is not publicly available). Below I will describe my experiment and break down how efficient my rewards were.
Experiment
| Rating | CP | League | Chests | Goal CP | Goal League | Goal Chests | |
| Account 1 | 1911 | 6700 | Bronze 1 | 9 | 100k | Gold 3 | 22 |
| Account 2 | 1904 | 350 | Bronze 3 | 5 | 100k | Gold 3 | 22 |
Each account will need to rent nearly 100k worth of CP to reach the goal of Gold 3. By doing this I will earn 30 more chests. At the time of running the script the value of each chest was estimated at 52 DEC (source). This means the expected earnings from 44 chests will be 2288 - cost to rent.
After running the rental script, I obtained the following results:
| CP | DEC | CP/DEC | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Account 1 | 93,300 | 294 | 317.35 |
| Account 2 | 116,535 | 304 | 383.34 |
| Total | 209,835 | 598 | 350.89 (avg) |
Expected value without renting: 52 * 14 = 728 DEC
Expected value with renting: 2288 - 598 = 1690 DEC
Given the above calculations, I expect the rewards will easily exceed the cost of the rental.
Result
With the rental complete and the chests opened we can now see if the actual earnings meet the expected. The market immediately following the season end was extremely volatile. As such, I am using the current market low prices for cards at the time of writing. Values for potions will follow what Splintercards uses: 40 DEC for Legendary Potion and 50 DEC for Alchemy Potion.
| DEC | L Pot | A Pot | Common | Rare | Epic | Legendary | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Account 1 | 191 | 80 | 150 | 90.15 | 0 | 458.66 | 0 |
| Account 2 | 65 | 40 | 100 | 109.90 | 1253.85 | 0 | 0 |
Total Gross: 2538.56 DEC
Total Net: 1940.56 DEC
Avg DEC/Chest: 57.69
The quality of cards opened was slightly above the 52 DEC/chest expected but within a reasonable range. Based on the 52 DEC/chest expected value, the 14 pre-rental chests account for 728 DEC. This means I made an additional 1212.56 DEC by renting cards.
One interesting thing to note is that Account 2 did open a gold foil rare card, which accounts for nearly half the value of the total earned (1152.53). If the gold foil had been a regular rare version the numbers would have looked like this:
Total Gross: 1441.80 DEC
Total Net: 843.80 DEC
Avg DEC/Chest: 32.77
Even if this had occurred, where the actual DEC/chest was far below the expected, I would have gained 115.8 DEC more than if I had not rented.
Conclusion
At first, I felt lucky to have opened the gold foil card as it carried the bulk of my profit this season. Upon reflection, with how many chests I opened I believe either getting a gold foil or a legendary card should not be too uncommon. I would like to repeat this experiment over the next few seasons to get a better sample size. As a final send off, here is the newest addition to my collection:
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