Splinterlands - Painful changes and my first max summoner!

Hello everyone! Welcome back to my weekly Splinterlands blog, a new Social Media Challenge post has started, and the theme is the same as last week, to share your most remarkable moment in the Splinterverse.

Sometimes, I need to think about what I'm going to write about but there is so much happening now that I don't know where to start! So, let's just start with the beginning and I'll bramble on...

To find out how you can participate in the challenge yourself, and start funding your deck, you can find the Splinterlands post here.

Painful changes

With the maintenance window last Tuesday, some big changes are implemented, so let's talk about that, since I'm not a whale, I see things different than the big names in the community I think.

• From next season it will cost 2000 DEC or 40 vouchers to play one season in Wild League
• Wild League SPS staking requirements has doubled

So for me, I'm playing this game for almost three years now, I joined in the time where rewards were just too good and unsustainable and like with everything else, there are people who find ways to exploit this and the bot armies arrived, buying a spellbook once, maybe some cards, or just rent them and start extracting value to never invest anything back in to the system anymore.

Back then, the ROI from the spellbook was only 4 weeks, and because the Splinterlands team allowed the use of bots this became a cancer constantly leeching from the economy, from the community the call to fight the bots started growing bigger and bigger, but only small changes were made and the problem was pushed ahead for way too long, until now - and it doesn't only hurt the bot owners I can tell you but it's the only way out I think.

As a normal guy, I live in Europe, I just work for a company, I'n not poor but also not wealthy, by no means anywhere close to being a whale, I invested about $800 personal money in to my account over the last 20 months because I just love the game and everything there is to do around it, on top of this, I invested some funds I earned with other games and crypto airdrops that essentially were free money, and like everyone, I saw my investment only get lower and lower so that's not cool of course but the things is: It's the only game I'm still playing and having fun with, so when I am having fun, others can have fun too, that's the real strength here.

I can live with the 2k DEC needed for Wild, hopefully this pushes more players to Modern so it gets playable again for players that aren't max level because even with my gold level deck, from Silver 1 and up I'm facing a lot of max level players still.

The doubling of the SPS staking requirement in Wild is really too much I think, it was already high to begin with:

This is the original list of staking requirements, so for me, as a max gold player I would need 58.304 SPS to get full earnings in Gold 1, but in the last days of the season it should be possible to push in to Diamond 3 when you're an experienced player, where 88.051 is needed.
This list of requirements remains the same for Modern, and is being doubled for Wild, effective immediately once the game got live after the maintenance window.

I worked HARD, playing every day, grinding my ranked battles (mostly with 2 accounts), playing tournaments to earn more SPS and doing my brawls, in that time, I've got a total of 48.000 SPS staked to my main account, which still isn't enough to get full rewards in my targeted league, so, doubling that seems ridiculous to me, yes, it's against bots but they're also hurting normal players hard - isn't the 2k DEC enough to repel the bot armies?

I really hope the team knows what they are doing and it's for the better in the long run - to me this feels wrong, please don't make this a game of whales only, we need a lot of players, normal players!

Not only bad things in the Splinterverse 😉

Troubling times for sure, assets never have been so low but something that needed to happen, with bot owners dumping their assets on to the market, both card prices and SPS aren't done going down just yet I think, and while it feels scary it's also a great opportunity long term and because I'm fighting a lot of these max level decks in Modern lately and there is a lot of difference in strength between a gold and a max level water deck, I decided to use the funds I earned with blogging to buy my first max level summoner, I doubted if it would be better to go with Quix, they were in the same price range, but I still went for Kelya!

With it, I was able to level Diemon Shark, Pelacor Bandit, Djinn Oshannus and Flying Squid to max to even the playing field against the max level decks I'm facing in Modern, and not without success because this didn't happen in a while for me in Modern:

I've got more on my wish list to level up of course, top on this list is a max level Deeplurker, and Xenith Monk for lower mana matches but I'm out of funds for now so I need to wait a bit for more blogging payouts. 🙂

So now I'm doing my best to kick those max players asses, with some success also with my gold level summoners every now and then, and what is a Splinterlands blog post without a battle in it right!? so I saved one from this morning for you all, so it's a fresh one!

The battle I want to share for today is a 44 mana Modern League Armored Up battle with not a lot of choice, only the Life and Dragon splinters are open to be chosen from, and I figured with armored up, it's the best to go magic, but at the same time I wanted to protect myself against magic, the choice for me was easy, while is most cases the Dragon deck offers a lot more offensive force, this time I chose Life with Grandmaster Rathe as my summoner, with the extra armor and all armor being Void Armor, it's nasty to get trough. I recently leveled my Aves Sturgis to get the 3rd magic attack, it's a very good upgrade to weapons train the adjacent cards with an extra magic attack too!

First look at the battlefield:

Well, it's no surprise to face another max level deck, that's a strong deck for sure, he totally ignored the extra magic threat because of the armored up ruleset though, I am at a level disadvantage but that doesn't tell everything, let's see how this plays out!

My Line-Up:

• Summoner: Grandmaster Rathe - reason: Void Armor, magic protection.
• First position: Drybone Raider - reason: High damage, enrage, retaliate.
• Second position: Djinn Renova - reason: Magic attacker and Triage to heal Iziar.
• Third position: Pelacor Conjurer - reason: Low mana but very good Weapons Training receiver.
• Fourth position: Aves Sturgis - reason: Good magic damage Weapons Trainer.
• Fifth position: Scavo Hireling - reason: To repair Void Armor.
• Sixth position: Iziar - reason: Taunt / Triage, to soak up magic damage and receive healing.

The Battle:

Round 1: Iziar got poisoned AND afflicted right off the bat, that's a bad start, but then again my team is still completely alive while I already killed Djinn Chwala, behind Junker, there isn't a lot of HP so this could get wrong, fast for my opponent without any magic protection.

Round 2: Iziar died, but a taunt is supposed to die, it's just to give my team the time it needs to kill off the other team, and they did a remarkable job actually! Only one active attacker left since the Crystalsmith can only heal itself but isn't able to fire from the first position.

Round 3: Chaos Dragon is GOOD, but not THAT good, no way he's going to survive another round.

Round 4: Djinn Renova made the killshot, another win for me!

You can watch the battle unfold for yourself here.

Pretty nice earnings, I need the SPS and glint badly!

Final words and concerns

So, to be fair, yes Splinterlands really is in troubled times, and hard painful changes are being made, which most of, I agree are necessary, I just don't agree with the SPS staking requirements.
The game and everything around it, is just to good to quit, I really enjoy playing and managing my accounts, making blog posts, doing brawls and tournaments so I'm here to stay and I got to have trust in the team.
My only concern is, once Chaos Legion phases out of Modern League, with the high SPS staking requirements for Wild, I won't be able to play at the level I do now without investing another $1-2k in my account to buy a Rebellion set (or the newer set after Rebellion) and I'm not willing to do that, I always had in mind that selling a part of my old assets would've made me able to buy a new set, and carry on with playing with new sets.
The way things are going I don't know how this is going to play out, but we'll cross that bridge once we get to it, and just ride this wave, there are so many nice cards to buy now, cards that never have been in my alley, also SPS below 1 cents is a nice buying opportunity, choices, always, so many choices in Splinterlands!

Thank you for reading!!!

If you haven't made an account already, please consider using my referral link to sign up, I'll happily send the amount I get for your signup back to you in DEC or SPS to help you start.

Have a great day!