Splinterlands Update 3/15/2022 | Bye Bye Bronze, Gold Foils, SPS, DEC Rentals

Bye Bye Bronze

I did a few seasons in the Bronze league. I pretty much hate it at this point and am ready to move on. After playing in champion for so long, it was fun for a while to try to compete at the entry level, but I'm done. It has also given me a better understanding of the challenges that noobies face.

My main critiques are as follows:

1. You won't get very deep unless you play SCARRED LLAMA MAGE for 30%+ of your matches. This gets old very fast, and shows the lack of counters that exist for him at the bronze level. This also leads to a lot of draws. He wins so much it creates a psychological need to play him even when it's not appropriate. Yodin Zaku and Mylor Crowling are the same way to a lesser extent. You run into these 3 summoners about 70% of the time by my rough estimate.
2. You have to grind through an aweful lot of bots. I'll state it again, I don't like bots, and I hope enough hooks continue to get built into the game that makes their use impractical. I understand the need for a permissionless game, but their existance is overall detrimental to the ecosystem.
3. Getting busted down to 300 at the end of the season. Nothing sucks more than grinding your way up near the top of the bronze rankings, and waking up to find your rating go from 2800 to 300.
4. The rewards are low. The rewards are so low at bronze, the play to earn aspect of the game doesn't remotely do it for me. It might be good rewards for someone less fortunate, I'm not sure.

My advice is to GTFO of bronze as soon as you can. I don't get why anyone would want to stay and compete at this level, but I see many of the same accounts topping the rankings. The rating difference between the top of Bronze and the top of silver is only about 200.

Hello Silver

I'm looking forward to continuing my journey to see what card features get unlocked at silver and how that impacts my game play. This will most likely mean overcomming many of the patterns I developed while playing at Bronze.

Chaos Gold Deck

I continue to concentrate on picking up gold cards for Chaos Legion. I'm well on my way to getting all of the common cards maxed out. I will actually play with these going forward and rent out my regular foil cards.

SPS

I'm back to staking 100% of my SPS. It doesn't make much sense to me to sell any around 10 cents. If it dips below 10 cents I may actually buy some. Long term I'd like to get 200k. From what I can tell, at that level I can maintain 100 SPS per day staking reward indefinitely.

Rentals

I'm a little short on my rental target of 10k DEC/day. I believe at the peak when I had all my cards listed I was taking in 30k DEC/day. Since then I've been clawing cards back to be more competitive, and will likely continue to do so. I'd like to keep the DEC rentals stable at 10k/day, meaning I will have to continue to aquire cards and list them as I pull cards to play off the rental market.

Guildless

So I'm sitting here writing this, and I receive a message in Splinterlands that I had been demoted in the guild. Maybe there was good reason, maybe there wasn't, but the fact that nobody said a word to me was enough for me to say bye bye-- pretty cowardly if you ask me. So I'm a free agent once again. I've never seen any real ROI from the guild system anyways, besides some discounts. They have been mostly drama for me.