Hey everyone, another Thursday, another Splinterlands blog post!
Welcome back to my Splinterlands blog where today I will be making the first Splinterlands post for this week to participate in this weeks Social Media Challenge, I always try to participate in the allowed two weekly challenges to continue building my accounts with some extra funds to speed things up a bit.

This weeks challenge is the same as last weeks:

🔥 Share Your Most Remarkable Splinterlands Moments: Do you possess a battle of epic proportions that deserves to be seen by all? Have you crafted something extraordinary within the Splinterlands realm? Maybe you've got profound thoughts, insights, or strategies related to stats, cards, abilities, or gameplay that are waiting to be shared? We want it all, and we want it to be nothing short of AMAZING!

To find out how you can participate in the challenges yourself, check out the official Splinterlands post here.

Again, it's not hard thinking about amazing things in the world of Splinterlands, what insiders call Praetoria.
With the launch of the new set just 9 days ago the game went trough the biggest change since I started playing in 2021, and it's a great change!

Because of the changes I downgraded my deck simply because I couldn't afford to play at the level I did before, not because I wasn't willing to put more funds in to the game but a max deck went from a $800 Chaos Legion set to about 10x that for the newer sets, which is how the game is designed and it's perfectly fine.

So, I started playing with my Silver Rebellion cards, with some Conclave Arcana cards but still low level, and I felt like a completely new player the first day! 😂

I was playing in Diamond 1 in the end of every season, when I was lucky I would make it to Champion 3, so I expected I would first have to drop a couple of leagues, getting my ass kicked on the way down by higher level decks and I would probably end up somewhere in the Gold 2 region, and because of this, I would need less staked SPS on this account, which would be nice because now my Diamond deck is playing in Wild League controlled by XBOT (more on that later) so it needs A LOT of sps!

So, to my surprise, I keep hovering around the 3100 rating in the Diamond 3 and Diamond 2 leagues. On some occasions, match liquidity is lower because most players are probably playing in Wild League since it's free 2 play this season.
Thanks to @txracer I now know that after 45 seconds of searching for an opponent, the match liquidity bots arrive and they have completely maxed out decks in Diamond, kicking my ass hard so I am now paying more attention to the timer and cancel the search at 44 seconds, but sometimes I am distracted and things like this happen.

I guess this is something that has to be tweaked a little better by the team because it's no fun, but of course they need data for this first so this will take some time.

Play 2 Earn

Before the change I was earning anywhere from 6 to 10 SPS with a Diamond deck, so now I went to a Silver deck, I totally expected my earnings to be at least halved, and then yesterday this happens, a new SPS earning personal high, with my previous high at 10.2

At the current SPS price at $0.0107 which has dipped a little, that's 11 cents for one single win!

The earned SPS and Glint will help me boost my account even more, so I can earn more and this goes on and on, it's why this game is awesome. 😁

I have to admit, fighting with a lower level deck in a higher level league is not easy and I do lose slightly more than I win, at a current win rate of 46.7% but the juicy rewards when I DO win are worth it.

Bot Controlled Accounts

So, one of the decisions I had to make was what I was going to do with my other cards that no longer could be played in the Modern League. I wasn't planning on selling my Diamond set so that choice was easy, I would keep it but in the last 6 months I played two accounts manually what was a long grind and it took a lot of time, I can keep that up for a while but it's supposed to stay fun so I knew, with this big change coming, I needed to make plans I could keep up for the long term where I would only be playing ONE account myself, and let my Wild account with my older cards be controlled by a botting service.

Because XBOT can harvest my land plots as well when I forget, the choice for my 'main' account was to let it be run by XBOT, it even managed to have a very high win rate at the start of the season where I was in the top 3 of the Gold leader board in the first week, it has now reached about the max rating it can, fighting a lot of other strong accounts so the win rate is getting lower now but it is still doing very nice, earning 2.5 - 3 SPS every win (XBOT takes 25% of that) and it's still on the leader board, next season I will be on the Diamond leader board so it will probably be a one time thing it will be in the top. 😅

Without any effort from me, this way my cards can still earn, on my next end of season report I can see how much it earned when I deduct the rental of additional SPS and the Wild Pass for next season.

Guild Brawls

Guilds are really important to add the community feeling to a game, it's the same for Splinterlands, I love chatting with my guild friends in Discord about the game, share and celebrate our awesome moments and help each other where we can.

I even underestimated how important it is when one of my guildies told me this:

Recently our second guild has became much more active thanks to @cherokee4life deciding to come and help me, bringing his friends and combine our strengths, we have been working hard in the last week to get this guild as active as we could, starting some alt accounts as well to fill frays and yesterday, for the first time ever we did it, NFG Club - Legion II reached the first position. 💪

Every participating player received 34 SPS worth 36 cents at the moment to expand their bag of SPS.
We still need some players so if you're reading this and you're new, or thinking about starting to play Splinterlands, or you are in a dead guild, let me know!

Sharing a Battle

A Splinterlands blog post without a battle is a bit boring maybe, and I had plenty so I picked a cool one to share.

The battle I want to share to add some fireworks to this blog is a battle I had earlier this morning, against a higher level player than myself, it's a 50 mana What doesn't kill you / Broken Arrows / Weak Magic battle in the Modern League, with only the Fire and Water splinters available to be chosen from. Adding the enrage from the ruleset, I knew I wanted to have Commander Slade as my tank, I love this dude now my Arkemis and Diemon Shark are banned to the Wild League, when you add enrage to this dude he's very dangerous, so Water was the obvious choice for me.

First look at the battlefield:

O well, I didn't expect Risqruel because it boosts ranged units, unavailable in the Broken Arrows ruleset but it's still a higher level team, at least the reward cards are so let's see how this plays out.

My Line-Up:

• Summoner: Cryptic - reason: I'm loving this dude more and more because the tactics are so versatile.
• First position: Commander Slade - reason: High damage,fast, enfeeble, very good all round tank.
• Second position: Venka the Vile - reason: High damage with piercing, I would have rather placed Venka more to the back but because of the Weapons trained back line this wasn't an option.
• Third position: Anasth Soothsayer - reason: Heal and cleanse is a great combo to counter affliction.
• Fourth position: Daigendark Surveyor - reason: Low mana dude to get weapons training.
• Fifth position: Daarg Deadblast - reason: I kinda forget about using this card so I'm starting to use it more again now, weapons training plus added speed is nice.
• Sixth position: Ulundin Overseer - reason: Great meat shield, expensive in mana though. After this fight I even bought the Gold Foil version because of the nice combo with Daarg.

Tactics Stage

Added benefit when using the Legendary Summoners is the versatility of the tactics, with Cryptic I can either choose to use Retaliate / Enfeeble for two units OR Poison with Expose, which works great against team that has tanks with Shield or Void for example, in this case I went for the first option.
The blind ability makes the other team miss more attacks, combine this with my really fast tank with void and it makes him very hard to hit, too bad the enemy team has a lot of magic attackers though.

The Battle:

Round 1: The enemy tank was killed fast, unfortunately the Hob Goblin is immune to my Enfeebles, still my team is doing a lot of damage, the low HP on the front is concerning though...

Round 2: Thanks to the healer, my tank is still alive, protecting the other members of my team.

Round 3: One by one, the enemies fall while my team is still complete, the rear card is a tough one but it won't be able to handle all the magic from my back line.

Round 4:

Round 5: And Venka made the final kill, another win for me!

You can watch the battle unfold for yourself here.

With 500 glint and 8 SPS it's not as good as my personal high but it's still really really nice with the SPS rewards being about the same as before the rotation, I'm earning a little less glint on average now, which is fine since I'm close to maxing my reward set for Silver League.

That's it for today, it's also payday this week so time to bring in the monthly fun money to invest in my land plots!

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.

Also, when you require any help to get you started,let me know, I'm here to advice and guide new players and maybe I can help you with card delegations too!

Have a great day!