Hey everyone, welcome back to my Splinterlands blog!
It's a Saturday today, so it's about time to make my second Splinterlands Challenges blog post for this week.

I hope your Splinterlands experience has been a lot of fun lately, it's been a lot of fun and also chaotic for me, everything changed so I needed to decide what to do with my cards that could no longer play in the new Modern League, and I have quite a lot of cards!

Also, getting to know the cards and the lack of knowing the cards is quite a challenge in the first days, and it made me feel like a completely new player - overwhelmed by all the options and not knowing what to do. 🤣

Before the big change I was playing two accounts manually, which takes up a lot of my time and it was fine for a while but I am glad I now have decided to only play one account manually and let my two wild league decks be played by the bots.

So this weeks Splinterlands Community Engagement Challenge is about exactly that, exploring the Wild League, and it has been quite some time since I stopped playing in the Wild League. I think it was when we no longer could buy the Wild Pass with Vouchers, making Modern League the better option for me.

How to Participate:
📝 Write a Hive blog post exploring the Wild Format
🏷️ Use the hashtag #splinterlands
🎯 Share your post on social media!

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

SPS Staking Requirements

The biggest hurdle for me is the staking requirement, in the picture below is the amount needed per league for Modern, for Wild this is DOUBLE!

Free Wild Pass

Usually Wild League players have to buy a new Wild Pass for 2000 DEC or roughly $2 every season that lasts for about two weeks but because of the launch of the new set, this season it's free for everyone to join which is pretty cool because it saves me 4000 DEC for my two accounts. 🙂

The idea behind the Wild Pass is that it is not possible to buy cards once and earn with them forever without making any investments in to the game again, essentially fighting the massive bot farms we had in the past, leeching the economy to a slow death and it works fine, I do think however that there should be a difference for low league wild players because for Bronze and Silver League players it's not possible to earn more than the $2 required for the Wild Pass.

Splinterlands Bots

Wild League is allowed for automated play, known as botting your account and the two best known services for this is ArchMage and XBOT.

Both services take a certain percentage of your SPS earnings,
For ArchMagae the percentage you pay depends on which type of Access Pass token you have.

Alpha Pass (ARCHMAGEA) holders pay 15%.
Beta Pass (ARCHMAGEB) holders pay 25%.
Standard Pass (ARCHMAGE) holders pay 35%.

ArchMageB token isn't much available however, let alone the ArchMageA token. The last B token that was sold was six days ago, at a 120 HIVE price, worth $32 that day.

Above are the current prices for the ArchMage tokens, when you just want to try it out, the entry token is only $2.54 so that's really cheap. With this token however, you pay a 35% SPS fee.

XBOT has about the same system, with about the same problems for the most expensive token as it's not much available.

The entry token is more expensive with $8 but it takes 5% less SPS earnings.

Which one is better?

I started with Archmage, with the idea of letting it handle my Survival account but at the start its performance was poor, so I bought an XBOT LITE token as well which I now run my main account with, added benefit for XBOT is that is can also harvest your land plots which is really nice!

The battle performance on both services is pretty good but because I now run both of them on different level decks I can't really compare them.

My main account with a Diamond level deck, added with Bronze and Silver level older cards is handled by XBOT with a 65.7% win rate so far, which is incredible and yesterday I was even at the first position on the Gold Leaderboard, as of now, this account is in the 7th position.

Next season this account will be on the Diamond Leaderboard where it probably won't be in the top 100, but we will see.

My other account is a pretty new Splinterlands account which had never played Wild League before so it could steem roll trough the lower levels wielding Gold level cards, this account is handled by ArchMage with a 70.1% win rate but you have to keep in mind, this account could easily destroy low level accounts while the XBOT account already was in Gold League.

So far, this account is at position 23 on the Bronze leaderboard, and probably will be on the Gold leaderboard next season.

So both have pretty good performance, XBOT has a better total service though, managing land harvests and being able to auto buy the Wild Pass and rent SPS.

Sharing a battle

Well, this post will be a tad boring without a proper fight in it, wouldn't it be? 😁

The battle I chose to share for this post is one that took place yesterday, it's a 53 mana Unprotected ruleset battle in the Wild League, handled by XBOT - with the Fire and Death splinters locked out.

Being a manual player for like.. ever! it's pretty strange to see automated play on your own account, but it does a perfect job so I am pretty happy with it.
This team makes perfect sense, I love it!

First look at the battlefield:

Well, the funny thing in Wild is, you never know if this is a human or a bot, bringing Adelaide with repair is kind of useless, and her resurrect without armor is also pretty useless, I think that 7 mana could have been used in a better way, I like the rest of the team though!

XBOT's Line-Up:

• Summoner: Quix the Devious - reason: Choosing Kelya would've been a waste without armor, so this is the obvious choice, also nerfing ranged damage.
• First position: Baakjira - reason: Great anti magic tank for only 6 mana.
• Second position: Kulu Mastermind - reason: Awesome synergy with Baakjira, giving it 3 melee attack, the unprotected ruleset makes the high damage opportunity very effective.
• Third position: Chaos Dragon - reason: Magic damage with blast is a great combo.
• Fourth position: Angelic Mandarin - reason: Silence and Triage makes this a great support unit, healing the taunt.
• Fifth position: Deeplurker - reason: Opportunity without armor is lethal!
• Sixth position: Wave Brood - reason: Great taunt, anti magic and anti ranged, being healed by the Mandarin.

The Battle:

Round 1: My team first have to eat trough the enemy taunt's Health Points so not much has happened just yet, both teams are using the Taunt / Triage strategy.

Round 2: Whoops, Baakjira died because of the massive melee damage the enemy front is doing, good news is, the enemy taunt is killed and it's good to have more anti magic than Baakjira alone. Kulu Mastermind has Shield, and the magic attackers will fire at my taunt with Void, which is perfect!

Round 3: Well, the enemy tank died, but Marisol is a great backup tank, the other team is very low on HP so this won't take long.

Round 4: Almost done...

Round 5: And Wavebrood made the final kill, it's a win for me!

You can watch the battle unfold for yourself here.

With 1.3 SPS it's a lot less than what I was earning with this deck in Modern League, which was between 6 and 8 SPS mostly. The XBOT fee is 25% since I'm running the boosted mode for better performance, so it's about 1 SPS for me, I'm still happy with this since it doesn't take me any time and I can fully focus on my Silver level account playing in modern, managing my deck and land plots and making posts. 😍

I will still need to test out renting additional SPS because this is just my own SPS bag of about 92k.

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!