Season challenge: Playing with a spellbook and 1K+ DEC

Recently, there has been a lot of commotion about how you can't play Splinterlands without investing a ton. While I am quite sure that this is not the case (I mostly rent since the start), I still wanted to try how much a single account, WITHOUT any owned cards, can earn (or lose) in a single season.

My initial plan for this Season Challenge is to just turn the results into a single post by end of season. However, I eventually realized that it might be fun to record and update the results in detail. Here is my first entry for this challenge!

Challenge Summary

Starting balance: 1,636.628

Initial rating: 900
Owned cards: ZERO
Cut-off: End of current season

There is no proper reason as to why I set my initial balance to 1.6K DEC. It just happened that it was the carry-over balance in this account from last season. My estimate for a decent starting balance is around 500-800 DEC.

No owned cards. Zero, Zilch, Nada

Notes:

For easier record keeping, everything will be expressed in DEC**

Card rewards will be converted to USD value (based on PeakMonsters My Explorer), then converted to DEC depending on the rate as of writing.

Strategy

To maximize rental costs, two quests will be stacked** before each round of rentals.

ECR management I will only rent when my ECR is at 100% Stop playing at 45-60% ECR
Target league: Diamond II and up
- Reason behind this is I am feeling lucky (LOL) with reward chest pulls this season. I never tried calculating which league gives the most efficient DEC reward vs. rental costs. So I'll just go with my gut feel on this one.
- More than the rewards, it feels so good to open more chests for daily quest 😅

First rental run results

Pretty sure that I overspent on this one. Normally, I can rent to Silver I with less than 400 DEC/day (a lot of people spend way less than that). It must be the post end of season hype, where each rental feels A LOT cheaper. I had fun anyway.

Current rating

Current account rating

When my rentals expired, I was able to increase the account's rating by 982. This resulted to a current rating of 1,882, few ratings short for Gold III.

Ranked battle rewards

Rental costs: 595.076 DEC/day

Ending DEC: 3,934.909

Ranked battle rewards P&L: 3,934 - 1.636 - 12(from quest) = 2,286 DEC (ranked rewards)

Quest rewards

First set of rewards

Second set of rewards

Total cards value: $1.45 = 103 DEC DEC rewards (Quest): 12 DEC Total DEC from chest: 115 DEC (chest rewards)

Total profit (including cards): 115 + 2,286 = 2,401 DEC

This simply means that if we cash out now, we are already on a profit with our initial Spellbook investment of $10 or ~720 DEC. Since we had a boost of 900 rating at the start, we can cut our DEC profit to half to act as a buffer for that boost. This gives us approximately 500 DEC profit. Not bad for a start.

Final Thoughts

Overall, I think that was a decent run despite the high rental costs. I am thankful that the DEC ranked rewards during this run went bonkers and was giving a lot more than usual. There is definitely a lot to improve when it comes to my rental efficiency.

I'll keep everyone updated with my rental round for this challenge account. I'm quite hyped for the next round, since I am expecting to open 6+ chests for each quest. See you on my next post!

EDIT: For those who are interested in following this season challenge, I made a collection in PeakD to make this series much more organized and reader friendly. Collections is my favorite @PeakD feature because it helps both authors and curators organize posts easily. Feel free to check my published collections to have a better idea how it works.

Since I am used to curating collections with a combination of my posts and other authors', it slipped my mind that I can also turn this series into a collection. I got the idea of turning my series of posts into a collection from @sjarvie5, after reading this post. Please check out the linked post, it is something to look forward to.

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CREDITS

Game-related images from Splinterlands
@flauwy for the cool-looking dividers
Cover photo made in Canva