Splinterlands Experiment : Renting for Champion League

I’ve always been a bit wary of sinking too much money into games. Over previous years I’ve seen a number of Blockchain based games Boom and Bust. While I’ve had my doubts at times about Splinterlands I’ve been happy to see that the game has now survived 2 pretty savage Bear Markets and is likely to be on the verge of another big expansion. I’ve wondered for some time what it’s like at the top of the competitive scene with fully upgraded cards but I’ve never played beyond Gold League. The Rental Market gives me an opportunity to try out the next level and satisfy that curiosity.

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It seems like an opportune time to give a Rented Champions League Deck a try. My guild Drop Bears has recently advanced to Tier 3 Brawls but is struggling to fill every fray and one of the frays being left open is #12 – A Champion Level Fray. We’re still doing fairly well overall but perhaps could do a bit better if we were to fill that particular fray so this shortfall has been the catalyst for me to take the plunge and I’ve decided that I’m going to take on the challenge of filling that fray with some rented cards.

I think it’s a good time to be renting because the Bots have just been banned in Modern Ranked - a development which might lead to a few more cards being put on the Rental Market. PLUS it’s just BEFORE the planned release of New Land Functionality which is very likely to create some new demand for maxed out cards to be Staked later this month. So there is possibly a bit of a sweet spot for the next few weeks between these developments when renting might be cheap and easy, so it makes a lot of sense to try this now if I'm going to do it.

The first thing I’ve done was have a look at some of our recent Brawls to see which players have been competing in Fray #12 and what sort of cards they are using to get what kind of results. Of course there are some really fat decks competing there worth $30,000+ each but there are some cheaper ones which are competing with decks worth maybe only $2,500 to $3,500. They aren’t winning all their games but they’re winning a few and I’ve only got to win more than 1 game in a Brawl for it to be a net positive for my guild – so that’s my goal.

I’m setting myself a budget of cards worth about $3,000 with an Average Rental APR of about 10% which comes down to about $0.82 or 972 DEC Daily at current prices. I’m going to round that up to 1000 DEC Daily for Rentals so what I need is cheap, effective cards with some fairly specialized play strategies that I can use to hopefully jag a couple of wins in a Brawl if battle conditions fall my way. The 1000 DEC budget I’m splitting up as 200 DEC x 4 Regular Splinters, plus 100 DEC for Dragon and 100 DEC for Neutral. This leaves me 1 Splinter short which will no doubt catch me out now and then but for the most part I think I can get away with dropping just 1 Splinter.

I’ll give this experiment a couple of weeks to see if I can learn the game at Champion level and get this rented deck to work positively for my Guild. It’s an experiment so if it doesn’t work then that’s fine it’ll only cost me a few dollars. If it does work then maybe I’ll persist with it or maybe I’ll decide to throw some serious money at upgrading my older cards. We will see. Wish me luck and I’ll see you on the battlefield!