Hello.
Today I would like to write few words about Tournaments in Splinterlands.
But, on the very beginning, I would like to mention my general idea, which encourages me or justifies even to write down my own thoughts in public space. Because as we all know, all important stuff has been spoken allready, so anything we would try to express has no real meaning, and could turn to hubris.
Well, you could ask me "how smth like ten ton hammer dropped on your existence encourages you to anything?" :)
I could answer that although we live in the shadow of gigants, surprisingly we, while maintaining the scale, fight same struggle as they did. And, what is important, we meet on our path people, who very often just by accident, inspire us to change and/or improve our lives or maybe not lives even, but ways we do things.
And you could ask - Laaca is there any more irish whiskey in the jar?

Cracking The Map

Well, my habit in Splinterlands is: I play my own cards, with very few exception. I dont waste DEC from my rentals to rent cards I would like to have and I use that DEC to buy GF cards. For the future!
But... yesterday we had our usual few hours long discord.voice conversation because of SL RoadMap'23. So we talked about Splinterlands, Life, the Universe and Everything.

My SL mate @atnazo started to talk BS, that because I play so many tournaments and have good enough set own cards I should rent some key cards I dont own to have chances for higher places.
It really sounded like heavy bs on the beginng, I was muttering few "kurwa" because he was touching my Very Reasonable Way to Do Things My Way.
To make long story short - although we are near EOS and rent prices spiked as usually, I set budget for 600 dec and rented those key cards, ok - not every, to have peace from drilling a hole in my belly.

Sparks of Light in the Monk's Cell

My rent was not optimized obviously. I did average, but better than usually in that tournament. My score was 6-5, and this was not enough to pass to the second round, but as 64th did same score, there will be rewards split, so I will get more than 19 sps.
Overall cost for rentals was smth like 14 sps. So with a little cheaper rents there is no chance, in the future tournaments, I will have waste. Minimum is break even.

Other benefits are:

• rented cards can be used in other tournaments or just ranked plays
• learning new ways of play, with cards I dont have
• better chances against well known players. stop being cannon fodder and free points

Proofs

I will post some battles below, with a little commentary. I will mention rented cards I used in those battles, which probably gave me win.

1 Rented: POSSIBILUS THE WISE, SERPENT OF ELD
My plan was: as victory condition I set focused damage, so melee in that case. I didn't want to depend on luck with bow/magic monsters because of Scatter Shot rule. I wanted high hp and Triage to heal backline monsters if my opponent go ranged monsters. I wanted also high evoidness for frontline monsters.

Battle Link: Battle

2 Rented: POSSIBILUS THE WISE, TORHILO THE FROZEN, AXEMASTER, CORNEALUS [4 of 7 cards!]
In this battle I wanted slow melee and bow monsters as Dragon/Quix was closed, and there was small chance my opponent will play ILTHAIN with bows reflect but +1 speed.
My plan was focus my opponent damage on taunt and let my high damage monsters do their work in the front. It worked.

Battle Link: Battle

3 Rented: TRUTHSPEAKER
In this battle my plan was to stand. My defense was based on Truthspeaker, as monsters I used have no armor, partly. Truthspeaker called Boatman, so armor was covered, and SPIRIT HOARDER with Triage was an obvious pick to cover hp loss.

Battle Link: Battle

4 Rented: GRENADIER
No melee in this battle. I was predicting PELACOR CONJURER or FAILED SUMMONER rather.
Anyway - no attack frontliners so there was ask for Granadier.
Thx to all war gods my opponent did not played CORAL WRAITH.

Battle Link: Battle

Last Words

It was an interesting experiment and crack in the wall of my habits. I will explore it futher for sure.
I would like to encourage other players to play tournaments if they missed that opportunity so far.
Ok I know, I know - you need SPS in stake. But look at Roadmap'23. You will need SPS anyway. More even - you will urge to have more SPS in the future. Now SPS is crazy cheap.
I think 12k staked SPS is obvious minimum for players who plan to have Silver+ deck.

Here is my last rentals if anyone is interested:

Image free licence: Licence
Edited with Canva
Fonts thx to CoolText
Special thx to @atnazo for kickig my butt
You dont play Splinterlands?! Here is my Refferal Link