$12 Challenge - Day 1 - Strategy overview and goals for this season.

Hello everyone!

Many of you on here probably don't know who I am, but I go by Niclamus on Splinterlands as well as on twitch. Because I'm sure that the word "giveaway" in the title is something that is going to be the reason a good portion of you are reading this, I thought I would say something about it early. Yes, this $12 challenge does include giveaways to random people. You'll have to read the rest of the post to find the opportunities to have a chance at them. There will be a couple of places to have a chance at them throughout the week.

I'm the programmer behind the chat bot you may see in some of your favorite Splinterlands streamer's channels over on twitch, SplinterlandsBot. I was recent inspired by Gank over at @SplinterlandsHQ (see the end of this post for links) to start up a challenge to start a new account spending just $12 and see how far I can go with it. $10 will be used to purchase the spellbook, and $2 worth of DEC will be used on rentals as needed. At the time of the account's creation, $2 equaled 367 DEC. Most, but not all, of the games played during this challenge will be streamed live over on my Twitch channel, feel free to come and join us. I tend to do a handful of giveaways through the stream so if you want a chance to pick up some DEC or maybe a card here or there swing on by.

Before going over the strategy of the first day, I think it is important to know what the overall goal for the season is before going in and having a plan to get there. Obviously, the goal for all of us is to progress as much as we can but I think it is best to take a responsible view and position to try and get there. This really is a long term game, not something that you need to push right away to try and hit the highest ranks possible. My goal for the first season on the $12 challenge is to build up our DEC and try to hopefully pick up some cards through both daily quests and the season end rewards to start building up our owned power for future rank gains.

To accomplish this, the goal for this season is not to leave bronze until the last day. At the end of the season, if possible, we will try and get enough power for a reasonable DEC price to hit Silver 3. The reason being we don't want to push too high up in ranks and end up outside of bronze at the start of next season – that would really hurt DEC totals as our cost to rent to be competitive would go up. Being in bronze with a high rating really seems to be the sweet spot to building up an account. The plan for actually playing and building up DEC on the account is pretty simple as well. Figure out a team I can rent out at a fairly low budget, and grind until I hit around 40% DEC capture rate. I'll then wait 3 days and do it again so that I am back at 100% capture rate when I start each session, to get the most out of the DEC I spend on rentals.

Given the parameters I have set out of stopping at 40% capture rate, I know it is very unlikely that I will be able to break even on the first play session as starting with a rating of 0 the amount of DEC I receive per win is going to be very low. As such, my strategy for the first day of this challenge was pretty simple:

1. Complete the starting daily quest first.
2. Rent a decent team for as cheap as possible and get as high of a ranking as I can before hitting 40% capture rate.

The reason I wanted to complete the daily quest first was because in novice all monsters are capped at level 1. The benefit of this is that the starter cards from the Spellbook are a bit stronger when all cards are capped at 1, versus in bronze where they go 3/2/2/1. For this season, my starter quest was Fire. It took more matches than I expected, but I was able to finish the quest prior to hitting Bronze 1 and was able to open 1 chest. Luck was on my side, and I managed to get a reward card from that chest.

Maybe not the best card but getting a card out of that first chest is a great way to start our collection on this new account. I have decided that whenever I get a card from my daily chest, I'll give away a card to someone randomly that has commented on the recap post for that session. So, I will be giving a Venari Heatsmith to one lucky person who comments with their Splinterlands username below. The winner will be drawn live on my twitch stream this coming weekend, Sunday September 26th in New Zealand.

After finishing the daily quest, it was time to hit up the rental market to set up our team. For day 1 of this challenge I decided to go with the Life splinter. Generally speaking, the life splinter tends to have some of the cheapest rentals and can actually be really powerful in bronze. For summoners I picked up a level 2 Daria Dragonscale and Tyrus Paladium.

For monsters, I built a lineup pretty well focused around protecting and buffing a level 2 Silvershield Assassin. In addition to renting the Silvershield Assassin, I also rented level 3 Divine Healer and Armorsmith, level 2 Luminous Eagle, and a level 1 Furious Chicken and Creeping Ooze.

Another two cards that were core to my lineup were the Silvershield Knight and Shieldbearer which I had access to for free thanks to the Spellbook.

The lineup building for this was pretty straight forward. Always use Daria if possible when choosing a summoner for the +1 melee, only use Tyrus if dragons are banned. Silvershield Assassin is played on every single match. Even low mana matches, I'm throwing her out there and protecting her as best I can with things around her. If I'm able to have enough mana to play Shieldbearer, Armorsmith, Silvershield Assassin, and Creeping Ooze I go that route, otherwise I'll use the Silvershield Knight for the extra +1 melee damage and stack what I can to try and keep the Assassin alive from there. Trial and error here, mixing and matching these cards and I was able to win quite a lot of my matches.

So what were the results for day 1? I spent a total of 94.657 DEC on rentals. I started with 367 DEC, and ended with 327.561 DEC, for a net loss of 39.439 DEC. As noted above, I didn’t expect to break even this session so I'm really happy with that result. I also didn’t get to play down to the 40% capture rate as I had intended as unfortunately life obligations kept me from grinding as much as I wanted to. On the bright side, my ending rating for the first day was 932 so I think I'm in a pretty good spot now to have a profitable run in the next session and really start gaining some DEC. My next daily quest is the Death splinter, so I'll probably be trying to figure out a good death budget build for the next session!

Want to watch this challenge play out live? Come follow me on Twitch!
This challenge was inspired by Gank over at @SplinterlandsHQ on Twitch.

New to Splinterlands? Feel free to sign up using this link then I'll get paid whenever you buy stuff, because why not? Or don't, I'm not your mother.

Until next time! Good luck out there everyone!

Update: Check out Day 2's progress here!