It's been over a year since I last wrote about Splinterlands. And considering that's where half of the value of my crypto portfolio sits, I should be keeping a close watch on new features and events, as well as the current status of my inventory.
Credit: @clove71
Background
I've been playing Splinterlands since June 2018 and although I had little fiat laying around to buy packs and cards during this time (the next 2 years!), I managed to buy the odd card and pack, as well as picking them up through daily quests and rewards.
In November 2019 I went to the SteemyFest in Krakow and met the Splinterlands co-founders. At the time, STEEM, the game cards, and Crypto in general, were not performing well. I was also pretty broke and looking at these assets (worth around $2000) and thinking that I might need to sell them at some point soon to fund living costs.
That weekend though, Matt and Jesse found time to speak to me and were both really confident that Splinterlands was still new, that the NFT craze was still to begin. And so instead of selling my Hive and Splinterlands assets, I returned to the UK the following summer to find work. That happened quickly, twice, (and just before Covid, phew!) which meant my crypto assets were safe.
Skip forward another year or so and those assets started to increase in value quite quickly. I was also buying packs (Untamed mainly) which has previously been slow to shift, which future boosted my total SL asset value. And then the SPS token drop arrived.
Selling cards I've never been too keen on (although I have let a couple slip away far too cheaply!), but selling some of this new token which was at times valued close to a dollar was something I would do, and did, for a reasonable part of the token drop.
In summary, the words of the co-founders and a big slice of luck has meant that I have both cash savings, and a portfolio of Splinterlands assets which are very much worth me paying attention to. Thanks guys!
Rebellion Conflicts
Is the name given to the process of airdropping the next 9 Rebellion Cards. Each conflict will be around 30 days long, and during this time players will need to stake Rebellion cards or packs using a Mage Wagon to collect points, which in turn will increase the chance of receiving an airdropped card.
At this point, I'm not too interested in my percentage chance of receiving an airdropped card, I just know that I want to be in with a chance of doing so!
Are you keen? I think so!
The points accrued (for an increased drop chance) are to be based on the Collection Power of the Staked Rebellion cards, as well as 100 CP for each Pack staked (up to 100 per wagon).
Stake everything?
My first thought, considering staked Rebellion cards can still be used in battles (delegated or on the market is no good), was to stake all my Rebellion cards. I decided though to put a min CP cap of 100 for a card (combined or otherwise), so to reduce the number of Wagons required.
As far as Rebellion packs go, it is unlikely I'll be staking any. The reasoning here is that 100 packs is a 10000 CP boost, and 1 Rebellion Gold Foil Legendary is 12500 CP. I bought 200 packs (even though I have a max Rebellion set) yesterday and went on to open them all. Sadly, I didn't get a GFL, but the GF epics (2500 CP each) and the rest of the cards should (no I didn't check!) have provided more than 10000 CP - the value of 100 packs staked in a conflict.
Buying Wagons
Meant getting hold of Credits, DEC, or Vouchers. I'll not go into detail here but as with @libertycrypto27's findings, Wagons should be bought using Vouchers as this is very much the cheapest way to get hold of them.
How many Wagons? As stated I'm looking to stake every card with 100 CP or more. I found the number of Rebellion cards that fit this criteria using the sort and filter options in Peakmonsters - 295 cards in total. Therefore, the number of Wagons I need will be 295/5 = 59 Wagons.
This leaves 409 Rebellion cards of < 100 CP, which if I were to stake would need a further 82 Wagons. It's a slight gamble, but leaving approximately 5000 further CP un-staked, so's not to buy a further 82x50 vouchers, is the way I'm playing this one.
All set
So, I have my vouchers, any Rebellion cards previously rented are in the process of being returned, and I wait patiently for the maintenance update in two days time (January 23rd). At which point, it will be time to buy the Wagons and start staking. (I hope the interface for this means it wont take hours!)
Personally I am for experimenting with various airdrop criteria, and think this approach could work well. That's it for Rebellion Conflict talk, what else has been happening in my Splinterlands journey?
Rent
All cards not needed to play are sent to another account where their rent status/cost/etc is managed by @splinterrents, which uses discord as the management interface.
Whilst the current DEC income for Rentals is nothing like what it was a year or two ago, it does seem like the market has stabilised and could even be starting to recover. I've had income as low as 2/3k DEC/day in the past year, and so I'm happy to see 5/6k DEC earned at present during the peak days of the two week Season.
Land
I'm a small land owner of just 9 plots, and this number feels like the right amount for the number of cards I have 'spare'. When I say spare, most of these cards were being rented, and only a couple of these cards should really be part of my playing deck. Ideally I'd liked to have used no 'play worthy' cards, but I suspect I'm not the only one in this boat.
As far as production goes, I've tried to focus most on Research (2 plots) but also built a mine for SPS which gives a more tangible income right now. Also, my grain production is on the slight surplus side - I'm expecting the almost worthless grain to be required in the millions at some point!
One more note on land - the seemingly random harvesting rewards known as Totem Fragments.
Two so far for me, and based on the Land Manager tool at https://www.baronstoolbox.com/, I've been pretty lucky to have been rewarded these.
Mousing over the image next to the terribly drawn green arrow will provide the information 'Estimated Token Fragment % Chance if you collect right now'. For me, these percentages range from 0.001 to 0.003% - which sounds a lot like 'no fucking chance mate!'. I'm going to Harvest now, it's been 5 days since the last...
Well that worked out OK didn't it! So now I have 3 Fragments in total, and I think keep whatever I unearth for the time being.
Play
I used to be competitive, and then 200+ further cards and many thousands of new players arrived.
These days I struggle in Modern (with most cards allowed to used being maxed 😳), and I use XBOT to play for me in Wild. I suspect that many players with a deck that can comfortably play in Wild are using one of the gameplay bots these days. I spent years battling without help (and fewer cards), and am grateful (although still with a slightly uneasy feeling of using automation) not to have to force myself to play on days I don't have time or don't wish to.
XBOT usually lands my account in Champion I or II come the end of the season.
Guild battles I do take part in ( Go Team Possible!) and generally hold my own. It will be a while yet though before I have a max Quora...
Buying cards
In addition to maxing Riftwatchers and Rebellion sets, I'm still picking up the odd card to level up some 'ancient' cards I own. My latest level up, after 4/5 years at level 8, now a max.
A quick look at Peakmonsters tells me this card was used as the tank(!) in a victorious battle 23 hours ago. It will need to win a few more to recover the cost of buying the cards I needed to max it - I can wait.
I think that is just about it for my personal Splinterlands update. Best of luck to you, my guild, and the Splinterlands team for 2024 and beyond.
Cheers
Ash
Nice Read, I've been getting a bit burned out by Splinterlands (as a manual player) and the opportunity cost is simply too high to get in deeper competing for the airdrops.
If anything I would say they need a game mode where anyone can come in and have fun with the game at times they want without the obligation to play 60+ minutes daily or run a bot at an affordable price without the hassle of having to rent manually.
I had not heard of Splinterrents and might check that out to put some idle cards on the rental market again.
I do look forward to what 2024 brings for the game,
Cheers
Cheers, long time no see - my bad :)
It was always this way though? One reason I like this drop is that there is a chance (albeit very small) that someone picking up 100 packs or so could get dropped a card?
Like all the cards, free to play, no rewards? That sounds decent, although there are costs so maybe number of players would need to be capped, and stuff put in place to stop bots (yeah, people would I reckon!).
I think as well as Splinterrents there is an option to enable renting in peakmonsters (put the ones you want to be rented out on the market first worked OK for me).
Good luck for 2024 (and 5 :) )
What I would do is have a fair entry cost (or have it linked to a battle pass), add some rewards like Rebellion Packs / Cosmetics / SPS. Those who reach a certain win rate make a small profit on their entry cost, and those who do poorly make a small loss just to make it more interesting. It should be more about the game than the rewards though. The cards used to play this mode can be provided by players who just stake their cards in a pool with part of the entry cost that would be paid out as rental income. This based on how many of a certain card are in the pool and maybe even how often they are used which would create good value to the rarer more powerful cards. This would make renting cards also an easy 1-click experience.
Off course bots / battle helpers would need to be banned (if that actually is possible), in the end it would be more a gamified way to buy packs allowing anyone to come in have a fun game exprience at any time of the day that they want without further obligations. When I used to play Hearthstone, Arena kind of worked like this and I actually was willing to pay for it.
I doubt we will ever see something like this though even though there have been talks about draft mode.
Bloody hell you've been lucky with yout totem fragments!
Looks like you found the gold Kolbold Miner you were looking for too. Well done!
From reading your post and others it seems I would be better off opening my packs rather than staking them as is. But I'm still miserably unlucky with pack openings and I can't face anymore of that right now.
I've been opening my chaos packs with a view to leveling up cards to put on land and, true to form my luck has been abysmal. More than 800 opened without a single GFL. And that's with full potions. It's a long way off my record though which is 2000 beta packs without a GFL.
Depressing as hell.
I wasn't going to bother with wagons but since I have enough packs to guarantee a card I might as well.
Oh, and on a completely different note . . . when you take SPS out of the game do you take it to GBP or Euros? I want to take some profits and am still investigating the best route to take.
Pulling a fragment mid-post 🤣
For the airdrop I think opening is better CP-wise, but you may have other plans for the unopened packs.
Awful sounding luck! At least you could buy those on the cheap from those desperate for cash like me!
If you have the vouchers, why not!
It's been a while... I think I sent the SPS to Metamask and traded for USDT with pancakeswap, then sent this to Binance to swap for Euros. Hopefully this route is still available next year when things go wild again :)
Why next year? How will they go wild?
I'm hopeful that the 4 year cycle continues where bitcoin halves (this year) and takes off the following year. Fingers crossed!
So Hive might moon next year? I see there are only a couple of months for BTC halvening. From that point, Hive might go up but boost more next year, right?
That's what I think yes, only because the same happened in 2017 and 2021. Let's see :)
Yes, 2021 in February, I think. So this time, in 2025, not in 2-3 months from now, after Halvening?
I need 3 more BCX to get dispel on Quora. That would be nice.
I am glad that you are well out on top with SL - I am in a hole. One day perhaps I will break even? :D
6 here for this must have card!
I've been fortunate but did what was needed and held for a few years before the action begin in earnest.
One day, your daughter will break even :)
Thanks for the mention and for the link to my post with the calculation of the cost of mage wagons
I will do like you and use in mage wagons only Rebellion cards that have a CP > 100 because under this value buying a mage wagon to put cards with a low cp is a choice in my opinion absolutely wrong from the financial point of view considering that a wagon costs more than 2$
I wish you the best for airdrop and in general for your results on Splinterlands ;)
@tipu curate
Upvoted 👌 (Mana: 38/48) Liquid rewards.
No worries, you did a great job explaining things :)
CP>100 seems to make sense, I hope the airdrop is favorable for you too :)
How many cards before you max out the Quora? Since like an incredible achievement since Quoras are hard to come by. Also it's quite saddened you didn't get any rebellion legendary. They seem to be rare
Hmm, 46 cards, I have 14. A long way to go yet!
It's great to see you still going strong with Splinterlands and that is your portfolio doing well. Meeting the co-founders and their confidence in the game's potential was definitely a stroke of luck, but it's paid off for you.
I'm excited to see how you do in the upcoming Rebellion Conflicts airdrop. Your rentals and land production seem to be going well too, but those totem fragments with their 0.001% chance of dropping are a real tease. Congrats on maxing out that ancient card, hopefully, it pays off in battles.
Glad to see you doing great in splinterlands and trying to make the most of the rebellion airdrop. This change seems good and hope it works well for airdrop distribution. You hold 9 plots which is nice and upgrading cards to the max level is not easy but you have done it. Great going buddy and I hope the next bull cycle will make your in-game assets value grow significantly.
That was a great read. I always feel happy for the players that entered the game early, and were able to take some profits during the peak. I've heard of some instances where they didn't sell and are regretting not selling even a few assets.
It looks like you have a solid plan and execution for Land and Conflicts, and I hope you get lucky with the airdrops.
Very lucky on fragments, I have 10x yours and have just 4 so far, an no Epics!
Wow
So you have been playing Splinterlands for so long. I was actually thinking that the game was still a bit new. I’ve seen so many cards and learnt a lot from people’s posts
I’d begin to play it someday