Hi everyone,

new ranked rewards have been out for a week now and there's a lot to talk about. In this post I want to summarize what has changed, strategies to profit from these changes, as well as show you how I have personally done so far.

Let's get into it!

What has changed?

Without going into all the technical changes of how rewards are calculated now (you can read up on that here), here are my key takeaways:

Rewards have increased overall (more chests, more DEC per chest)

These are the past two days of daily rewards on my alt account, which is playing in bronze 1. From the sheer amount of chests it's more than I would've gotten for the end of season in silver! I'm now getting this amount on a daily basis. In terms of what I get, there are a lot of cards and DEC as you can see. Before there were mostly credits and potions in bronze.

Rewards are highly dependent on win rate

Since you only get rshares (and therefore rewards) for wins, winning has become more important than ever. I get around 10 - 15 daily chests on my alt account with a 60% win rate. It was closer to 70%, but the higher my rating, the tougher my opponents get. This is occurring throughout all leagues as far as I can tell - everything has become more competitive.

There are significantly less bots

We have seen a massive drop in daily active users. The above screenshot is from the last 7 days and might not look too significant. If we zoom out to the last 6 month however, the picture gets clearer:

Those are almost certainly bots, as they can't earn any rewards without owning or renting cards. While some bots are very likely to already do this, the majority of them will need to figure out the most profitable way first. With the daily focus they probably also need new coding.

The rental market for CP is way down

Bids are currently getting filled for 800 CP/DEC, which is already way up from the past couple of days, where it was around 1500 CP/DEC. Compared to before the update this is still double the amount, though as you would usually have to pay around 400 CP/DEC mid season.

The rental market for meta cards is up

A look at the most used summoners at bronze level shows that prices for these are up by a lot. Especially the most sought after cards (Llama/Kron) have taken a spike. However this changes throughout the day and I personally have found to get considerably cheap rentals for my bronze account. I usually don't pay more than 10 to 20 DEC per day for my focused splinter.

Strategies

There are a lot of different approaches to this new system.

In this video Hawks21 talks about how he's not caring about his ECR as it doesn't lower the rshares compared to the rewards you get for playing more games considerably.

In this video AfterSound talks about how he's getting 30 daily chests and how it might be profitable to play on multiple accounts.

In this video Bulldog1205 talks about how he's earning 92 chests in two days, with just the $10 spellbook.

Overall there seem to be a lot of different approaches and strategies when it comes to maximizing your rewards. As I'm not a numbers guy to figure out what really works the best, I'm just playing on a daily basis. Some things that I have found use full and that work for me are:

• Play in the league you're earning chests for (bronze chests - play in bronze)
• Try to get to the highest tier in that league asap (bronze league - bronze 1)
• Once you're in the highest tier rent meta cards (if you don't have them) for your focus splinter and spam it

This works pretty well in bronze for me, where my alt account only has the Chaos Legion starter cards. My main account which plays in silver has 4 1/2 maxed out Chaos Legion decks and a couple of Dice and Untamed cards so I don't need to rent as much, if at all. The higher your rating the more competitive it gets however and if you want to spam your daily focus splinter, it definitely pays off to rent some more summoners and cards to not be too predictable. Generally speaking I feel you get away very easily with spamming one splinter, though.

Conclusion

I think the changes are awesome as I'm earning silver league end of season rewards on a daily basis with my bronze account, that I have maybe invested $10-20 in. My silver account which I have invested a lot more into is also doing great and also earns EOS rewards on a daily basis with better probabilities per chests. At the same time I'm able to do fairly well in tournaments with my collection. On the downside I don't really get any rental income for cards I don't use as rentals for CP are down. I think this will change when bots have figured out a way of maximizing earnings within the new system and will start purchasing or renting cards however.

With the current set value of Chaos Legion being comparably cheap to the past couple of weeks I think it is still a very good time to start building a collection.

Disclaimer

None of this is financial advice. This content is for educational purposes only and might fall out of date as both Splinterlands and the Crypto Market in general are subject to constant change.

Referrals

Start playing Splinterlands today!

Thanks to Carrie Allen for the amazing Markdown Tutorial
and to Chris Roberts for this Thumbnail Tutorial
Background Thumbnail image is from Pexels
Free image editing software used Canva

Older Posts

Check out my 5 tips for new players series: Part I, Part II, Part III

Check out my Bronze league strategy guides: Part I, Part II

Hope you enjoyed the read. Have a great day and until next time!

Pinkman45