Hello, hello!

The new season is upon us and with it the ranked reward changes. I created a brand new account (it actually was one of my old ones, but I wiped it clean) to start out from scratch and see how far I can go with these new reward changes. In the following I'll go over the setup for the account, including how much I spent and exactly what I bought, and my plans with it. If this is something you're interested in feel free to follow along.

Purchases

As we all know by now, ownership is important to earn rewards. This is why I purchased most of the Chaos Legion starter cards this week, as I feel that those are still very affordable and offer a great basis for the decks.

This is what I bought on May 22nd + around $0.60 worth of life cards I forgot in the first purchase. I didn't get the Fire starter cards, because I never play Fire and don't think it's all that strong, but I do have a set of starter cards on my main account and might send that over if I feel I need them. For the purpose of transparency I included them in the total cost calculation ($1.5).

I also gifted myself a copy of each reward card from my main account, since I have plenty of those, except for Harklaw and Djinn Biljka. If you were to buy those today, this is what you'd pay:

I used Peakmonsters for all the purchases.
You can check what the complete collection looks like further down below.

Total investment:
$7 Spellbook (it costs $10, but you get $3 worth in Credits which you can use to purchase some of the cards)
$9 Chaos Legion Common and Rares
$4.5 Chaos Legion Reward Cards
$0.50 Rental Budget
= $21

Collection

This gives us a total collection of 59 cards with 1480 Collection Power to begin with and here is what that looks like:
(Some reward cards are missing in the screenshots, but I priced them in in the calculation, so you should have them)

Fire

Water

Earth

Life

Death

Dragon

Neutral

As you can see I didn't purchase every single Chaos Legion Common and Rare, because there are some that have little to no use at level one in my opinion. I also didn't buy any summoners nor Untamed starter cards, because those are too expensive. There are lots of ways when it comes to building a collection. You could go for only two splinters and get slightly better cards for example. However with the daily focus I think it's better to have a broader collection to begin with.

Earnings

Since we are missing summoners entirely but must play them each game, there's always going to be a slight penalty on the rewards we earn. Other than that we have enough cards to build complete line ups. We'll see if these will be competitive enough or if we need to use Untamed starter cards, which would further decrease our earnings.

I have no numbers on how much this would decrease our earnings specifically, as that will vary from battle to battle (mana cap, cards played/ cards owned, win rate etc.). The Splinterlands team did estimate that the average player will earn about 10 chests a day however. If we take this number with a very conservative approach and say we get 5 chests a day, we would end up with 75 chests over the season (5*15) from daily rewards, plus however many from seasonal rewards. Let's again be conservative and say 30 out of a possible 150.

This would mean a total of 105 chests each season. The current estimated value of a new reward chest in bronze is to be $0.04 (by Neal McSpadden).

105*$0.04 = $4,2. We can therefore expect a return of $4,2 per season or $8,4 per month. Getting back our complete investment in 2,5 months.

Rentals

From my experience in bronze it has been very easy to increase the win rate by renting a couple of cards and following certain strategies. Here is what I'm considering as of now and what has worked in the past:

For Earth

For Water

For Life

For Fire

By potentially increasing our win rate and the amount of cards we play owned, I believe it will be possible to earn much higher rewards (more chests). This of course will be highly dependent on how much the cards go for on the rental market. I would only rent cards for one splinter, depending on which daily focus we get and spam that one.

Conclusion

I'm looking forward to the new season and trying out this very minimalistic approach to the game. As of now I'm fairly confident in my ability to get some rewards with this strategy and also think these cards will most likely appreciate in value over time and in rental value, making them a good investment overall. This would also mean that in a couple of weeks or months you wouldn't get the same cards for only $13.5, but but let's see how things turn out. I'm going to give you guys an update from time to time tracking the progress!

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

If you're not playing already create an account over at Splinterlands.com and hop right into battle

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

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

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

Pinkman45