SGS Splinterlands : Going Forward with ARCHMAGE

Season 29 for Splinterlands finished up last night and it was an experimental season for the SGS cards which had been rented out for the last year or so. I first floated the idea of Botting the SPS Splinterlands Cards about 20 days ago and then followed up 11 days ago with the news about SGS Splinterlands Now Trialling Xbot. That Xbot Trial is over now and I used the final few days of the season to also trial a rival product called ARCHMAGE. I incorporated this experiment into my own evaluation of the 2 bot products which I yesterday wrote up as Splinterlands Bot Wars : Archmage vs Xbot

You could say I’ve put a bit of work into this space and written about it probably more than I needed to, but when it comes to managing assets on behalf of others I like to be thorough. After going through this experiment and analyzing the bots on offer I am fairly confident that ARCHMAGE is the better option for SGS due to it being a solid performer and also cheaper to get started with. The question at this point is – Did the bot experiment outperform the Rental Market? So today I ran the Season Report Card to see what the Rewards for Season 29 were.

The first thing worth mentioning is that the Archmage bot got the account up to a Rating High of 2431 which put it comfortably in the Gold II zone with a Win/Loss Ratio of 1.45. This was a nice surprise as I thought it would probably cap out at Silver I so it’s good to know that the deck is still pretty competitive even against Gold League cards. For Rewards, the @ssg-community account picked up 98 Soul Bound cards including 1 Gold Foil, plus 174 Potions and 409 Merits. It is tricky to put a price on that stuff because you can’t (yet) sell them but these rewards are worth something. As for the more tangible rewards, there was a CHAOS Pack ($1.43) plus 208.375 SPS ($4.58). Those tangible rewards alone outstrip the 5245.451 DEC ($4.31) that was earned on the Rental Market the previous season.

As such, I think it’s a bit of a no-brainer to go with forward with Botting on the @ssg-community account. Those Soul Bound cards will realise their value only after they come out of print and are allowed to be traded, but SGS is here for the long term and my gut feel is that there is at least a couple of extra dollars of value per season in those cards. Therefore I’ve gone ahead and purchased an ARCHMAGE Token to pay back the one I borrowed for the trial and we'll keep the one we're using now. I’m comfortable letting the account run with Archmage for a few months and then we can take another look. Worst case scenario we can sell back the ARCHMAGE Token, but my expectation is that it’ll pay for itself in a few seasons.