Today I finished off the 2nd Rental Stint of my latest Splinterlands Experiment : Renting for Modern Ranked and I wish that I could report a positive outcome, but sadly it has been a disappointing result. I could possibly put my poor result down to inexperience with the 100% Chaos Card Set that I used, but I am not a terrible player so I think many experienced players would struggle as I did.
The first thing that I noticed when renting for my 2nd stint was that the prices were higher than they were the 1st time around. In some cases they were substantially higher and while I rented all 6 splinters the first time around, this time I couldn’t stretch the budget that far. Kelya was a lot more expensive so I dropped the Water splinter...and then proceeded to get smashed up by opponents using Kelya, Deeplurker, Pelacor Bandit and Uraeus. Admittedly, that's a fairly devastating combination around the top of the Silver Tiers where I hit my ceiling.
I ended up spending (in DEC) rental fees Fire 173, Earth, 123, Life 201, Death 260, Dragon 117 and Neutral 87. Giving a total of 961 DEC per day x 2 days. My strategy was to use Death and Life splinters preferably as they had stronger summoner / monster combinations.
In the end I failed to make it into the Gold Tiers entirely and went slightly backwards over this 2nd Rental Stint. This was frustrating though I still earned an additional 124.47 SPS and 6013 Glint (x2 for EoS). That put my total rewards from the experiment at 238.201 SPS and 22,870 Glint. The SPS is worth about $3.10 USD compared to the 4798 DEC I spent on rentals which was worth about $3.62 USD. So you could say I spent the $0.52 difference on the Glint which was enough for 4 Epic Card Draws.
Not terrible. Epic Chaos Legion cards that are trade-able currently sell for about $0.09 each so perhaps the Glint I earned as reward would close that final gap and give me a near break even for the experiment. Regardless it was a fun exercise and now I know what Modern Ranked is like my curiosity is appeased.
I would have to say in conclusion that there is a clear separation between the Chaos, Riftwatcher and Rebellion card sets both in terms of rental prices and overall competitiveness. That’s not entirely surprising but I think it’s also not a particularly good thing either.
