This post will attempt to answer this basic question. To answer this seemingly easy question I am going to look at two accounts: seattlea that is playing in Wild and investor777 that is playing in Modern League with a rented Gold level deck comprised mostly of Rebellion cards that are not even close to a full Rebellion deck.
Let's take a look at what it costs to play in Wild League first. This season was a special season where Splinterlands waived the cost of Wild Pass. That means that this season the cost of playing in Wild is zero, but this will not be true starting next season so I will say that it costs 2,000 DEC to play in Wild League, at the time of me writing this post the price of SPS is basically at peg which means that two thousand DEC is approximately equal to two dollars:
If we take a look at the cost of renting in Modern right now, the best cost to performance ratio that I found at the start of this season for investor777 account was the following deck:
This deck contains a total of seventy eight cards which according to 
The rental cost for this deck is 1,936 DEC which is approximately $1.93 per day or $27 per season. It should be noted that many of the cards rented for this experiment are no longer available for rent at this time and some of the most expensive cards are more expensive at this point than they were when this deck was rented.
For example the most expensive card in this deck Eternal Tofu was rented for 230 DEC per day and it is now 400 DEC per day and the third most expensive card on this list was rented for about 100 DEC and it is now available for 270 DEC. One or two cards on this list are available a little bit cheaper, but in general most of the cards on this list are significantly more expensive to rent then they were during the start of this experiment.
It is possible that once the new season starts we will have cheaper cards available for rent, but at this time this is the situation in the rental market.
It has to be noted that the two accounts being compared have slightly different amount of SPS staked.
It should be noted that Wild League requires double the SPS staked to get the same multiplier, so in order to get the same SPS rewards and Glint multiplier Seattlea account should have 506k SPS staked.
And that is just for the same ranking, as we see the gold level deck in Modern was able to achieve 3,700 ranking or Champion 3 league while in Wild seattlea was able to get up to 4,080 ranking or Champion 2 league so the SPS staking requirements would be even higher in Wild to get the same reward multiplier.
What this means is that you have to have a lot more SPS staked in Wild league compared to Modern league as it is easier to get higher ranking in Wild with maxed out Chaos Legion cards.
The easiest thing to compare is the amount of Glint earned. In Wild League Seattlea earned just over 260k Glint:
And in Modern Investor777 got 254K Glint:
With only 6k difference in Glint rewards Wild is slightly ahead, but definitely not by much!
So how do SPS rewards compare?
Here are the daily SPS Ranked rewards for Investor777
| Day | SPS Ranked |
|---|---|
| 1 | 140.62 |
| 2 | 141.291 |
| 3 | 123.282 |
| 4 | 353.952 |
| 5 | 243.738 |
| 6 | 428.281 |
| 7 | 136.337 |
| 8 | 14.499 |
| 9 | 170.953 |
| 10 | 248.971 |
| 11 | 354.239 |
| 12 | 325.124 |
| 13 | 525.778 |
So the total rewards for Investor777 came up to: 3207 or around $32.07 at SPS that is roughly around a penny. Given the cost of rentals at $27 this means a profit of $5 per season or roughly $10 a month.
The question now becomes would it be possible to make more than $5 a season after $2 Wild Pass cost in Wild league?
So here are the daily SPS earnings in Wild League for the Seattlea account:
| Day | SPS Ranked |
|---|---|
| 1 | 36.149 |
| 2 | 50.323 |
| 3 | 79.178 |
| 4 | 13.239 |
| 5 | 44.336 |
| 6 | 79.966 |
| 7 | 106.476 |
| 8 | 36.455 |
| 9 | 164.661 |
| 10 | 76.467 |
| 11 | 62.515 |
| 12 | 27.522 |
| 13 | 119.425 |
For the total of 896.712 SPS for the season which is approximately $8.97 per season, which brings us to $1.97 more in Wild compared to Modern.
As I have pointed out earlier the rental prices now are even higher compared to when I rented these cards for this experiment, so it seems that it is going to be more profitable to stay in Wild League compared to renting in Modern.
Right now you can earn 3207 SPS in Modern and 897 SPS in Wild; that is 3.58 times more SPS can be earned in Modern. If SPS is going to go up in the future then it may make sense to rent for Modern, but based on the current SPS price there is no reason to try to rent cards for Modern format, you will actually earn more in Wild.
If you have some staked SPS please vote for my SPS Validator Node HERE
I have recently became a Hive Witness and would really appreciate your vote for me as a witness: https://vote.hive.uno/@seattlea
If you wonder what is the best way to get involved you can use my link to begin your Splinterlands and HIVE journey.
