I see a lot of post in Splinterlands Hive community on opening chests, sharing battles, season reviews, brawls and upgrading reward cards. But I never see posts on something like what do you really need in terms of modern league cards that help you get into the top one hundred spots on the Modern Champion leaderboard. As a top fifty leaderboard player today I am going to share with you my actual results and analysis that was made possible by using data collected via a great tool from 
Sure one can take a look at the market and see what cards are the most expensive and just buy them. Here is what this would look like:
There are some really good cards here, and sure it is nice to have them all, but do you really need them all? Well, I don't have Dragonlord Mancer or Cloveria Morth'lana or Delya and I have just a level one Dar 'Gottem' Gearnut. I also don't have Electrofox, Tasoshi Drakamot, Meriput Mossmender, Lorn, Elowen Sylphie, Ghostly Blackshimth, Thessok Hunter or a maxed out Ulundin Overseer.
So out of the top ten most expensive cards for Modern I have only three: Eternal Tofu, Calamity and Shock Trooper! I have level one Dar 'Gottem' Gearnut and level six Conjurer's Hubris. And from the top twenty four cards pictured above I have only ten, so you really don't need to have the most expensive card in the game to place in the top fifty Splinterlands players in Modern Leaderboard.
I took the following screenshot from the SPL Stats tool by beaker007 that tracks my card usage and win rates. As you can see my top five cards are Halfling Refugee, Venka the Vile, Commander Slade, Calamity and Lorkus. These most crucial cards appear to be neutral cards as they can be used in the most scenarios, Calamity and Lorkus are used less, but they have the highest win rates. Perhaps I need to find ways to use these even more.
Now let's take a look at the Archon data, as there are less of them and it is much easier to analyze:
My most played archons or summoners are Lorkus and Cryptic at thirteen battles each. Surprisingly for me Lorkus has a much higher win rate of 61.5% vs 30.8% for Cryptic, perhaps people see my Cryptic strategy used often and can predict and counter it.
Then we have Nidhoggr and Bella Ratjowlski at nine battles each and Nidhoggr has a the highest win rate of the frequently used summoners at 77.8% while Bella Ratajowlski still has a respectable 55.6% which is better than my overall win rate of about 54% at best.
Then we have Razi Claktrap with five battles and 60% win rate followed by Sheng Xiao with three battles and 66.7% And then comes Eternal Tofu with two battles and 0% win rate followed by Elias Max Pruitt and Brewmaster Abraxas with one battle and one win each and then Risqruel Drath with one battle and one loss.
As I start collecting more data, I will share better numbers for these cards, but I believe that even these results are quite revealing.
If we look a my top ten most used cards in Modern right now, we see some clear themes. The speed meta of Cryptic is clearly being hard countered.
You can clearly see that in the thirty some percent numbers for the Cryptic and the related lineup. The combo of Lorkus and Kelan Gaines is proving to be a lot more effective.
The next ten most used cards reveal the Nidhoggr related cards and Bella Ratajowlski teams as more successful
Once again dragon and Razi Clanktrap cards have a much better win rate than Endura Brune which is from the Cryptic lineup. I have just recently re-installed the Docker version of the SPL Stats tool recently so there will be a follow up to this post once I get a bit more data as the season goes on.
You don't need the most expensive cards to be in the top fifty on the Modern Champion Leaderboard and the key summoners that you must have are: Lorkus, Nidhoggr, Razi Clanktrap, Bella Ratajowlski and Cryptic.
Halfling Refugee, Calamity, Kelan Gaines, Grove Doomblade, Arachne Weaver, Moribund Arrowbait, Baron Fyatt and Ironcoil Bullwark are the most essential cards along with Rush Townsend, Bellowmancer, Thunderouse Heral Zyrx the Emberglace, Rage and Cavewise Wayfinder and mystic Mudbinder.
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