There are plenty of factors that affect your DEC gains from winning games - win streaks, gold or promo cards, guild bonuses, and your rating, just to name a few. Another huge factor, and one of the easiest and most reliable ways to maximize your DEC income, is to properly manage your capture rate.
What is capture rate? If you mouse over your DEC balance in the game client then you'll see your capture rate - it's a percentage ranging from 0-100%. Whenever you win a game then your DEC gains are scaled by that amount. Every time you play a game your capture rate decreases by 1%, and it recovers by 25% every day.
Managing your capture rate can make a huge difference in your DEC gains. In order to illustrate the difference let's look at two scenarios in which you play 25 games a day in order to offset the capture rate gains, with the same winrate, rating, etc.:
Scenario 1 - You start off at 0% capture rate, your capture rate fluctuates from 0-25% each day.
Scenario 2 - You start off at 75% capture rate, your capture rate fluctuates from 75-100% each day.
In scenario 1, your average capture rate is roughly 12.5%, depending on the exact timing of your games. In scenario 2, your average rate is 87.5%, or 7 times higher! In other words, you could take 3 days off to let your capture rate recover, play 25 games on one day, and still make as much DEC by that fourth day than you would make by day 7 of scenario 1. Obviously this is an extreme example, but it shows just how much capture rate can impact your gains.
In an ideal world, you would keep capture rate at 100% - play a game whenever it hits 100, then wait until it maxes out again before playing another game. This is entirely impractical since nearly everyone has better things to do besides log into Splinterlands every hour 24/7. However, there are a few takeaways from this - you want to keep your capture rate as high as possible, and the best situation is that your capture rate is near to 100 each time you play. Importantly, you don't want that rate to stay at 100 for long, as whenever you're maxed out then valuable capture rate recovery is going to waste.
So how can you apply this to your real-life play? Well, keeping your capture rate in the 75-100% range is a good rule of thumb, do that and you'll get most of your potential gains. Remember that managing capture rate is simple - once you are set up then you can make more DEC gains without having to play more, spend more resources on buying/renting cards, or researching strategies to climb the rating ladder.
Disclaimer: Information in this article is accurate to my best knowledge, but I've only been here a week. (And I'm finding that there are plenty of things to learn)
Thank you to everyone for reading! I hope this helped you out a bit, or at least provided a little entertainment. If you are interested in reading any more of my writing then feel free to click on the links in the previous paragraph.