Last night the most recent Splinterlands Season finished up and since this is the first full season of my Splinterlands Experiment : Renting for Champion League I think I now have enough experience and results to be able to draw an informed conclusion about whether the experiment has been a success or not. I won’t drop a spoiler here in my intro though so you’ll have to wade through my methodology and commentary first….
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Over the course of the season I rented cards 4 separate times for 2 days each time and I attempted to correlate these rental sprints with the Brawls. My budget for each rental sprint was 2000 DEC and a couple of times I did overspend mainly due to errors I made missing critical cards, but overall I spent 8068 DEC which equates to about $6.11 USD of expense at current valuations. This amount was never going to break the bank but it sets a target for the rewards I earn to try and beat. The value of cards I was able to rent on that budget varied from $6,400 to $7,600 USD and didn’t vary too much over the course of the season.
Today I used the very helpful SplinterStats Report Card tool developed by @kiokizz to see what my rewards across the season were like. The SPS earned across Daily and Season Chests plus the Ranked Play Rewards amounted to 359.21 SPS, which at current valuations is worth about $6.10 USD so right there alone I’ve hit the break even target and I could stop writing there. However, it’s worth pointing out that there is some cream on top. I also picked up 215 Soulbound cards including 6 Legendaries, plus 110 Legendary Potions, 96 Alchemy Potions, 1628 Merits and 2 CHAOS Packs. Those CHAOS Packs are currently worth about $1.18 USD each so they are some nice liquid rewards too.
Thus, even without considering the Brawls the experiment has turned out to be profitable purely from the Ranked play and this is good to know that the rentals can support themselves independently from the Brawl rewards. Basically that means that anyone could do this themselves and make a few dollars renting and playing Ranked...plus it’s kind of fun…
As for the Brawls, I only played 3 of the 4 Brawls this season because I didn’t feel ready for the first one. Once I got going though I did OK. Across the 3 Brawls I played in Fray #12 I won 9 battles and lost 10 for a win rate of 47% which I was pretty pleased with. I hope that my Guild is happy because the last 2 Brawls we’ve taken out 2nd place at Tier 3 and since we only really started playing T3 a couple of months ago I think we are doing fairly well and improving quickly. So I put the Brawl competitiveness down as another successful element to this experiment and since that was the catalyst for me trying this whole thing in the first place I am quite happy about it.
But wait! There’s more! There were some cool Rewards from the Brawls too. I picked up a further 108.57 SPS from the 3 Brawls I played plus 11,150 Merits so there is a little bit more cream on top there. Again, it’s not a life changing amount by any means but it is a bit more confirmation that my rental strategy can comfortably yield a Nett Positive outcome. If there is a downside then to all this, it's the fact it takes a bit of work to manage the repeat rentals, tweak the bot config and play an extra Brawl account. I’ve been playing 3 accounts per Brawl of late and that’s probably not sustainable longer term, but for now I’m going to persist and see if I can keep a good thing going.