Any plan needs to be flexible enough to allow changes when the situation is different from expected.
At the beginning of the season, I expected to be playing every day of the season and optimize my ECR every day. For the most part, I did that.
But now, I saw an opportunity to play the end differently.
I already depleted my ECR to about 70% and CL2 was within reach.
So, I thought... OK, I'll push it to CL2 and take the last day of the season off.
Which went... almost as planned. I eventually reached CL2, but not until my ECR dropped within the 40-50% range.
That was a very high price to pay to reach CL2. With the new ranked rewards system, the difference between CL2 and CL3 is not as important as it was in the previous system, where it made the difference between 80 or 120 reward chests and starting from D2 instead of D3.
Now, the main benefit is that I will start next season from D2, with a very low chance of dropping to G1.
That and my ego being pumped, because I haven't reached CL2 for a long time.
Otherwise, next season I would have played for champ chests from CL3 too, and most likely my rewards would have been better for this EOS if I had continued to play minding my ECR level.
So, why did I choose to push it to CL2 after all, because it was a decision I took when ECR was still around 70%?
For two reasons:
- because I don't want to play in gold, and this almost guarantees I won't drop back to gold
- because I calculated that I'll only lose 24h of focus mission play on the last day of the season (tomorrow); on the 1st day of next season I'll continue to take my break to replenish ECR, but not the full 24h, so I'll still play the focus mission
At the beginning of this season, I thought the most important will be the season rewards. Turns out I was wrong.
I wasn't inspired enough to keep a record of my daily focus mission rewards, but without precise calculations, I believe I won more chests on the focus missions in total than I will for the season.
And that without depleting my ECR more than for 24h on any day other than today.
However, the numbers alone are not so relevant. I earned 12 champ chests on my focus mission yesterday (my record), but haven't won anything worth mentioning.
Here's where I think the new rewards system could be improved. We have the new 12 reward cards introduced together with the new system.
Isn't it worth playing for bronze or silver chests with a deck that can rank up much higher, to farm these new reward cards and upgrade them sooner than a diamond/champ account could? You'd be earning A LOT more bronze/silver chests if you play in higher leagues, regardless of how the reward structure is squeezed towards the higher chests.
I've seen enough people testing these waters, and I assume they wouldn't do it if it wasn't profitable.
Overall, the jury is still out after the first season post-new rewards, where I'm concerned. I haven't seen the season rewards yet, but generally, I am relatively disappointed by the rewards I received for the focus missions for champ chests. If we couple this with the drop in renting income, oh well...
What I find great about the new reward system is that starter cards don't win rewards anymore. And that was a huge milking venue.
But under the general crypto market conditions, maybe this is not the best time to judge performance within Splinterlands. Plus this was the first new-rewards season, so I believe many tested a lot during this season, bots are probably on stand-by, which probably affected the rental market.
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