At first, I don’t care experimenting on Hive what to write. Now that I read the white paper, realizing that whatever I published would be permanent, I somehow have this feeling of regret that among four articles so far, I should not have published the other three because of their low quality. However, now that I want to write, I find it difficult for I am thinking of an ideal story to share. Unfortunately, I could not find any “ideal story” except my daily battles and some scattered insights here and there. Moreover, I also want to avoid “self-talk” that readers would not find any value in my writings. Anyhow, despite all of these mind wavering, I beg for your tolerance to be patient with my story as I share my journey from the first to the third season of my playing on Splinterlands.
I forgot the exact day I stumbled with this card game. I think it’s around the middle of July. However, if I will base it on the time I created my Splinterlands folder in my personal computer, the exact day was 03 August. I think this date is right for it is now my 3rd season on Splinterlands. I entered the latter part of the first season.
First season, I ended Bronze II. Second season, I reached Bronze I but ended in Bronze II due to either cancellation of rentals on the part of renters or miscalculation of exact number of rental days on my part. This season, I reached Silver III four days ago, but I refused to climb the higher league due to lack of powerful cards. I was thinking that if I struggle to be consistent in winning battles on Bronze league, how much more difficult will the battle be on Silver league? Nevertheless, as I continue writing this article, it’s just 58 minutes left before the end of the current season. I think at this point, my standing will no longer be affected by rental cancellation. And so it is safe to say that I ended this season in Bronze I with 2,105 rating at 365 rank. I think this is already a great improvement considering the number of player base at Bronze league and the fact that the highest rank I reached last season was 3,230.
My Stats for Three Seasons
The reason for my hesitation to climb the upper league is the recognition of the reality of my limitation when it comes to buying power. There are many instances that I find cards held by the other player, which cannot be found in the rental market. You have to buy them individually and combine them. There is no way you can win over superior cards, not unless the holder still doesn’t know the mechanics of the game. There are several instances, that I hold the same card with my opponent, but I still lost the game. I suspect that it was due to a higher-level card used by the other player. The only way to beat superior cards or to have a fair fight is to also level up your cards either by paying a higher rent or purchasing them. But if you lack the fund, you have to accept your limitation and the fact that it is how the game works.
So far, my playing journey on Splinterlands is now more or less 45 days. I never expect that my files will grow up like this:
It seems that for an outside observer, playing Splinterlands is a serious business for me. I intend to use these files in blogging. As you can see, I divided my files into different categories. In this post, I just want to include my experience about rewards, the quest potion, and staking. And of course, I want to conclude this article by sharing an interesting fight.
Rewards
As of 07 August, my highest rating was 196 and my rank was 27,779. Out of 16 battles, I won 10. As you can see on my First Season Stats, I only had 1.37 DEC and zero SPS. At that time, I didn’t know about power. It’s only just recently that I realized that I got that 500 power because of the card reward I received in completing the fire quest.
Gold nightmare level 3 is the first reward I received. I was ignorant of its value at that time. Upon writing this post, its market price was $6.25. Since then I got more other cards as rewards both from Daily Quests and Seasons’ Rewards.
Among the above card rewards, I already sold seven of them worth $25.00. My current collection now is about $47.15. So, if you will ask me if buying the $10 Spell book is worth the price of playing the game, I think you already have my answer.
My Bitter Sweet Journey with Quest Potion
After more or less 9 days of playing the game, I was able to complete I think 6 quests, with 3 potion rewards and 3 card rewards. I didn’t know that time how potions work. It was not until 14 August that I read this article. Both the writer and the commenter were talking about quest potion, but at that time I thought that was the potion I received as a reward. And so I bought 10 potions of both alchemy and legendary thinking that it would increase my chance of receiving gold and legendary cards as rewards. At that time, I just had 306 DEC, and I used 100 of them to pay for the two potions, only to see later that I bought the wrong potion.
And so when I realized that the Hive writer was referring to a quest potion, I immediately asked my son to buy me 1,000.00 PHP worth of BNB. But he said, he could not for there was a required minimum amount to purchase BNB. So instead of BNB, he bought XRP. But the problem is, I could not complete the transaction to swap my XRP to BNB for lack of enough BNB in my MetaMask account to pay for gas fee. It's good that my 2nd son has extra BNB on his account for he is playing CryptoBlades, and so I asked him to send me 0.007 BNB to complete my transaction. Just what the article said, it was really true that I received an extra quest potion in buying 10 of them. I was anticipating that with the 11 quest potions, the outcome of my battles will improve. I actually completed 7 quests already for the last 9 days and I struggled to reach 400 DEC. Just imagine if I knew this information before, I could have 35 loot chests instead of 7. That would make my DEC accumulation faster. I am just grateful to those two guys who discussed about the importance of buying quest potion.
I was fortunate that I was able to buy 10 quest potions using credits. Because of the potion, after completing a daily quest, I could open more chests giving me bigger chance to receive higher rewards. The highest DEC reward I received in completing a quest was 2,024. In dollar terms, that’s equivalent to $11.19. So, you see, at that time, a player could easily regain his $10.00 capital ($17.50 to be exact including the cost of quest potion).
Unfortunately, due to some reasons the management decided to remove the credits option in purchasing the quest potion. At that time, I was wondering whether the team has carefully considered the economic side of giving rewards. One Quest Potion costs 750 DEC; that's $5.32. Now, after completing a quest and if a player will only receive a reward worth $2.28, can we really call it a reward? And then I thought that if the credits option will not be restored, I was thinking of an alternative for the team to reconsider, which is decreasing the price of quest potion from 750 DEC down to 200 DEC. One guy on Reddit corrected me. He said that the team knows what is going on and he would rather see them fix the problem so that the game economy keeps working even at the expense of losing some players rather than keeping all players happy and breaking the economy. I think he’s right.
Staking
The first time I received my SPS airdrop, I was really impressed. Imagine that by just owning 28 DEC, I received 0.355 SPS. I have never seen in traditional finance a 301.65% APR. I advised my second son that once he cashed out his SKILLS, try SPS staking too. I also said the same thing to my eldest son playing Axie Infinity. I also told him to open an account on Splinterlands and do the staking. I even encouraged him that Splinterslands could be the next Axie in three-to-five-year time or maybe less.
For those who are not familiar with SPS staking, I just want to share with you the advice I followed coming from an anonymous person on Reddit:
“Here's how you do the staking: Go to the new SPS box at the top next to credits and DEC. Click that and it will take you to the SPS page. On the left side where it has your total SPS, under that it says how much you have in game (liquid) and how much you have staked. If staked is 0 then further down there are 4 buttons one of which is stake. Click that put in how much you want to stake. If your SPS are still in a wallet then before doing this you need to click the transfer button next to stake, select Binance Smart Chain, put in the amount, and 'transfer in'. You will need to confirm this in your wallet app and pay the transaction fee.”
Responding to one inquiry on Reddit, I tried to compare staking to traditional finance as a way of depositing your money in the bank. But the interest (read it as APR) in SPS is far higher from that of traditional banking. Being a stock trader for 7 years, I am actually impressed with the idea of staking provided that the business behind the coin must be solid or the other way of saying it, is that the players find real value in this game.
Comparing staking to buying company shares, staking for me has a big advantage due to its daily "dividends" or yield. Unlike in many companies, the dividends are distributed either once or twice a year. The only difference is that in the stock market, you can turn your shares into liquid anytime you want, but in SPS, you need to wait one month before you can unstake 25% of your total holdings. I think they do such locking of coins to avoid drain in liquidity as a result of sudden pull out of huge fund of the so-called "mercenary capital" who has no loyalty to the protocol, but is only concerned about the most profitable opportunity in a short period of time.
Reading the SPS white paper, it was stated there that 400M will be airdropped in 12 months depending on the assets that a player is holding; 900M in play to earn; and another 900M in staking/LP/ oracle rewards within 5 years. The remaining 27% will be allotted to DAO, private sale, team and partners. Knowing such information, I decided to invest $300 in SPS. I also have DEC from battle rewards but the amount is still so small, more or less 7,150. I observe that the yield in staking is higher than my airdrop points. Just less than a month, my total yield was already closed to $100. Of course, the yield depends on the price of SPS in the market, but at least the quantity of your SPS will grow over time.
Battle
Finally, about the interesting fight I mentioned earlier. As for me, this is one of my best battles ever on Splinterland, not because I won, but I consider it as one of my best defeats. And I really learned a lot in terms of strategy from the other player, which I adopted in my game since then. Though in terms of offensive attack I have the advantage due to four melee, one magic, and one range and the other player has only two range attacks. However, the three melee attacks of Shield Bearer were nullified by Armor Smith. And the combined attacks coming from Wood Nymph, Screeching Vulture, and Earth Elemental were invalidated by the two healers, Divine Healer and Venari Crystal Smith. At first, it seems that no team is gaining the upper hand, but as the battle progresses, the power of two healers against one prevail. The battle has a total of 23 rounds! As a result of fatigue, everyone died except Shield Bearer, the last man standing!
See the outcome of this battle here.
Still not playing Splinterlands? Try it! It's fun!
Here’s my code.