With the latest Splinterlands season finishing up overnight I've been able to finally conclude my Splinterlands Experiment : Renting for New Modern which I kicked off a month ago and ran with over the last 2 competitive seasons. It's been fun...and interesting...and I've been able to get a good handle on how the games Meta is evolving as well as better understand the direction the developers are taking the game. All good things...but was the experiment a profitable success?
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After running the Season Report Card for the most recent season I hit a record Rating High of 3000 which put me deep into Diamond III Tier of Modern Ranked, finishing with 185 Wins out of 382 games played. That means I lost more games than I won but I still earned 1129 SPS from the matches I did win. After spending 9920 DEC on renting cards and SPS to earn those rewards that's a pretty decent result - however to calculate profitability it depends how you value DEC and SPS because both declined over the course of the season. SPS in particular.
At season start DEC was worth 0.0009491 and SPS was worth 0.0088 so if I use those numbers 9920 DEC would be worth $9.42 USD and 1129 SPS would be worth $9.94 USD. That is a profit. A success...however if you use todays prices the values are $9.16 expense and $8.24 reward. That could be just an unfortunate currency fluctuation but if you add in the Brawl Rewards of 136 SPS on top it does boost the rewards up to $9.23. So, yay. That's profit there (even if it's slight) and so I'm calling the experiment a profitable success.
I did also earn a very decent 175,387 Glint over the season which is a bonus and I was also able to help my Guild by competing strongly in Fray 10 (Gold Modern) so there are some less tangible benefits from my experiment that are also worth noting.
I'm concluding my experiment for now but I am going to keep renting some Modern cards because I've proven it to be viable and I'm still having fun. With a couple of tweaks I think I can improve my play and performance even further in future seasons but I've already achieved my goal so I won't do further updates here on Hive. If anyone wants some tips on how to get a viable rental deck going for Modern then feel free to reach out. I feel confident now that I'll be able to give some decent advice to any players interested in experimenting themselves.