Introduction
This is a second post in my Splinterlands Modern vs Wild Season Analysis series. Please view the first post here. Today I am reviewing my last season where I was playing completely in the Modern League making it into Champion Three before falling back to Diamond One. I will be comparing SPS and Glint earnings to my last season that was in Wild, let's see which format has worked better and what I have learned.
The Modern Experiment
Above is a quick summary of my achievements during the last season. As you can see I was able to achieve Champion 3, Collected almost 300,000 Glint tokens, additionally I was able to take First Place on the Silver Modern Leaderboard earning 150,000 additional Glint tokens as well as placing Fourth on the Survival Silver Leaderboard earning additional 50,000 Glint tokens. And finally I also placed on the Foundation Leaderboard taking twenty first place with four cards as a prize.
Above you see that I started in Silver 2 and have quickly advanced to the Diamond League collecting all of the league advancement chests. Looking back it seems that I have dropped too far and could have dropped to a Gold Modern League and could have competed for the second place in Modern Gold Leaderboard:
With some careful playing towards the end of the season I could have taken a second place in Modern Gold Leaderboard earning an extra fifty thousand glint compared to the Modern Silver Leaderboard where taking the first place was too easy:
The last Modern season started with bots not able to play legendary summoners so they were fairly easily beatable which resulted in a video from Tales from the Crypt Mancer after that and a post from @azircon the bots were adjusted to include all summoners and for the incomplete Modern Deck that I had they became almost un-beatable.
That caused me to employ a bot avoidance strategy which worked except for the last Tuesday where cancelling before the forty second timer hits on the opponent search stopped working and bots appeared at any moment which caused a quick rating drop into Diamond Three, before I stopped playing. That was fixed the next day and my rating climbed back but not as high as it was before the change to the liquidity bots:
As you can see prior to the bot change I was in the Champion league with a 62% win rate (165 wins / 266 battles * 100 = 62%)
My final win rate was much lower as I still kept battling the bots to check if they are still un-beatable: (276 wins / 525 battles * 100 = 52.6%)
Human players were much easier to defeat.
SPS Rewards
When we look at the SPS earnings chart we see a big spike to almost record SPS earnings last season. So what was responsible for the spike from under eight thousand SPS to at least eleven thousand SPS last season?
My theory is that the only thing that really changed were the Modern SPS earnings, but lets see if that is correct.
From the chart above the most obvious is a spike of the blue line from 0 to over 3,153 SPS which were my Modern League SPS earnings. This compares to 1,292 SPS earned in Wild League last season which is a difference of 1,861 SPS.
Another interesting data point from the chart above is the fact that the heydays of earning SPS from Survival battles are clearly over. That is the yellow line in the chart above. The peak for the Survival SPS earnings came in season 155 when I earned 1,920 SPS with seasons 156 and 157 still producing high SPS rewards of 1,653 and 1,154 respectively, after that survival season earnings were insignificant at 312 SPS last season. Brawls came in at 418 SPS
As you can see from the chart above my largest source of SPS rewards continues to be SPS Validator Validation rewards at: 5,404 SPS tokens last season and the third top source of SPS is staking rewards at 1,400 SPS which is behind the 3,153 SPS earned from Modern League this season but slightly ahead of the Wild League SPS earnings last season which were at 1,292 SPS.
The green line is Validator license rewards which holder earn for just having an SPS Validator license and my single license earned 361 SPS.
Comparing Modern and Wild Profitability
In order to compare Modern and Wild season let's compare the SPS earnings and Glint earnings as well as take into account the costs of playing in Modern or Wild league.
First the SPS earnings:
| Modern | Wild | Difference |
|---|---|---|
| 3153 SPS * 0.007 = $22.07 | 1834 SPS * 0.007 =$ 12.84 | $9.23 |
So at current SPS prices it does not make sense to rent the maxed out partial Modern deck as the cost of rental is going to be around $50 per season and you can make about $9.23 + Wild Permit cost (2,000 DEC * 0.861) = $10.95 more than in Wild.
You might consider Glint into this calculation. Let's see how Glint Earnings compare:
| Modern | Wild | Difference |
|---|---|---|
| 299,786 | 257,893 | 41,893 |
Additionally when going for a leaderboard in Modern I have earned 150,000 extra Glint tokens, I could have earned 200,000 extra glint tokens if I had gone for the Golden league leaderboard. So playing in Modern you can earn 200K to 250K extra glint. Since Glint tokens do not have a monetary value it is hard to quantify.
Additional earning sources to consider when renting a modern deck: Tournaments and delegating your maxed out wild deck to another account and using it to play Survival for the whole season.
Last Season results
| Statistic |  Wild |  Modern |
|---|---|---|
| Battles | NA | 525 |
| Rank | NA | 1 |
| Rating | NA - NA | 3420 - DIAMOND_I |
| Rating High | NA | 3940 |
| Win PCT (Wins/battles * 100) | NA (NA/NA) | 52.57 (276/525) |
| Longest Streak | NA | 20 |
As you can see every single battle I played last season was in the Modern League. The highest rating achieved was 3,940 which was before the bots received all of the legendary summoners and raised the level of competitiveness across the board by dumping higher rated players with not fully maxed out decks into the lower tiers.
SPS Earnings
| Earnings | # |
|---|---|
| SPS validator block validation |  5404.737 |
| SPS ranked battle (modern) | 3152.975 |
| SPS staking reward | 1400.014 |
| SPS brawl | 418.608 |
| SPS validator reward | 361.245 |
| SPS survival battle | 312.361 |
| MERITS brawl prizes |  15040.0 |
| GLINT ranked |  299786.0 |
As I have commented above my top three sources of SPS are from block validation, Staking and Ranked Battles. Modern SPS battle earnings are more than double Wild SPS battle earnings.
Reward draws purchased
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|---|---|---|---|
 |  |  | |
As you can see I am following the same strategy of purchasing only Legendary reward cards and this season I was able to purchase six out of ten legendary cards.
Special items earned
 |  |  |  |  |  |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
From the chests I earned it looks like I got pretty good energy which is enough for almost three days worth of playing. Merits look good as well, and as always no packs or land plots.
Cards earned
 bcx: 1 |  bcx: 1 |  bcx: 3 |  bcx: 3 |  regular bcx: 43 gold bcx: 2 |
 regular bcx: 24 gold bcx: 1 |  bcx: 25 |  bcx: 25 |  regular bcx: 10 gold bcx: 1 |  bcx: 5 |
 regular bcx: 24 gold bcx: 1 |  bcx: 22 |  bcx: 3 |  bcx: 25 |  regular bcx: 19 gold bcx: 2 |
 regular bcx: 10 gold bcx: 1 |  bcx: 3 |  regular bcx: 14 gold bcx: 2 |  bcx: 11 |  bcx: 12 |
 regular bcx: 22 gold bcx: 3 |  bcx: 6 |  bcx: 3 |  bcx: 8 |  bcx: 1 |
 bcx: 1 |  bcx: 6 |  bcx: 2 |  bcx: 3 |  bcx: 2 |
 bcx: 1 |  bcx: 1 |  bcx: 1 |  regular bcx: 1 gold bcx: 1 |
I continue to earn a lot of reward cards, but the only ones that are still not maxed out are the legendary cards.
League rewards
| | | |
|---|---|---|---|
         | |||
As you can see I have earned nine league advancement chest rewards. That is me coming up from Silver Three in Modern all the way up to Champion Three in Modern. If the bots were not tweaked I probably would have made it into the Champion Two.
This kind of advancement resulted in lots of chest, let's see what I was able to earn in these League Advancement chests:
League rewards special items earned
| | | | | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Forty energy is nice and provides almost two more days of energy, fourteen thousand merits doesn't sound very good, but still helps with maxing out my Gladiator cards.
As always no land plots or packs, and it makes sense as league advancement chests are the same and the chest draws and there is less of them.
League rewards cards earned
 bcx: 1 |  bcx: 1 |  bcx: 1 |  bcx: 1 |  bcx: 1 |
 regular bcx: 1 gold bcx: 1 |  bcx: 1 |  bcx: 8 | regular bcx: 6 gold bcx: 1 | bcx: 12 |
bcx: 7 |  bcx: 4 | bcx: 1 |  bcx: 2 |  bcx: 4 |
bcx: 2 | bcx: 1 |  bcx: 11 |  bcx: 2 | bcx: 3 |
 bcx: 7 |  bcx: 7 |  regular bcx: 4 gold bcx: 1 | bcx: 3 | bcx: 1 |
bcx: 1 | bcx: 6 | bcx: 1 |  bcx: 1 | bcx: 1 |
bcx: 1 | bcx: 1 |  bcx: 1 |
Here you can see that I have started earning Foundation set cards and these cards can now be combined, which gives you basic summoners for the Modern Format! So don't overlook these!
If you have some staked SPS please vote for my SPS Validator Node HERE
I am also a Hive Witness and would really appreciate your vote for me as a witness: https://vote.hive.uno/@seattlea
If you wonder what is the best way to get involved you can use my link to begin your Splinterlands and HIVE journey.