Introduction
Splinterlands is a complex game and some of the things that can be optimized are not entirely obvious. Today I am going to review my last season in Splinterlands and talk about what I do to strike balance between accumulating Glint tokens for those new reward cards that are coming out and accumulating SPS for the long term appreciation potential if and when Splinterlands will go mainstream in crypto or even possibly mainstream in the mainstream gaming.
My Approach to Modern and Wild Leagues
Take a look at the image above. What is this massive drop from 4000 down to 1600? This is my Modern raking and as you can see I dropped from Champion to Silver. Why am I doing it? I believe that dropping from Champion to Silver 3 makes sense in order to collect league advancement chests and face easier competition at the start of the season in the Modern Silver and Gold Leagues.
In fact Modern Silver, Gold and even Diamond 3 leagues are comprised of players with mostly silver or at most partially gold and rarely partial diamond level decks. Which results in a great win rate and lots of SPS as in 170 SPS per day from Modern. Which brings us to another benefit of doing this: competing for Silver leaderboard and winning some more Glint:
Take a look at the win rate I have here : 60 wins out 67 battles... that is not bad at all... If I can stay in the first place that is a nice 150,000 extra glint in addition to the glint in Modern:
What I noticed as I was advancing through the leagues is that league advancement chests contained almost enough energy to re-fill my energy to continue going up.
Earnings of SPS in Modern Gold leagues are approximately equivalent to the Diamond One in Wild. Additionally there is no Wild Pass to play in Modern, so this season I will be focusing solely on Modern League and save the 2000 DEC.
I will be playing in Modern League exclusively this season and next season and the next two seasons I will be playing in Wild League and on purpose throw one battle in Modern to get ranked down to Silver in three seasons once again.
As you can see my rating in Wild was consistently maxing out around Champion Two. I guess that is the limit for my deck, making it to Champion One is pretty much an impossibility for me.
Grinding in the Wild consistently earns good SPS and great Glint earnings. So to summarize my approach:
Three seasons in Wild to maximize Glint and tank my Modern ranking and one season in Modern to earn higher SPS and attempt at raking on the Silver leaderboard to compensate for overall lower Glint earnings in Modern.
SPS Earnings
The chart you see above is my SPS earnings since I started playing Splinterlands around 94 seasons ago or 3.62 years ago! At the beginning of the chart on the left you see me starting at 25 SPS per season and steadily climbing until 1,367 SPS earned in season 91.
Then the first big peak you see in season 103 was 3,078 SPS per season, the next major peak came in season 123 at 5,306 SPS and finally the last peak SPS earned just playing Splinterlands and staking came in season 139 at 5,845 SPS earned.
After that my all time biggest SPS earning season came with the release of SPS Validators in the season 155 at 12,183 SPS earned! Since then my SPS earnings were steadily declining with only two seasons bucking the trend. Which brings us to the last season and the lowest SPS tokens earned since the launch of validators: 7,644 SPS.
Glint Earnings
Glint token was first launched in season 132 and surprisingly we see somewhat of a sustained up-trend in my Glint earnings. Yes, there was a spike in season 150 to 700,000 Glint but I have been at 462,000 Glint or above since season 148, coming in at 516,000 Glint in my last season playing Wild only.
Season Summary
| Statistic |  Wild |  Modern |
|---|---|---|
| Battles | 417 | 2 |
| Rank | 193 | 325 |
| Rating | 4120 - CHAMPION_II | 1660 - SILVER_I |
| Rating High | 4240 | 1700 |
| Win PCT (Wins/battles * 100) | 52.04 (217/417) | 0.0 (0/2) |
| Longest Streak | 8 | 0 |
As you can see I had only two battles in Modern loosing both of them consistent with my ranking reduction strategy. In Wild I have achieved a respectable 52% win rate.
Detailed SPS Earnings
| Earnings | # |
|---|---|
| SPS validator block validation |  4551.034 |
| SPS ranked battle (wild) | 1291.639 |
| SPS staking reward | 1149.281 |
| SPS brawl | 352.375 |
| SPS validator reward | 318.615 |
| SPS survival battle | 36.775 |
| MERITS brawl prizes |  12080.0 |
| GLINT ranked |  257893.0 |
As you can see my top earnings continue to come from SPS block validation, followed by ranked SPS earnings and finally SPS staking rewards.
Brawl and license rewards are significantly smaller at 352 and 318 SPS respectively. Below are my previous season SPS rewards for comparison:
As you can see the biggest decline was in the SPS validator rewards and Survival mode seems to be loosing relevance when it comes to SPS earnings...
Costs
| Costs | # |
|---|---|
| GLINT rewards draws | -520000.0 |
Spending over half a million Glint tokens and still not able to max out my legendary reward cards. I might want to consider start Glint accumulation for the upcoming new reward card set as soon as I finish a couple more key legendary reward cards.
Reward draws purchased
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|---|---|---|---|
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As you see here I am remaining steady in my strategy of buying first tranche of Reward Chests. I also was able to purchase five legendary Reward Draws and those do not come cheap at 35,000 Glint per draw
Special items earned
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|
I earned a good number of Merits and energy, but as usual not jack-pot prizes :)
Cards earned
 bcx: 2 |  bcx: 1 |  bcx: 1 |  bcx: 1 |  regular bcx: 23 gold bcx: 1 |
 bcx: 11 |  bcx: 5 |  regular bcx: 31 gold bcx: 1 |  bcx: 17 |  regular bcx: 31 gold bcx: 1 |
 regular bcx: 4 gold bcx: 2 |  bcx: 3 |  regular bcx: 20 gold bcx: 1 |  regular bcx: 13 gold bcx: 1 |  bcx: 10 |
 bcx: 23 |  bcx: 14 |  bcx: 17 |  regular bcx: 10 gold bcx: 1 |  bcx: 1 |
 regular bcx: 4 gold bcx: 1 |  bcx: 5 |  bcx: 8 |  bcx: 3 |  bcx: 7 |
 regular bcx: 16 gold bcx: 2 |  bcx: 7 |  bcx: 26 |  bcx: 2 |  bcx: 1 |
 bcx: 2 |  bcx: 2 |  bcx: 5 |
A surprising thing here is that after I purchased 480 chests of all rarities I was not able to pull any legendary cards beyond the five legendary cards I got from the Legendary Draws.
An extremely unlucky season for me, especially since I always use Legendary potions when I open my chests...
League rewards
| | | |
|---|---|---|---|
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I got a total of 58 chests of all rarities and was able to pull a single legendary card. That is an OK luck as far as I am concerned.
League rewards special items earned
| | | | | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Once again no jack-pot prizes... One day I will pull a land plot from these... But that day is not today LOL :)
League rewards cards earned
 bcx: 13 |  bcx: 1 | bcx: 3 |  bcx: 1 | bcx: 2 |
 bcx: 8 |  bcx: 1 | bcx: 6 | bcx: 2 | regular bcx: 7 gold bcx: 1 |
bcx: 6 | bcx: 2 | bcx: 7 | bcx: 7 |  bcx: 6 |
bcx: 1 |  bcx: 5 |  bcx: 1 |  bcx: 1 |
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.