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Is it worth renting to increase rank at the end of season? Volume 3: King Midas's Touch

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@badrag
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I've done a few of these posts in the past investigating my costs and rewards from renting to a higher league at the end of the season, and whether doing so was worth it. I'm posting again for a few reasons:

  1. I'm renting up to Gold III instead of Silver I, and want to see how tough the Gold league is
  2. I found a few extra tweaks to wring a little bit more value out of it
  3. To see if the same math checks out, especially with DEC less expensive and cards plentiful

The Gold league

Given how cheap DEC and rentals are right now, I wanted to try renting up to Gold league. Instead of renting to 70k CP, I rented to 100k for entry into GIII. I surprisingly found it less hard than expected. There were still a number of decks I faced of all level 1 cards. Few decks comprised actually Gold-league level cards. So this was a pleasant surprise. Even when I got a hard daily quest (Fire, and I don't use Fire cards), my deck of level 1 cards was sufficient.

Some new tweaks and optimizations

In the past few seasons, I've continued to expand in the game and learn about other systems, letting me stack opportunities better.

Guild brawl

My guild's brawl coincidentally ended at the same time as the season, so I rented out cards for my brawl frays prior to renting out for just CP. This meant the cards I would have rented anyway got to help out in my brawl as well.

Tournament

I signed up for the zensports tournament of CL, and so I rented some cards for this tournament that also counted towards my CP. Although things got busy and I missed the tournament, this was no biggie, as I needed to rent CP anyways.

Three daily quests

I realized you can stack 3 daily quests if you do it right.

  1. 2 days before EOS, get a daily quest and complete it but don't turn it in.
  2. 23.75 hours before EOS, rent up to the intended league
  3. Wait ~5 minutes and turn in quest, then get next quest
  4. Do next quest and turn it in
  5. Wait until ~0.6 hours before EOS when daily quest resets, and bang out 3rd quest before EOS (this requires some luck and fast games).

The math

To determine the value, it's pretty easy: subtract the costs from the earnings.

Costs

The costs are: rental costs and opportunity costs of which of my cards I would have rented. This latter group was 0 though, so my only costs were for the rentals. In total, I spent 623 DEC on rentals.

Rewards

The rewards are broken into two categories: extra chests and extra DEC from winning.

Extra DEC

In total, I won 30 battles in Gold 3, earning 415 DEC. Had I stayed in Silver II, I'd have earned ~150 DEC from those wins, so I netted ~265 DEC.

Extra chests

In total, I opened 37 chests at GIII between daily chests and eos chests. I earned 1,127 DEC from these chests. If I weight this by the number of chests I earned from GIII in excess of what I'd have earned in SII, I netted ~380 DEC.

I honestly came out pretty well here: 2 epic cards and a GF common. In my 3 months of playing splinterlands daily, I still have yet to get a legendary daily reward (although I did just get a legendary gladius card, so I can't complain too much).

Putting it together

In total, I netted 21 DEC from renting up to GIII. It sounds like a small number, and it is. DEC and cards values are depressed right now, so even good rewards aren't a big jackpot. The only way to get a nice payday now is a GF Epic or Legendary or a jackpot DEC chest, and that is basically winning the lottery (1/6,250 tries I think).

Was it worth it? Yes. As before, despite me spending a lot of time on the math here, the math is secondary to the fun of it. And I enjoy opening chests. So for a rental cost of ~$3 I got to open 10 extra chests. Even if the expected value on that trade is negative (it is), it's worth it to me because of the fun.

But, was it worth maximizing to the extent I did? I don't think doing 3 daily quests in GIII was worth it. The timing were too precise and I spent too much time worrying about it for it to be worth ~$0.20.

Referral

Does this sound interesting? Interested in playing a card game and earning cards that are valuable? Then use my referral link! I'll start you off with a free card!