I'm Enjoying Splinterlands Again
Survival Mode grew on me a lot last week and I actually had a day or two where I just wanted to keep playing enjoying the entire process of getting a higher ranking to see where the SPS earnings were going to. I also manually tracked 61 games so far which got me from Rank 620 to rank 1000 which made me enter Silver League.
Low-Risk Survival Strategy
Basically, for each individual Survival battle, I fist take a look at the Collection Power of the Opponent and the most recent decks they played. If I have doubt I tend to just submit a Blank Level 1 Surrender Team not taking the risk to lose an entire lineup and a summoner. I have plenty of these Level 1 cards. This makes it harder to climb the ranks but should give more SPS over the long run as it allows you to basically keep going.
At times though I did get tempted to take the risk to submit a team I believed I could win without seeing too many cards dead which I often ended up regretting. 15 out of the 62 battles I ended up surrendering this way and the average collection Power of these opponents was a whopping 7 Million+ each of the battles being up against Max Level Cards. This does kind of feel like a loophole where you will either be up against max players or level 1 surrenders. Out of the 61 battles in 20 of those I was up against a Level 1 deck basically getting a free pass.
Silver League Grind Stats
These are the stats that I kept in my grind with the Lily Death Speed deck which I deemed invincible eventually getting crushed and put on cooldown. It kind of sucks that especially the Nightmare common card takes a much longer cooldown period. I also played a Water Kraken deck which eventually also lost sooner than I hoped. High Ratings above 1000 also tended to be matches where I was losing regularly if I submitted a real deck so that is something to look out for.
Survival SPS Earnings!
Basically Survival is a mode for the whales who have big collections and multiple Max Level cards and almost all of the extra SPS inflation is going to them. It should eventually lead to a bit more sell pressure and a declining price even though in the short term earnings will be quite a bit higher. It was also noticeable how quicky the SPS earnings were going up each time I managed to increase my rank.
The 61 battles combined earned me 311.402 SPS which is an average 5.10 SPS for each battle with my last win giving the highest SPS earnings at 13.795 SPS and this with around 280k SPS Staked
Survival Mode Future Expectations...
I'm not sure what to expect going forward with Survival mode. While I had fun with it a couple of days, I hate to be back in a position where I'm forced to play Splinterlands for hours daily which is an issue that Splinterlands really needs to fix. I assume once Chaos Legion gets dumped out of Modern, there will be many running bots in Survival to try and get something out of it still which will put pressure on the Survival Earnings.
Conclusion!
If anything, in survival mode it feels good to destroy Max Level cards of your opponent putting them in Cooldown. While I had some fun in recent days with this game mode trying to rank up and earnings more SPS than usual. I do fear it soon will turn into a situation where the game forces you again to play for hours daily just to get your returns.
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While the grind in hours is not worth it, its still a decent chunk of SPS earned for Survival Mode! Nice one.
The grind is actually worth it at times when you really want to play and have fun with it. One of the core issues of the game is that it forces everyone to do this for hours each day without exception or just run a bot. I don't understand why nobody is really talking about this or trying to solve it. It also is the biggest reason why no new players are coming in. Even with all the changes, everything is still designed for whales with lots of assets who know the game and how everything works.