For those that don't know, the Ranked Rewards system is receiving a huge overhaul and will hopefully go live after this season that just started ends at the end of the month. Before that happens, let's dive into the new mechanics and figure out the best way to maximize our rewards!
If you would like to read the official Ranked Rewards update post, you can find it Here.
The basic idea is that instead of doing the daily quest that we're use to like "win 5 battles with the Fire Splinter" you'll have a "focus" for one of the main Splinters that lasts for a 24 hour period. Every battle you win with the "focused" Splinter will grant you Focus Points (FP) which fills a progress bar that once full, earns you a reward chest which you can open at the end of the day.
You can get up to an incredible 30 chests per day, regardless of what league you're in! Of course not all chests are created equal as Champion chests are way more likely to have Gold Foils, Legendary's, and Chaos Legion Packs as well as more DEC compared to Bronze chests but it's nice to know that if we put the effort in, we can get quite a lot of chests no matter what league we're in.
It gets even better than that though as you can earn up to 150 chests for your End of Season rewards!
The Devs wanted it this way so you feel like you have a reason to play each day instead of doing your daily quest and nothing more or pushing up to your desired league and then stopping for the season.
Unlike the Daily focus, any battle you win, using ANY splinter will grant SP points towards your End of Season chests.
Here's how that looks in game.
One thing we need to consider is what determines how fast we progress toward our next chest and that's a formula known as Reward Share points or Rshare.
Rshare is a formula that takes your League Rating cubed, Energy Capture Rate, and any bonuses you received for the battle to determine how much DEC you get. What bonuses are there you ask?
You can see here that my alt account is on a Win streak so it's receiving a 15% bonus to my DEC reward, along with a 5% bonus from my guild for 20% more DEC in total. If I had used an Alpha, Beta, Promo Card, or Gold Foil Cards, I would have received those bonuses as well.
The higher your Rshare, the faster you'll unlock the next chest for every win you get.
Now that we know more about the system and how it works, we can start to dive into what I think will be the optimal strategy for unlocking as many chests as you can not only per day but over the course of the season as well.
Win Rate
Win rate is definitely the most important piece of this puzzle since if you don't win, you don't get any Focus or Season Points which means zero progress towards your next daily chest or End of Season Chest.
Losing also ends your win streak bonus which is the biggest bonus most of us can get so we want to avoid that as much as possible.
To make matters worse, Energy Capture Rate (ECR) goes down whether you win or lose so we really want to maximize every battle by winning as often as possible.
This means you will want to focus on a league that you can do well in. For me that's Silver League.
Here you can see I did 370 battles, won 318 of them, and had a max streak of 43. This means I'm rarely losing and wasting my (ECR) and I quite often have the max 50% win streak bonus.
Depending on what cards you have, your best league might be Champion or it might be Bronze, that's going to be up to you to figure out where you can perform the best at.
Don't Push Beyond Your Capability
The second most important thing is don't push beyond your capability. This kind of goes hand in hand with win rate but there's another reason why, if for example, you have Bronze level cards, you wouldn't want to push into Diamond. The amount of Rshare points you need for each chest goes up based on which league you finished in, in the PREVIOUS season.
So for example, let's say it's the last day of the season, I've been farming in Silver and I have 50 chests built up. I have the power and the rating to promote all the way to Diamond league. This seems good right? The Diamond chests contain better loot so it seems like a no brainer!
The problem is, next season, my reward chests will require Diamond level Rshare points to acquire but if I'm back to playing in Silver, where I have a high win rate and want to farm, I'll be getting Silver level Rshare points while trying to unlock Diamond Chests.
| Bronze | Silver | Gold | Diamond | Champion | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Avg Rshares Per Win | 166 | 3,048 | 12,977 | 34,328 | 71,473 |
| Rshares To Get 1 Chest | 300 | 5,000 | 18,000 | 43,000 | 90,000 |
| Rshares To Get 10 Chests | 4,311 | 67,917 | 224,754 | 493,789 | 977,694 |
| Rshares To Get 50 Chests | 109,646 | 1,298,797 | 2,857,928 | 4,296,623 | 6,730,926 |
| Rshares To Get 100 Chests | 2,665,128 | 20,185,856 | 23,168,316 | 19,064,582 | 20,901,158 |
This means that while I'd get a boost to my chests in the short term, I'd be setting myself up for failure the following season and would have a hard time earning more than a couple chests since according to the table, it would take 43,000 Rshares to get one Diamond chest while I'd only be earning on average, 3,048 Rshares per win back in Silver.
Only move up when you're sure you have the skill and cards to stay there with a decent win rate as the system seems designed to "punish" the strategy of farming in one league, and then promoting right at the end of season.
Maximize Bonuses
The next thing that will make a big impact is to maximize bonuses as much as you can. This means finding a good guild with a high level Quest Lodge, doing your best to have a Win streak, and using Alpha, Beta, Promo, and Gold Foil Cards as much as possible as long as they don't lower your chances of winning.
I recently picked up a Gold Foil Celestial Harpy to go with my GF Pelacor Conjurer because I realized my go to low mana team is Life with Lorna Shine and I was playing the Pelacor Conjurer and the Celestial Harpy a lot.
It now makes more sense than ever to try and get Gold Foil versions of the cards you use the most, not just for the DEC bonus but to also boost your progress towards your next reward chest via gold card bonuses.
Consider Renting Powerful Cards For Your Focus
Once you know what your focus for the day will be, it may be worthwhile to rent Yodin, Magnor, Ferexia General, etc if you have the Fire Focus for example. This is simply a way to help increase your win rate and one of the interesting changes from this update is that you will ALWAYS be able to play your Focused Splinter that day so you can get a lot of mileage out of these rentals as Fire would never be banned in this case.
If you can get them in Gold Foil versions then not only are you more likely to win, you're also getting a bigger bonus per win so keep that in mind when calculating the value of rentals!
Modern Versus Wild
I know many people, myself included, expected to play in the Modern format almost exclusively when it releases further down the road but I'm actually reconsidering. I think the optimal strategy will likely be to farm 50 EoS chests in Wild and 50 EoS chests in Modern, rather than trying to farm 100 EoS chests in just Modern for example.
Let's take a look at that Rshares table again from a bit back, I'll copy / paste it so you don't have to scroll up.
| Bronze | Silver | Gold | Diamond | Champion | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Avg Rshares Per Win | 166 | 3,048 | 12,977 | 34,328 | 71,473 |
| Rshares To Get 1 Chest | 300 | 5,000 | 18,000 | 43,000 | 90,000 |
| Rshares To Get 10 Chests | 4,311 | 67,917 | 224,754 | 493,789 | 977,694 |
| Rshares To Get 50 Chests | 109,646 | 1,298,797 | 2,857,928 | 4,296,623 | 6,730,926 |
| Rshares To Get 100 Chests | 2,665,128 | 20,185,856 | 23,168,316 | 19,064,582 | 20,901,158 |
As you can see, for a Silver player, it takes 1,298,797 Rshare points to get 50 chests where it takes a whopping 20,185,856 to get 100 chests. The chests are only doubling but the Rshares required went up 15x.
This means if you can get 50 chests in Wild and 50 Chests in mordern, it will only take 2,597,594 Rshare points (1,298,797 + 1,298,797) which is significantly lower for the same 100 chests. Since Modern isn't out yet, this is just speculation, it's possible both formats will be linked as far as Rshare points goes but if they're not this strategy will be incredibly effective.
Alpha and Beta cards wont be allowed in Modern obviously but it may be possible to earn chests faster in Wild anyway with Gold Foil, Alpha, and Beta cards (or even Gold Foil Alpha / Beta cards!) due to the huge bonuses they grant towards unlocking chests which is another reason I'll almost certainly still play in the Wild format at least somewhat.
Of course getting your hands on those cards may be another story but it's possible with everyone setting their sites on the Modern format, it may not be that expensive to rent Alpha and Beta cards if a large amount of the player base has no need for them in Modern.
We'll have to see how things end up and let me be clear we're still a ways away from Modern even coming out but it's something I'll be keeping an eye on as I want to see how the market reacts to the split in formats and how we can benefit from the situation.
This new system is mostly straight forward but it is a little tricky to understand all the numbers and rshare values so I hope this guide helps you maximize your reward chests going forward so we can all earn to our maximum potential!
Focus on win rate and playing in a league you can "farm". Don't move up until you have the cards and skill to handle the next league. Maximize bonuses from gold foils, alpha, beta, and promo cards and consider renting powerful cards for your daily focus to help you win and when Modern comes out, don't give up on Wild so quickly until we know how it works with the new rewards system!
Thanks for reading and have a great day! If you like my content, considering following and feel free to check out some of my other posts down below!
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Great writeup! One thing I am curious about is how the daily chest reward requirements scale up (i.e., how quickly you hit diminishing returns for stacking all of your play on one day). The team said that their goal is to incentivize everyone to play daily, but one thing that occurred to me is that depending on how the numbers are set up, it could potentially still make sense to stagger your play in order to spend a larger proportion of your ECR at a higher league.
That could allow you to to farm more season rewards and basically trade some daily RShares for higher EoS RShares. Until we see how all of the number work out we won't know for sure what the best thing to do is, but either way I'm really looking forward to all these updates! 😁
Yes exactly, I did my best with the information available but it remains to be seen what will truly be optimal.
I see what you're saying, like if you get reset to bronze 1, don't go crazy for your first daily, just focus on getting back to silver1 (for example) as efficiently as possible ECR wise since rating is so important for the rshares calculation.
excellent information I have the power to gold II but I prefer to stay in gold III even now it is very competitive, I can't imagine the next season, the important thing about the updates is that apparently the bots will stop acting like parasites
Yeah, it will be really interesting to see how things change when the update goes into play.
You're right I didn't talk about what will happen to bots and the ghost card situation but if they want to earn they'll need to buy or rent real cards so hopefully that makes them put some skin in the game!
Awesome breakdown as usual. Will be interested to see how the reward shares (earned) strategy unfolds regarding modern/wild. Something to watch for sure. I also wonder what these changes will do to the rental market. I can't put a finger on it, but many of the sign point prices moving north with players being encouraged to play in higher leagues with the negative impact of using Ghost Cards. Time will tell. Sharing this on https://twitter.com/PraetoriaDigest.
Thanks! I agree completely, on one hand I feel like they may not "want" us to earn as many rewards as splitting wild / modern might allow, but on the other hand, maybe they'd be okay with it since it brings value to wild and they seem to have a "as long as you have the cards, we're okay with it!" mentality.
As for the rental market, it's impossible to say but I'm of the opinion that bots will be profitable even without ghost cards and if that's the case, we're destined to get higher card and rental prices as it's basically what's called an "arbitrage" opportunity. The game pays out this much, it costs that much to rent / set up a bot, you profit the difference.
So more and more bots will be created as it's just "printing money" for them until card and rental prices close the gap. With a new set of reward cards about to come out, they will undoubtedly start off "expensive" and then get much cheaper like the current reward cards.
This means in the short term, bots will be extremely profitable and I'm expecting a bit of a "bot explosion" which will pump prices but as the new reward cards tank in price it may get tougher later on and no longer be worth it, causing rental prices to come back down.
The biggest threat to my prediction is If the new ranked reward system pays out less for bots than we expect.
This could happen because so much of the SP and FP is rewarded for winning now and ECR plays such a big role, instead of just needing to complete your daily quest and hit a certain rating for end of season rewards, you need to have a good win rate as well as the cards that allow you to accomplish that every day.
It's possible players earn more in the new system but most bots actually earn less than they do now and if that's the case, bot farms could shut down instead of ramp up which means liquidating what assets they do have and falling prices.
I don't think that will happen, especially not with a fresh batch of reward cards, but it's always good to be aware of alternate scenarios when investing and what could go wrong.
Even in the negative bot farm scenario you painted, it would still be good for the player base and overall economy. I'm bot-friendly, but see bot farms as exploitative given how much value they extract from the economy which is never put back in.
It feels difficult to fully wrap my head around the new rewards system given its complexity. A lot of speculation about ECR and optimal amount of games played to capitalize.
Regardless, I'm excited and will enjoy the ride wherever it takes us.
On another note, have you considered streaming or creating video content? Would you send me a message on Discord globalwarming and we can start a conversation. I think you've got a lot of great insights/knowledge to share... time permitting of course.
Yeah, I think that's where getting rid of ghost cards will make a difference. In order to extract that value, they at least have to buy cards or rent them from real people who do have them, shutting down the infinite value generator.
With Discord you need the full ID, for me its mondroid#0429, feel free to add me or msg me.
Thanks for the advice! I have been wondering the best way to maximise the new rewards system, and your post is most helpful.
Awesome! Glad to hear it!
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