Splinterlands is BOOMING and you can't miss this opportunity: there are still 1,800% yearly returns waiting to be made!

Introduction to Splinterlands Leagues

If you already know how Leagues, Rating and Collection Power (CP) works, including the minimum CP required for each League and how to increase your CP by acquiring new cards, feel free to go directly to the chart "Splinterlands Leagues - Yearly Return on Investment".

Leagues

According to the Official Documentation:

The 6 Leagues of Splinterlands cover a wide range of collections, experience, and skills. A brand new player in their first week will find themselves in the Novice and Bronze Leagues, while the most experienced players battle it out each Season for the coveted League of Champion I.
Rewards increase as players move higher up in Leagues, but so do the complexity of strategy and the difficulty of competition. Leagues are also limited by a player's Collection Power, which can always be increased by purchasing or renting more cards.

In Splinterlands, players are divided into 6 Leagues: Novice, Bronze, Silver, Gold, Diamond and Champion. And each League has 3 Levels ("I", "II" and "III"), with "III" being the lowest, and "I" the highest. The only exception is the Novice League that doesn't have levels.

So, if you're a new player, you'll start out in the Novice League. After winning Ranked games, you'll be able to climb to the Bronze III, then to Bronze II, Bronze I, Silver III, Silver II, Silver I, Gold III and so on.

Rating

When you win Ranked games, you'll gain Rating points. When you lose Ranked games, you'll lose Rating points.

The exact amount of Rating points you win/lose varies according to several factors; but, in average, you'll be winning/losing 20 Rating points per win/loss.

You can see the minimum Rating points for each League inside the game itself by clicking the "Leagues" button, or you can take a look at the Official Documentation I've linked above.

For example, Novice is for players with 0 to 99 Rating Points; when you reach 100, you'll be promoted to the Bronze III, comprised of players with 100 to 399 Rating Points; Bronze II is for players within 400 to 699 Rating, and so on.

Collection Power

Hold your horses, Mr. I-Want-To-Join-the-Champion-League-Today. Just having Rating Points isn't enough to climb to the higher Leagues. You'll also need Collection Power (CP).

Again, the Official Documentation explains what CP is:

Your Collection Power is equal to the combined Dark Energy Crystal burn values of all cards that you currently control. The exclusive purpose of Collection Power is to limit the maximum League of ranked play based on the extent of their card collection.
The purposes of this feature are to encourage players to grow their collections proportionally to their skill and as they advance in Leagues, but also to limit the potential for highly skilled players with small collections to earn the same top-tier rewards as players with decks that cost them thousands of dollars.

Determining your Collection Power isn't straightfoward as it depends on the rarity of your cards, the set/edition, if they're gold or regular foil, etc. It's also outside the scope of this post; so I highly recommend you to take a look at @mozzie5 Beginner's Guide on How to Determine Collection Power. It's majestic.

The important thing is: having a high Rating isn't enough to promote to the higher Leagues. You need to have an accordingly Collection Power (CP), or the game will keep you in the lower League you're already on.

For example, a player might have a Rating of 777, enough to be placed into the Bronze I League. This player have a Collection Power of 1500, but the minimum CP to Bronze I is 5000. So he'll stay in the Bronze II League, where the minimum CP is only 1000. When his CP reaches 5000, he'll be promoted to Bronze I.

Splintercards.com has this very nice table with all the Leagues and their minimum Rating/Collection Power.

Increasing your Collection Power

You can increase your CP through 3 different ways:

1. Acquiring Cards: each new card you own will permanently increase your CP. You can buy the cards on the market, or receive them on the Reward Chests. This post will focus on the purchase of cards, as it's a permanent solution to minimum CP requeriments.

2. Renting Cards: you can rent cards from other players, temporarily increasing your CP while you rent them. You'll have to pay a daily fee to keep them. Renting is outside the scope of this post (but will be the scope of another one that I'm already planning, follow me to read it when I publish!)

3. Delegating Cards: other players can delegate you cards, which works like a "free rent", in the sense that it's temporary but you don't need to pay a daily fee. We won't talk about delegating too.

Splinterlands Yearly Return on Investiment (ROI) - 24/September/2021

The chart above was made under the following assumptions and using the following concepts:

1. Value per Reward Chest, in US Dollars (USD), according to Splintercards Loot Chest Value Calculator. At the time of writing, it's 0.372 USD/Chest. Have in mind that this is an Average, which means that you can be lucky and open a Gold Foil Legendary card and earn 260 USD in your first Daily Quest, or you can keep opening chests for months and win a whole heap of useless junk.

2. The Player will buy the most efficient cards to increase the Collection Power, according to PeakMonsters Best CP/COST Ratio. At the time of writing, it's 84.034 CP/USD.

3. The Profit is the sum of the Daily Quest Rewards multiplied by 365 (days in an year), and the Season Rewards multiplied by 24.333 (15-days seasons in an year). So I'm assuming that the player will actually play Splinterlands everyday to complete their Daily Quest in order to collect the bonus Reward Chests.

4. The Player will be able to keep his Rating in order to stay in the League and get the Daily/Season Rewards accordingly. In other words, the player has to know how to play the game to hold his ground against other players in the same League.

5. Return on Investiment (ROI) defined as "profit earned, divided by cost of investment", according to the math-savvy @gadrian in LeoFinance

6. I'm not considering any price changes of the assets involved (purchased cards, reward chests value, DEC, etc.), for the sole reason that neither I nor anyone else have a crystal ball to see the future.

Example: Silver III needs a minimum CP of 15000, so he'll have to invest 10$ (Summoner's Spellbook) + 178.50$ (15000 / 84.034 on cards) for a total of 188.50$. He'll earn 12 Chests per season and 2 Chests per day => 1022 chests per year => 380.18$ per year => 380.18 / 188.50 = ROI of 201.69%

First Impressions

• Bronze III has an incredibly high ROI of 1,810.40% because it doesn't have a required minimum Collection Power, so you can achieve it by spending only 10$ for the Summoner's Spellbook. In Bronze III you can earn 1 Reward Chest everyday and 5 Season Reward Chests every season; in about two Seasons you will be able to pay your investment and already make a profit.

• The Silver League looks like a reasonable point between investment and ROI. The player can amass a sizeable collection of 188-843 USD and still have a very high ROI per year.

• The worst ROI is the Champion III League due to the fact that the whole Champion League has the same CP requirement, but Champion II and I have better rewards. So you need a very high Collection Power (500,000) but not so high rewards in comparison. But, even then, the ROI is still a solid 48.60% per year.

Next Iterations and Planned Improvements

I spent more time creating the above chart (and the Excel spreadsheets that I used to create the chart) than I would like to admit. Thus, I'll be publishing several iterations of it in the future, in order to keep the whole community updated about the state of Splinterlands ROI for players willing to purchase their own cards to permanently increase their Collection Power and climb the ranks in a sustainable fashion.

In the next posts, I'll be trying to add the following improvements:

A. Account for the 3% Cashback that one can get by purchasing their cards on MonsterMarket.io; I've wrote a guide about this HERE. Lesser costs = higher ROI !

B. Account, as profit, the DEC that is earned by winning Ranked games. The problem is that DEC rewards are too volatile and are dependant on several factors (capture rate, win streaks, Guilds, gold foil cards...). I also don't know where to find the average DEC Reward per League.

C. Confirm the lenght of Seasons. There are posts saying that 1) it's always 2 weeks, 2) always 15 days [I used this one], or 3) Seasons fluctuate between 12-16 (or 12-17) days. Shorter seasons means higher returns, as players end up receiving more Season Rewards per year.

D. Account, as profit, the SPS Airdrops that the Collection Power will generate for the next ~300 days. Also, the DEC won is also counted towards your "Airdrop Points" can generate extra profits by itself. Also, the SPS can be staked for more extra profits. That's a lot of extra profits.

E. Add a second line to the chart, in order to show the average Daily (or Monthly) USD rewards. I just need to make it look good.

(Also, if I made an unforgivable mistake in my calculations, please let me know and I'll fix it. Thanks in advance!)

Conclusion

I hope this Return on Investment Analysis will help the Splinterlands community to understand the numbers that are going on behind the scenes.

The game is booming with an increasing amount of new players joining everyday. Yes, it's true that the cards aren't as cheap as they were in the past; but, even then, there are still incredible opportunities to make a bank if you take your time to build your Collection and to learn the game to climb the ranks. NFT Gaming is not "the future", it's already the present.

Thanks for reading this article, and until next time!

New Player Bonus Offer

If you're a new player that still haven't bought the 10$ Summoner's Spellbook, you can help both you and me by creating a new account using my Referral Link (https://splinterlands.com?ref=luizeba). If you create an account using my link and then buy the Summoner's Spellbook, leave a comment here and let me know.

Once I have verified the referral, I'll send you some cards for free to use on your first weeks in the game to help you progress faster through the Bronze League! Using my Referral link doesn't cost you anything extra and will make both of us stronger 💪!

If you're looking for other NFT games to play, I'm also on Rising Star and dCrops. You can find all those NFT games on the "Hive dApp Menu" Extension.

Unless stated otherwise, all images are Unless stated otherwise, all images are 1) created and owned by me; 2) from the game featured in the post; or 3) royalty-free and usable for both personal/commercial usage from Pexels, Pixabay or Unsplash.
Also, this is definitely not a financial advice. Alsom cryptocurrencies are very volatile, so don't invest what you can't afford to lose.