Aren't Rentals Down?

As bot farms become less profitable, tournament/ranked level play and rentals rise to the top in my mind. The rental market may be down for now, but I am still looking at expanding my rental portfolio.

No matter how good ingame rewards get, tournament grinders will have extra financial incentive to pay more for their rentals compared to the typical player and bots. I think it's likely Rentals will grow not only because of the new reward system, but Brawls will also reward players soon. Weird Beard has also talked about tournament economy updates down the road as well, and I am looking at my collection for rental potential now and future while cards are so cheap.

Rentals may be down for now, but I think it's unlikely that will last. The market will likely adjust in either forcing reward values down or forcing rental values up, or more likely a combination of both. Add on top of that how packs are purchased for their airdrop points before dumping their contents on the market or the packs themselves on hive engine, and I'm accumulating as hard as I can with both play and rentals in mind.

Peakmonsters or Splex.gg?

Why not both? While I certainly want to give a huge shoutout to Peakmonsters for their amazing new tools in peakmonsters premium, I believe the king of rental pricing and automation is still the splex.gg Rent Golem.

While the rent golem will ride your RC like a sorority initiate at her first frat party, pop a couple hundred hive and buckle up for the ride of your life. I might do another post before too long to talk about how I use Peakmonsters alongside the Rent Golem for even better results.

Logging in Securely with Keychain

One concern, you should always have with anything in crypto, is how your keys are handled and who has access to them. Keychain allows your keys to be stored securely and encrypted without handing them over directly to the service you're signing off on. Everything ran directly on the dashboard utilizes Keychain, and only the posting key is required for the rental account running the golem. More information on the Keychain project can be found here: Hive Keychain and Hive Auth

How to Set Up a Splex.gg Account

While the service is still in closed beta, your first step to setting up is to DM Genepool on discord using this discord server: Splex.gg Discord. He will never ask for your keys, but he will ask for the name of your desired management account to set up, as the main account.

Adding a Rental Account

For security and organizational reasons, it might be wise to set up a rental account since the account the rent golem runs on requires the posting key to run, but you can also set up a fast sweep to take dec out of the account as often as you like and lock the cards within the account for extra security. I personally do use a rental account and lock the cards to be safe.

Choosing Your Settings

The splex.gg team recommends balanced, and I've found even aggressive works pretty well with about 20 HIVE per 100 cards on 1000 cards. The FAQ does recommend 25-30 HIVE per 100 cards, and while that does seem to be a bit overkill to me, it does give your account a lot of room to grow without having to worry about HIVE constantly. Nothing is worse than getting caught up in a HIVE RC deathtrap even if you can always check out DLease.io for a HIVE lease if you find yourself in the dreaded deathloop.

Balanced

Balanced is the best as long as you can stand not seeing your entire collection renting out every second of the day. Does a great job of capturing the mass bot farm rentals as they occur.

Rent Everything

Rent Everything leaves a lot on the table removing the CP/DEC limit. While useful for some cards in the Beginning of the Season, and low liquidity cards like Alpha GFL's that just don't want to rent out, this option is not a great fit for most collections.

RC Saving Options

Just get HIVE guys. Seriously. Power Up some HIVE and Blog. Stop being cheap--you're only cheating yourself.

Aggressive

Aggressive uses more RC and gets less return on average for more consistent rentals out. This is the option you choose if you want to log into your account and just see all your rentals delegated without going with lowest market rates.

Dashboard

The splex.gg dashboard is full of amazing tools to take advantage of including total card counts, price of cards when added, their current cost, DEC rental income today, and the APY today.

I really enjoy how the dashboard also tracks how close you are to making a complete return on each card:

Invoices

splex.gg is certainly not a free tool, but I would argue it is certainly worthwhile. While if you update your rentals 10-15 times a day checking the market manually, you could perform pretty close to the rent golem. It depends on how you value your time at that point-- if your time spent manually adjusting rentals is less valuable than 10% of your rental income, then it makes sense to pass on the service. I would think most humans wouldn't be able to perform as well on the rent golem on most cards, and some collections do not work effectively on any algorithm. Those exceptions are pretty few and far between though, and there is no problem separating accounts for rent golem cards and cards that need special, manual attention. It's still a huge time saver with the potential to outperform you on most cards.

The site makes it easy to pay these invoices with keychain integration built into the site, and paying invoices in DEC or SPS takes seconds.

Market

splex.gg also has a market with cash back scaling on how much you spend through their market that sorts cards by estimated yRoA making it easy to purchase the cards with the best rental returns with graphs on how the card performs at each level. I personally don't like to buy only the hottest rentals because of how the ever shifting market makes it better to have a collection based on more than RoA. I still think peakmonsters has better market tools, especially with premium, but I love that splex.gg sorts by estimated yRoA since peakmonsters does not provide that sorting option at this time.

Other Tools

Reward Lookup for Hive/Discord Bragging

Season Lookup for more HIVE/Discord Bragging

Chest EV by League with Average and Median

Rating Graph to Track your Performance

I have been extremely satisfied with both peakmonsters premium and the splex.gg rent golem-- I expect to use both quite a bit. I personally enjoy a combination of the automation that splex.gg provides and the personal touch that peakmonsters premium provides.