When new DEC tokens were released, spliterland came out with a great delegation offer.

In addition to "burning" cards, or purchsing DEC on the Steem Engine or Tron markets, there will now be the ability to earn Dark Energy Crystals by delegating Steem Power to the @steemmonsters account! Each delegator will be awarded DEC on a daily basis from the amount taken in from users buying votes in proportion to their delegation.

This is similar to delegating your SP to voting bots but what made it a great deal was this next section:

Initially we are planning to distribute the DEC earned buying votes from the ~360k SP available in the @steemmonsters account to all of the other delegators. This is to encourage more people to delegate as they will be receiving additional DEC rewards compared to their delegated SP.

This sounded absolutely amazing, they were distributing DEC earned by their own SP to delegators so I jumped on the opportunity right away and delegated 200 SP.

Initially results were fine. For the first few days i earned a decent 70 DEC for my delegation but it quickly dropped. So this weekend i did another analysis of how I was actually doing delegating my SP to splinterland.

I was surprised

I made a negative ROI in last 7 days comparing it to what I was paying on an average to the SP I was delegating from open market.

Source: https://busy.org/@steemmonsters/promote-your-posts-with-the-dark-energy-crystals-steem-engine-token

From my calculations, I made ~280 DEC from delegating 200SP for a week. Which in current market price is worth .65 STEEM.

For the SP I was delegating from open market, I paid .7 STEEM/Week for 200 SP. So I made a loss of .05 STEEM. That's -7.7% ROI.

So to answer the question, Is it a good idea to delegate to Splinterland/ steemmonster?
NO

Hope this helps someone, who cares about this type of stuff.

@mightypanda