Welcome back Splinterlands fans,

This week the engagement challenge is all about land and the brand new land cards. To be honest, I have been planning my approach for a while already, so this topic fits perfectly. Should I spill the beans on my whole plan, that was the big question, but yes why not, I love to share the journey and maybe someone finds it useful. I also secretly hope to walk away with at least one maxed land card, that would be sweet.

Let us first zoom out a bit and go back to the basics.

What are land cards again, how do we get them, and what can they do.

Quick Summary of the New Land Cards

I will not rewrite the full official announcement, you can find that here:
https://peakd.com/splinterlands/@splinterlands/splinterlands-inaugural-land-card-edition-full-announcement-and-technical-specification

But here is the short and important version.
Splinterlands is introducing a brand new land card edition that you can craft using your land resources. There are four rarities.

• Common
  
• Rare
  
• Epic
  
• Legendary
  

Each rarity comes with its own resource requirements and its own set of abilities. The stronger the card, the harder it becomes to craft. You need standard land resources like grain/wood/stone or iron, but the big twist is cinder. Cinder is created by burning cards from your collection.

Once crafted these new land cards will give a boost to PP production on your plot, making your land more powerful and more productive over time, perfect for long term strategy.

That is the summary we need for this post. Now let us move into the fun part.

My Crafting Plan

For me burning cards is always the hard part. Still I have been planning for this moment for a couple of weeks and I wanted a real target. My goal is simple.

I want to craft one maxed common land card and hopefully also 10 CC of the rare.

After looking at the numbers the plan ended up like this:

• 400 common copies
• 10 rare copies

These are the amounts I want to craft. That means a fixed amount of cinder is required and that cinder translates to a certain amount of CP. Time to check my collection.

Preparing the Cinder

I went through my collection and filtered out cards that I do not use anymore. Cards that are collecting dust. Cards that are part of my main sets the extra copies.
The total CP of those unused cards ended up around 117K CP, which equals 175K cinder. Enough to cover the plan.

It does come with drawbacks.
Burning imperfect units means losing that extra five percent CP bonus that a perfect max card normally provides. That hurts a bit, but I made peace with it. The bigger downside is that this batch of cards was originally meant for my survival mode. So I will leaving survival for what it is. But the land plan comes first for now.

I also already bought the grain needed for the craft so that part is covered as well. Now the only thing left is waiting for the crafting window to open, hopefully not in the middle of the night. The general sale will create some heavy pressure so good timing will matter.

The Market Reaction

This whole announcement already moves the market. Grain shot up nicely, perfect example of supply and demand or hype 🤣.

Card prices are also slowly rising, especially Chaos Legion cards and chaos legion reward cards. Why that set, simple, they have good CP per DEC value and they are still plentiful. Many players are preparing their burn piles and Chaos Legion is the cheapest fuel in town.

Finding the Right Plot

Placing the new land cards takes some thinking. My best plot has a small negative terrain boost for water, so it is not perfect for the common one, but even with that the numbers look strong. That is probably where my common land card will end up. For the rare card I have multiple wood plots that will benefit nicely so finding a spot will be easier.

If you want to plan your own setup you can use the planning tool here:
https://land.spl-stats.com/planning

One Thing I Do Not Like

There is one part that I am not a fan of. You are not guaranteed to obtain a crafted card after the limited three day crafting window in the general sale.
Burning the cards might end up with cinder that you cannot use. The team mentioned there will be more use cases for cinder in the future, which is good news, still I do not like burning cards and having the result sit idle in my account. But we roll with it, no other choice for now.

Beaker Signing Off

There you have my early land card plan. A simple straight forward setup, a clear target, a bunch of cards ready for the furnace, and a small hope that the timing works out in my favor.

Let us see how this plays out. I am excited for this next chapter in land and cannot wait to craft my first card.

Do you also want to be part of this amazing play to earn game consider using my refferal link.