Mistakes Were Made: My First Week in Splinterlands

Last week I decided to give Splinterlands a try. I have played plenty of card games before, but none with NFTs or an economy anything like this one. As you can probably tell from the title, I made a few errors over the course of my first week here. If you'd like to skip straight to the takeaways, I also wrote up an entry on some newbie tips to hopefully help some other players who are just starting out to avoid the same pitfalls that caught me. For everyone who is just here for the lulz, please read on.

Splinterlands sounded interesting to me because of the card ownership aspect of it. So naturally, I started off by...trying to get away without having any cards! Yes, I bought the spellbook and attempted to climb the ladder without buying or renting any cards. This may have worked in the past when you could still earn DEC from lower level matches, but in the current environment I was going nowhere. At first I thought I could just grind out the daily quest reward, but all I got was...potion...potion...potion. After a few days I got fed up and loaded some credits into my account. Time to actually acquire some cards!

Next, I read up a bit on cards to see what I should get. Some people seemed to think that some Wavesmith card was pretty good so I splurged and outright bought one, I figured if it didn't work out I could at least rent it out. Unfortunately I suspect that I purchased my copy while some other player was trying to bid up the market (thanks a lot, whoever that was), because the prices ever since a day or so after I bought have been a good $0.50 lower than what I paid.

I was able to win some games and get to a Bronze II rating. I did have to rent out some collection power though...I'm not sure if I just missed the setting, or if Peakmonsters only allows you to rent with DEC, but I could not for the life of me get the autorent CP system to work for me when I only had credits. So I ended up paying a bit of a premium going through the in-game market (ugh) to get enough collection power, to earn some DEC to set up my autorent. Not sure if this counts as a mistake, but it definitely felt bad. Also, if you know how to use credits for rentals on Peakmonsters let me know in the comments (please!).

Finally, at the end of the week things are mostly getting on track, albeit with some costly missteps made along the way. I have a mini-collection, a (tiny) income, and even managed to join a guild! Also, giving a try at writing a blog on the experience - this is my second article, if you want to take a look at my first entry on some of the lessons I learned (also linked at the top) you can check it out here.