Splinterlands in-depth Economy Guide

Hi !
This is a in-depth guide to the Splinterland economy and will delve into how to grow and increase your assets on your Splinterland account, starting "almost" from 0 in a wise and rational way and toward creating the basis to enter into the Silver Leagues with a solid economic foundation.

This is a very long post. However, if you find yourself at a point where you are unable to make progress in Splinterlands or because you don't know what strategy to adopt or how to earn more DEC, this is exactly the post for you.
What are you waiting for, then? fasten your seat belts, let's go!

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First choices

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Immediately after creating your Splinterland account and purchasing the Summoner's Spellbook, you are faced with many choices.
Will you invest more money or try to climb the leagues without adding a single cent?
If you have decided to invest more than the $ 10 Summoner's Spellbook,
how will you use this budget?
Will you buy cards or stake funds or a combination of the 2?
In my first short post I introduced the concept of using the SPS airdrops, convert those SPS through Hive (SPS-->HIVE-->DEC) into DEC and in the second post, how to use DEC to rent very efficient cards

What we will do today is explaining in details why accumulating DECs or putting them in a liquidity pool is a way more efficient method to get SPS aidrops than by staking SPS, why it's important nonetheless to keep some SPS in staking and
why buying cards will become, as your account keep growing in power, the best method to grow even faster.

I'll make extensive use of the tools and calculators that you can easily find on the web (I will provide all links, of course) and with their help I will verify what we are saying and show you how to do it by yourself.

First and foremost: the first choice.
What is your budget?
Consider adding even a tiny bit more than the 10 $ you spend to buy the Summoner's book.
10 $ more can go a long way to help you with the first needs your novice grade requires.
50-100$ more will, by themselves, create the seeds of a solid economic foundation.
Simple as that.
To make this post more interesting we will work with the first hypothesis, that is, buying a Summoner's book and only buying 10 $ worth of SPS/DEC.

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Buying cards or build up airdrop points/staking?

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That's basically the first question you should ask yourself.
I will give you a short answer: in the first period I recommend to just use those 10$ to buy DEC and use part of them to rent cards as showed in my second post.
The amount of DEC you will feel like using to rent cards,
to "ensure" you reach at least Bronze II,
will depend on how rapidly you'll learn how to rent and use few relatively cheap cards and get the result you are searching for.
The rest of the DEC will be used in the calculation regarding the SPS airdrop points you have and, as such, how many SPS airdrop you will receive daily.
Let's go with an example so that you can clearly see what I am talking about.

Once bought your Summoner's Spellbook you can buy 10 $ worth of DEC with your credit card or with Cryptos. With 10$ you can buy, while I am writing this, about 3650 DEC (take a look by yourself https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/dark-energy-crystals)
You will start competing in the Novice League.
Your first objective is to reach Bronze III in order to get 5 loot chest at the end of the Season.
You also only need to reach Bronze III league once in the Season to earn those chests.
You could do that by renting card/cards for just 1-2 days in the last day or 2 to pay the smallest amount of DEC in renting costs.
Always check if the card costs less by paying with DEC or with credits; usually the DEC option is the best.

Now, about which card to rent. You can rent a single summoner card that, played wise, will grant you a seat in the Bronze III league.
This card is Mylor Crowling.

This 3 Mana Summoner card will give the Thorn ability to all the cards you field, that means every melee attack your cards will receive will damage back the attacker card.
It doesn't work against ranged and magic attacks, it's true,
but in the Novice and Low Bronze Leagues
you won't find players with many ranged and magic cards.
It's very common you will face lots of fire element decks,
one of the most effective starter card deck,
a deck that is nonetheless dominated by melee attackers and, as such,
you will completely trash them.
Even in the case you suspect you are about to face
a deck with some magic damage cards, then you can field Mylor Crowling with a cheap (mana-wise) Failed Summoner and Unicorn Mustang and, again, easily destroy your opponent.
In synthesis, in lower leagues where people don't have many cards (like you) it's close to impossible to beat this summoner.
Now click on Mylor Crowling and take a look.
How much does it cost to rent him at Lev. 1? Less than 3 DEC.
Rent him in the last day of the current Season and,
if you play well, you can reach Bronze III.
In that case you will just need to attemp finishing the daily quests
with what you've got (nothing, Mylor Crowling aside).
In the meantime the 3647 DEC left
are being used to kindly airdrop SPS to you.
Let's now take a look at the SPS staking and SPS airdrop mechanics.

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SPS staking and SPS airdrops mechanics

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You can stake SPS and get SPS and vouchers in return and/or accumulate a mix of assets (like DEC) to receive SPS airdrops.

Imagine you use that same 10 $ to buy SPS.
While I write this you can buy around 100 SPS with 10 $
(take a look https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/splinterlands).
With this useful tool tool SPS stake you can see how many SPS you get by staking 100 SPS and how many Vouchers you get Tool Vouchers.
Bear in mind that those depends on the total global amount of SPS staked. The more SPS are staked in total, the lower your portion amount,
so your share of SPS staked compared to the total.
See? Today you would get 0.08 SPS daily if you staked 100 SPS and 0.006 Vouchers. In total something like 0.01 $ daily.

Let's take a look now at SPS airdrop points
https://www.splintercards.com/tool-sps-airdrop.html

As you can see, close to the name of the asset
(E.g. "Collection Power", "DEC Tokens" ) there is the number 1,
which means that for each Collection power/ DEC Token
you get 1 airdrop point.
Each 10000 airdrop point will cause 1 SPS to be airdropped every day.
As you can see, you will receive more airdrop points if you put DEC in a liquidity pool (but you might be subject to the eventual impermanent loss). Experiment by yourself.
Just keep in mind that you will soon need some DEC to buy cards.
If you keep 10 $ worth of DEC (around 3650 DEC) in your Splinterland account instead of staking $ 10 worth of SPS (100 SPS) they will generate 3650 aidrop points, equal to about 0.3 SPS per day (around $ 0.03 per day), more than triple the amount you get by staking SPS (0.08 SPS).

Why should you also be staking SPS gradually if it is more convenient to just accumulate DEC or put them in liquidity pools?
Because the amount of staked SPS is one of the requirements for entering tournaments.
At first you will not participate in tournaments.
You will not even get the idea of ​​participating in tournaments as completing the daily quests and
trying to reach the Bronze I and Silver III leagues will be challenging, but as you grow (not only in quality and quantity of cards but also more experienced) tournaments could be another fun way to get cards, DEC or SPS.

Once you reach the Bronze I league and finally the Silver III league, with a mix of purchased and rented cards and a hoard of DEC aside, you will find yourself at a crossroads. You will find that you are in the balance between the group of players with a few cards from the Bronze Leagues that you have just beaten and the players of the Silver III league, with several legendaries in possession, cards of higher levels and some particularly rare Monster / Summoner cards.

There is no exact answer on how to beat players of that level other than an obvious (and precisely because obvious, overlooked) suggestion.
You have to grow in power.

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Which cards to buy?

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To do this you have to start buying cards, but which ones?
It depends.
Each card has a value called Collection Power, which is the amount of airdrop points it helps to generate (which is used to calculate how many SPS aidrop you will get). Why is this important? Because it explains exactly why cards are assets.
I'll explain it immediately with .... 3 examples!

1. Go to Peakmonsters, click on buy, select the "Compare" view mode and apply the "Best CP / Cost Ratio" filter.
   Find in order the cards that give you the most Collection Power for the same cost.
   The idea is to buy the most useful cards among these and even if not particularly strong cards (especially at level 1) they will help you grow quickly in power
   (since you will partially recover the already low cost since they generate a lot of Collection power).
   Furthermore, as soon as you arrive at the Bronze League II and the games with the rulesets,
   you will find that it is not enough to have very rare Legendary cards to win but also the most varied number of cards,
   since you will find yourself in some matches with weird rulesets that exclude the few cards on which you relied so much on in the beginning.
   That said, in Silver League you will begin to find players with some good legendaries, summoners, or higher level cards. That explains why you will start evaluating point 2.

2. Take "Harklow", the Legendary Monster of the Death Element. It costs about $ 3, which is about 1000 DEC.
   As you can see, Harklow Lev. 1 is worth 500 Collection Power (i.e. generates 500 SPS airdrop points every day).
   500 Collection Power is what you get even if you have 500 unused DEC in your Splinterlands Account.
   This means that you have used 1000 DEC (which generated 1000 Airdrop points before being used) to buy a Legendary card which generates 500 airdrop points just by owning it, plus you can use it (or rent it).

3. Now consider Doctor Blight and / or Summoners. Similar for one reason only: they have a terrible Collection Power / cost ratio but are indispensable in order to compete at higher levels. Doctor Blight is just one example of a strong card that serves in the deck of a player who wants to compete in the Silver League and continue towards the Gold League. Summoners at higher levels are indispensable in order to play higher level cards.

The purchase of cards should be a compromise between these 3 and it is this balance (combined with your skill) that will determine how quickly you'll advance on your journey on Splinterlands.

Gradually, as you accumulate cards, the part of "income" that will come from renting cards will become more and more important.

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Conclusions

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One last piece of advice I can give you is to keep an eye on the prices of the cards that interest you.
Occasionally you'll find someone who just want to take some profits.

I am aware that this has been a long and demanding read
(hopefully informative too) and I am also aware that I will further address the subject later with some bets on cards that have obvious disparities, from cards that you can buy and rent at high prices for their cost, to cards whose usefulness is not reflected in the price and so on.

I hope to receive your support, lots of comments and many questions I'll be more than happy to answer to.
Have fun and share love !