Dipping my Toe into Splinterlands - Mixed Feelings
Hi all,
I decided to try Splinterlands again after watching this vid from @bulldog1205:
https://twitter.com/bulldog1205/status/1690162590477893632
Barrier #1 - No Spell Book
I joined their discord and he graciously gave me a promo code for a free spell book (normally $10 USD). This removed one of the (many) barriers to entry into the game.
Barrier #2: No Resources
I had no cards except for starter cards, but you don't earn any rewards with those. No chests, no SPS, nothing. How to get cards? Buy with DEC. I don't have DEC. I need to swap HIVE for it.
Done:
You can also buy cards with credits (which you can buy with Paypal or a credit card). That's the "0" on the left above.
Barrier #3: No Cards
OK. So now I have some resources. How to get cards? Everyone (and I mean everyone) has said to rent cards instead of buying them. For that, I had to head over to https://peakmonsters.com/.
(dear god:)
What are good cards? How do I build a deck? How much will this cost? Luckily, bulldog built a starter deck that you can rent all at once. It only costs ~$0.12 USD per day to rent.
Unfortunately, my renting experience wasn't a great one. It takes a while to load 100+ cards into your shopping cart, and during that time, several of the early cards got rented to others. This made my shopping card invalid. By the time I figured out how to clear those cards, more had gone invalid. Then can I rent the remaining cards? I press the button. It says I did. No cards show up. By this point, I'm starting to realize that you have to REALLY want to play this game to get to any actual gameplay.
I decide to rent a cards from bulldog's deck one at a time. I grab Llama & Kron and a few other super cheap earth (green) cards. The rest are still all starter cards.
Barrier 3: Staking SPS
As bulldog explained in his video, SPS staking can be used to boost the amount of SPS you get rewarded for playing. I staked around $10 worth of the stuff. I didn't realize, but you do earn 15% APR on your staked SPS.
Finally Game Time
OK! That stuff up there ^ was not fun, but now it's game time! I win a bunch of games and jump from Bronze III to Bronze II just by using the LLama/Kron combo. Half-way through Bronze II, the rulesets prevent me from hardly ever using him. Each game has a random set of rules and restrictions on cards you can play. For example, if Earth (green) cards aren't allowed, I only have starter cards. I quickly got into the habit of surrendering these games. Even in bronze 2, these cards weren't cutting it. Plus, I get no rewards from winning. I decide instead to just focus on winning the games where I can play llama/kron and to rush through my 50 energy.
I can't find an overall win %, but as you can imagine, it wasn't very good. This wasn't bulldog's fault. I only rented 10% of the cards he suggested! I also had no idea how to play (and still only having a very basic idea). The good news is that the 50 games flew by. I'd be surprised if it took me 2 hours all told to play them all.
In that time, I earned 7 season chests! No idea what's in them, but I hope it's cards.
I earned a few focus chests, but there weren't any cards in there. Mainly potions and things that (I think) you use to boost your pack opening rewards.
I also earned a little over 2 SPS tokens. That's roughly 44 DEC at current market prices. This almost covered 1 day of my 2 day rental (each row is a card. the 40 and 20 cost cards are LLama/Kron):
Unfortunately, SPS earned through battling is staked. This means you can't trade it for more DEC. (You can, but you have to unstake it first, which takes weeks.)
I also learned a lot about the game itself. I probably learned the most by watching the cards/comps other people used to crush me.
Conclusion
Overall, I can't say I'm thrilled with my experience. It's easy enough to make an account and play some of the practice games, but it felt like work jumping through all the hoops to play the real game with NFTs enabled. Also, I don't love that cards level up simply by paying more money. Buy more cards, power them up, and then they get bonus stats. I don't know enough to speak with any authority on this, but I can't imagine any real path for budget players to reach the highest leagues with cards they own. Renting is the only option.
The gameplay itself is decent. The strategy is all about putting a strong team together given the current ruleset you are facing. However, for me this just came down to praying Earth cards were allowed and that I had at least 17 mana so I could play my combo. More (and better) cards will alleviate that.
At the end of the day, I'm on the fence about how much further into the game I want to go. I'm going to let my energy recharge, and then I'm going to rent bulldog's full deck (no matter how painful!) and try again. I may also go ahead and rent for 3-4 days instead of 2 just to avoid the pain of re-renting them so often. The earning is certainly not worth playing a game that you don't find fun, so if the fun doesn't pan out, I can't see myself grinding. I'm hopeful that a full deck of good cards will make the experience much more fun. I also want to learn more than just Earth!
Special thanks to @bulldog1205, @rckmtl, and @cryptoznewb for tons of help and hand-holding.
Great update and good to see how you are progressing. The renting experience takes time to get to grips with and I've usually bought what I need to avoid the hassle of renting, but for some expensive cards it doesn't make sense.
I checked the deck renting process and I thought it would have been easier than it is, it seems it is not so easy to rent a whole bronze deck in one click like you wrote.
An easier way may be to just rent two splinter starter decks by Bulldog as I think you don't need a whole bronze deck to start with. Earth and Water are good ones and you probably could even rent just 10 cards from each one to start with and add any other cards you think you are missing.
Good luck with your playing, you have made much faster progress than I did at the start.
That's a solid suggestion. I'll buy some cheap ones like achim03 suggested and then focus on 2 (maybe 3) colors. His list of cards didn't have too many neutrals, so I think I'll pick those up to just to have fillers at different mana costs.
Good idea to join this.
It's very interesting to see how much a new player has to struggle to get actually going and start to earn some income from the game. I've been playing the game for close to 5 years and a lot has changed since I started. Many players rent their cards but it can also be very useful to own some cheap cards and buy them. There are some cards that cost less than 0.05$ and in bronze level it's not worth upgrading any of them, because you can't play them. Very interesting post. Hopefully you will continue your journey and write more about it :-)
I have picked this post on behalf of the @OurPick project and it will be highlighted in the next post!
Thanks for that suggestion. I'll follow your advice and just buy some of the cheapest ones.
Hello really, the game has some entry barriers, I particularly play well in gold, and it's well disputed, I hope you feel a greater energy in the game and want to stay, in the rest, I'm also willing to help, if you have doubts, hit me up on discord, see you in the praetorian fields, my friend!
I appreciate the encouragement!
I was looking forward to reading a post similar to this one. I've heard a lot about Splinterlands but I haven't tried playing it yet, apparently it's good for card game lovers but not so good for normal gamers. The problems you're having sound frustrating man.
For sure. Thanks for reading!
The other way is scholarship.
I think it's more of like a slow progress to build your own account. Like some games where you can pay to get leveld up. Here in Splinterlands it's kind of a steady gradual grind to level up the collection and to be honest gotta push and shove there's a lot of stuff and not enough money 😂.
Anyways I hope you don't give up. In terms of defi economy aspect I think Splinterlands has held strong compared to GU. Honestly we want to play for the game but to have that play to own/earn aspect there needs to be a sustainable model which I think Splinterlands is probably one of the best i wanna say as they have already survived a bear market and this is the second one.
:P I have more into Splinterlands than GU and Splinterlands games are short which is another nice part. No need to play 40 mins to 1 hour control vs control :) come on don't tell me u didnt enjoy that.
Hopefully they make GU faster paced. I just don't see the long pace games doing well anymore. Even like moba games on mobile are better cuz they are faster and dont nee ddthe high end specs. I'm not sure if this is a good example. I think you get my point. Don't give up!
You're right that short games is a HUGE benefit. I'm finding myself frustrated when someone takes 2 minutes to create their deck! Lol that's like turn 3 in GU 😆
lol well at least its only once. I find it worse when someone in gu runs down their timer every turn :) what about that lol and im stuck with them for 30+ minutes :)
if splinterlands added an official 'common and rare cards for your league. it will cost X' option for one or more splinters, it would be pretty easy, right? I hope they do that
go to splinterlands.tv and watch other good players - You will learn the game fast plus you can win awesome cards by watching . Good luck to you
https://twitter.com/LovingGirlHive/status/1692919924723974397
Thanks for sharing your experience, it is very interesting to see the contrast with other people talking about Spliterlands.
I've just started this month as well, and that video by @Bulldog1205 was a game changer. That being said I just made it to Bronze II today. I tried to pick and choose from the bronze list from the video, but found I ended up having to use starter cards for more restricted rule sets. I'm no whale but I can spend a few bucks so I too decided to rent the entire Bronze list. (Took me a whole morning to navigate renting, too.) I had already paid for the spell book so I had 3000 credits that will last me a few days, in spite of the fact that the video seems to have caused card rental fees to climb.
Now that I have 200-ish rented cards, I wish I could figure out how the get the cards with the "S" out of my face - something I didn't get from bulldog is just how badly starter cards mess up your returns.
I have a couple of bones to pick with the Dawg: First in his other videos, he just seems so happy that us n00bs need to stake SPS to get earnings. Thanks a bunch.
Second, I've been a little FOMO about lands, and wondered if I can/should get a small piece of that action. I was excited to see a video by @bulldog1205 on the subject. Sadly, he basically just read the 1.5 white paper. You know, I can do that too. Mind you, it did cure my FOMO - nothing I read or heard gives me the slightest interest in getting a land plot.
One issue I ran into is that buying credits is easy, but my banks wont allow crypto purchases using credit cards (might be a Canadian thing). (I want no part of Google or Apple Pay.) Dont see a way to buy SPS or DEC with credits.
I'm still enjoying the game, and I have bulldog to thank for that. Now if I can just earn back my rental fees before I have to buy more credits...
Cheers,
Mortor
https://twitter.com/lee19389/status/1693972806193598927
#hive #posh