This Week in My Splinterlands - My First Tournament and General Sale Strategy

With the switch to a completely new blogging schedule that I am taking, Splinterlands will be a weekly feature. I will just summarise the week and take as long as I need - it might be a 100 word tiny summary.. Or a huge essay!

This time I will also talk about events from more than a week ago - in general, i'll just summarize how Chaos Legion has been going for me and talk about what my strategy is - currently - for the remainder of 2nd phase as well as General Sale.

Chaos Legion So Far

It has been 2 and a half weeks since Chaos Legion arrived - of course, only around 2 million packs are available to be added to circulation and just around 1,5 million has been distributed; rest remains unclaimed with vouchers.

Personally, I have opened a total of 7 packs with really good results. While I haven't actually pulled a single card of a higher rarity than Rare, I did grab three GF Commons (including Deeplurker and Stitch Leech!), as well as the real jackpot among Rares - Gold Foil Tarsa. This means that my 7 packs definitely paid back for themselves! Here is the absolute winner of my openings:

As for gameplay, this Tarsa has not been very useful - I do not really have a single high level Fire card. In general, I do not find myself playing Fire too often in Chaos Legion - The Starter set of them is pretty inflexible, where nearly every team is going to end up based around Sneak and Opportunity. I also am not a fan of the playstyle, so I haven't levelled any followers just yet.

When it comes to splinters I do play a lot: those are Water and Earth. Earth is simple - there are some restrictive rulesets in which magic is simply the strongest, so I get to slam Mustang with double healers (Wood Nymph and Goblin Psychic) and call it a day. Mycelic Infantry, as well as Centauri Mage also make Earth a tempting option often enough.

Water is the only splinter I have any semblance of a levelled team in. Kelya is my only level 2 summoner, while I also have a GF Deeplurker and levelled Pelacor Bandit, Cruel Sethropod and Demented Shark. Water Melee feels so strong with Kelya in lower leagues that I fall back to it as a default composition if I am out of ideas.

In general, I am enjoying the new cards, even if they are not as strong (and figured out!) as some of the old ones. They are powerful enough in lower leagues to see them quite often and to be honest: I'm just happy we got a summoner that goes well with melee attackers in Water.

My First Tournament

This week I played in my first ever tournament in Splinterlands - The Winter Week elimination by Blazar Force. I never wanted to enter those before I had a decent collection, but seeing as it was an anytime tourney with a 1DEC entry fee - what could go wrong?

Well, it turns out a lot. I did finish with a decent (for my newbie standards) 10-4 result, but most of my wins were either just playing Water Melee/Daria Melee comps, or simply being matched against very low power players. I lost games that were restricted to other splinters way too often, but it was definitely a learning experience; and a reminder that there's no going around getting a well-rounded collection.

I enjoyed the tournament though. It was for sure a confidence boost, as I felt like 50% winrate was going to be all I was gonna achieve, yet I was pretty close to getting above 75% - just one win away! This only gives me more motivation to keep trying and improve my collection, as well as learn more nuance with teams I am not as comfortable with. Can't wait to join more of those tournaments!

Joining a Guild

One exciting thing I did was join a guild! It is a guild made very recently by @nytehawker so it is not at all developed - so it feels like fun to be a part of making something from scratch! It is a very friendly place with no real requirements, but that only makes me want to donate more DEC!

So far we only managed to level our lodge through questing, but we are slowly making our way to being able to participate in brawls!

Plans for Chaos Legion

I definitely am excited for Chaos Legion. My plan for the upcoming days is to simply.. increase my DEC holdings by as much as possible in order to avoid as many packs as I can - without having to put in any more FIAT.

Currently, I am aiming to hit at least 100 packs. That way I will be able to open a few of them, while holding the rest until the price hopefully appreciates over the long term throughout 2022. I also set aside a certain amount of DEC that I want to use to max out some splinters for Silver level. I am surely going to max Water, but I have yet to decide which other 2 I want to max - I know affording all of them is a big ask and don't want to overplan.

Oh, I also got way too excited for Baakjira and FOMO'd in buying a few packs with my vouchers, even though that will only give me like a 5% chance to get the card. It does look like an insane card across all levels and might end up being worth quite a bit.

Speaking of good cards, I can't believe I am seeing so little Tusk, the Wide! I feel like it's just got SO much health on top of a Void ability.

Closing Words

Overall, I am torn - on one hand, I want 17th January to come as fast as it can, but on the other.. I need as much time as I can to get more currency for packs! While I will be content with just 100, I do want to get even more: I believe both packs and cards will appreciate hard in value - so the plan is to stock up on as much as possible - use some to get a levelled deck (after all, I actually love the gameplay) and then wait for the rest to get expensive!