Exactly 786 CL-packs opened, 6 Gold Foil Legendaries pulled in total. I've never owned even one GFL before, let alone six, so this is a big deal! I'm especially happy with pulling a Queen Mycelia, as I simply love the (very creepy) backstory of her and her mycelic minions. I'm sure you've already read Part 1 – Corruption, and Part 2 – Below from the Book of Chaos, right? And the lore on the card itself?

Can't wait to put these bad boys to work on my land!

I haven't really written about my Splinterlands journey before, so I guess this is a good start as any. I've been into this game since pretty much the beginning, but I didn't really start buying cards until fiat purchases became an option, shortly after the introduction of the Beta series, if I recall correctly.

I'd say that I pretty much just stumbled into the game, mostly by luck, and a little bit because I was pretty active in the Hive community back then. I had a bit of experience from my early teenage years with Magic: The Gathering, so I understood the collectible cards part and the buying and opening booster packs part.

So I basically just started throwing down all the fiat I could for a while. At the time, nobody were talking about NFTs, and I did not think of it as an investment at all. My mind wasn't even close to comprehending what this could/would turn into, which is why I say I was mostly just lucky to have stumbled in here at such an early time.

Building my collection – early beginnings

I didn't really get it at all. I just kept buying booster packs, and soon realized I would never get my cards up to the levels I wanted if I didn't start buying singles. But buying cards off of other players instead of from the company felt really strange to me for a long long time. Today of course, it feels like the most natural thing in the world, but back then my mind was still getting used to the concept.

I played like this for 1.5 years or so, before I just stopped playing completely. I built up a nice collection of pretty much all the different cards, though a bit randomly upgraded I suppose. I also grew very attached to my cards, so I never sold a single one. And besides, I were terrified to get ripped off, so selling them was always off the table. I just left them there, as I grew more and more tired of the game and eventually left indefinitely.

Stumbling back in

I was obviously not active on Hive at the time of the big hardfork. And I don't recall what triggered me in January of 2021, to look into Hive and discover everything that had happened, with the hostile takeover and whatnot. All I know is that I did. And then I looked into Splinterlands as well, of course. Just to see how it went... To say the timing was perfect, would be an understatement.

Land still available in the thousands at $20. SPS just announced. Holy crap! I better get my ass back in the game. Again I scuffled together whatever I could find of fiat lying around, to buy as much land as I could. I wish I found more at the time, but 60 plots is a hell of a lot better than nothing.

Joining a guild and improving the collection

At this time I also finally managed to join a guild. And not any guild, again I was very lucky to be accepted into one of the top guilds, The Anti Social Club.

I became familiar with the Guild Brawls and soon realized that playing in Gold League in ranked doesn't mean your cards are good enough to to play the Gold Fray in the Guild Brawls. To put it another way, you'd better have maxed out cards for the fray you're in. I realized looking at my old collection that many of my cards weren't even maxed out for Silver League.

So I finally started setting some goals for my collection: As far as it is possible, I want to have a maxed out Silver League Level collection, so I can have solid performances in the Silver Fray in the Brawls. It didn't take me long to achieve this, as I had a solid (though random) foundation. With a few exceptions, I was soon confident to join the silver frays and do fairly well.

Strategy for the future – Chaos Legion and beyond

I really really want to move up to a max Gold League level collection and be able to play in the CL Gold League Frays. To do that with the older editions is out of the question, but I'm eyeing a new dawn with CL. With all my SPL earnings, and some other crypto investments that has gone reasonably well, I've been able to buy a decent amount of packs. 949 to be precise (that number includes the bonus packs).

This number of packs landed me close to a maxed out Silver Deck in this series. The rest of the cards I'll be buying as singles moving forward, and it already looks like I'm not too far off. I don't have a chance at maxing out Untamed at Gold level, but Untamed will be phased out of the upcoming Modern Format when a new series is introduced. Long term planning in progress!

Thank you for reading! I'll try to post SPL content more (or at least semi) regularly moving forward.
@mightpossibly