Converting Magic: The Gathering strategy to Splinterlands

Hey everyone, welcome to my blog series “Magic the Gathering to Splinterlands” where I will be examining and exploring the strategies and nuances of Splinterlands as a long-time competitive Magic the Gathering player. My name is Octopus, and I’m excited to go from poor and horrible at Splinterlands to a rich alltime-megaspike. In today’s post, I’m going to be talking about the game mechanics, and only the game mechanics, not the economy. Let's take this journey together.

Anyone coming here with piqued interest was most likely from the mention of Magic the Gathering rather than Splinterlands. Splinterlands seems to be (from the perspective of a newcomer to the space) much more culturally pervasive into the blockchain space than Magic is in the physical realm. Everyone I’ve talked to plays at varying levels. There are many more similarities and differences, which I’ll discuss here:

Some Differences:
-Magic: The Gathering requires a deck, Splinterlands does not
-Splinterlands pays you, you pay Magic: The Gathering
-Magic: The Gathering may break you financially, but not as much as some high-end Splinterlands NFTs

Similarities between Magic the Gathering and Splinterlands are…thin, unless you know what you’re looking for. Functionally when either game is stripped down to it’s bare nuts and bolts, the raw steel in your cast iron pan after a good chainmail scrubbing, they are both just math problems with colorful pictures. So what's the similarity? Resource Management.

So far, day one, both games are resource management at their very core. How you allocate your resources, make decisions based on your opponents choices (or past choices, in the case of Splinterlands), and strategically acquire additional cards, are all tentacles of resource management.

What does that mean for us? It means we can study, make inferences, test them, and come up with a solid strategy that should cut through the randomness Splinterlands affords us. Continuing on, I’ll discuss strategies I’ve learned playing Magic: The Gathering for many, many years, and how I’m using them to get better at Splinterlands, and how you can use them too! See you soon!