My Splinterlands Journey: A reflection on my first year anniversary in Splinterlands.

I remember my first few games in Splinterlands to be more thrilling that ever because instead of playing with Computer AI, which is mostly what my games are, I got to play with other players around the world. A week or two after playing the game, I reached a rating of around 600 which is a huge achievement for me at that time. I then joined Splinterlands PH Facebook group to gain more knowledge and strategy on how to play the game. Afterwards, I got informed that renting a few selected cards could bring you to higher leagues and gain more DEC per battle won. It was at that time that getting a 2000 DEC from chest is a huge celebration because the value of DEC at that time is quite good. However, around November 2021, I think, the value of DEC and other cryptocurrencies went down. This impacted lots of players based on Facebook posts that I have read. And many left the game. Then several updates were pushed through by Dev team to further stabilize the game. However, these were negatively viewed by several players and caused them to quit the game. But, I chose to stay and play the game.

Splinterlands, as seen by many, is a play-to-earn game. And I admit, for just a spell book that costs 10 USD, one's asset could be doubled, tripled or quadrupled in just a few days, considering that Mr. Luck is on your side. Honestly, since I started playing last August 2021, I haven't had any 5-digit DEC nor Legendary Gold nor Legendary Air drop in the game. So I guess I just need to grind more to grow my account, yeah? It's around January 2022 when I learned that you can post contents in Hive and earn tokens, especially the weekly challenges of Splinterlands. So aside from playing the game, I regularly post Splinterlands contents in Hive. A month or two after playing and posting contents of Splinterlands, I gained token that I eventually converted to DEC to buy cards. DEC is steadily declining its value at that time and I thought that I should stop renting cards to play. So, I went to peakmonsters.com and started placing bids to buy cards lower that the current listing. A huge kudos to @peak-monsters team for a very well done portal. You can check my post here - Build Your Splinterlands Deck Using Peakmonsters on how I used Peakmonsters to build my Deck.

Play to Win or Play for Fun? It really depends on your definition of fun. Winning is Fun, Losing is Not. Now that a new update has been pushed to the game, negative feedbacks arise again. But why I am still staying to play the game? Well, maybe because I simply enjoy the game. I normally play for Bronze Leaderboard and I sometimes I secured a spot and sometimes don't. The fun thing is you have to really exert effort to analyze each configuration you needed to play in order to win the game. With the recent changes on ranked games wherein you can play for Modern Ranked or Wild Ranked Format, cooler stuff happened. I usually play in Modern because of the low power requirement to move on the next league. Also, I currently do not own old cards and they are quite pricey for me. And lastly, new metas have seen in Modern. Something that is not enough in Wild to win becomes a standard configuration in Modern League.

The game also has an awesome community. A community that helps newbies play the game, hold competitive tournaments and conduct in-person events. And I think a huge part of me staying in the game is the community. And this is where the fun starts. As a player and as a person, it promotes engagement and self-esteem. A solid rock foundation which other cryptocurrency games has not in my opinion.

At around February 2022, I started accumulating cards and slowly building my deck. My main account is currently playing at Silver League with a minimal rental costs and have several accounts playing at bronze league. As far as I think, I will still stick into the game no matter what happened to the price of DEC or SPS. And take note, Rift Watchers are coming and will possibly introduce new configurations to work with and I am so excited!