My son heard what I made with Splinterlands and gave me $500 Canadian to invest. He's very good in shooting games (CS: Go, Valorant, etc) but card games just aren't his thing. Here's how I recommended he start out.

First: Opening an account:

Looking at the login screen the big green Create Account Button sticks out. However, for my son its the LOG IN with KEYCHAIN that gets him going.

Why? A free HIVE account (from 3Speak or others) gets him started with the whole HIVE system and the HIVE Keychain unlocks Splinterlands and all the other HIVE assets

Second: Login to the account

Now the account seems pretty bare. No spellbook. Not eligible for rewards. No DEC or SPS. However, the BATTLE button is ready for him to press so he can learn the game for free with the starter cards. First battle and first loss is here:

https://splinterlands.com?p=battle&id=sl_309fdeb5ee455dda3970f60a6bc2a34f&ref=tergan

Can't battle too much though because very few resource credits. Even one practice battle costs a bunch of available resources on a free acount, leaving 94% remaining after only one battle.

Third: Time to fund the account.

Most people will be starting with buying a spellbook ($10) but we are going the crypto route. We opened a crypto.com account and purchased EOS using a credit card (BTC, ETH, LTC, DOGE would also work but EOS has low fees). Once the EOS was in the crypto.com wallet we transferred it to the hive-engine.com using the Deposit function to swap_EOS option. Wait a few minutes and the EOS arrives which we can then sell for swap_HIVE. Once we have the swap_HIVE we click on the DEC token to purchase DEC with the hive.

After all that he is now sitting on DEC in the hive-engine account.

Fourth : Use the SPS Airdrop to increase value in the account.

Notice that even though the DEC isn't in the game it still counts towards the airdrop. Today I got 4.123 SPS which I quickly claimed then used the transfer button to move out to the hive-engine.com.

I could have staked the SPS and probably will once Vouchers are running again but in the meantime once the DEC and SPS are in the hive-engine.com account I head over to Tribaldex and login with my Hive Keychain.

I click on Add Liquidity and choose the pool DEC/SPS and add the 4.123 SPS and match it with 166 DEC. With the liquidity added to the pool tomorrow both the DEC and the SPS will be adding towards the airdrop.

Fifth : Collect profits daily

Keep on collecting the airdrop. Keep on moving the SPS to the liquidity pool (or stake it for vouchers).
Keep watching the value in DEC and SPS grow little by little every day.

Sixth : Prepare for battling! Join a guild!

I'll encourage my son to play a few games each day to see which splinters he likes and which suit his style. Personally I like life and water in Bronze league. Once there is enough profit in the account to purchase a spellbook (with SPS) a lvl 2 summoner and 5000 CP worth of support cards its time to take the plunge. The idea is to work the daily quests so at the end of the season your account looks like this :

Seven : Collect Airdrop, Staking and now battle rewards

Continue collecting rewards but now start purchasing key summoners to lvl 2 and a few key common cards to lvl 3 so daily quests take less time to complete. The goal is to be Bronze I by the end of season. Continue collecting until : 1. There is a competent line to battle in each splinter along with a few sneak or snipe cards to help in those quests and 2. There is a total power of 15,000. Should look a bit like this:

Eight -- Decide to continue to Silver or Start taking profits

At this stage daily quests isn't too hard because there is a competent line for each splinter with some powered up cards. There are SPS airdrop rewards coming in every day. There are end of season rewards every two weeks. There is considerable practice moving funds in and out of the game to various engines. There is the hive-engine ready to convert those DEC into EOS to move back to crypto.com

However, you hopefully have friends in guild and a fighting desire to be better. For my son I think he'll just want the cash. So for him: keep on battling every day, sell of the rewards for DEC-->Hive-->EOS and spent ths profits through his crypto.com credit cards.

Just my take on things but that's how I'm doing it for my son. How I did it for my current free to play account @hiveabbyftp and I made my mistakes doing it on my @terganftp account.

Whatever route you take, have fun and do the math :)