Beginner to silver I in my first season

Hi folks,

this is my first post and I want to share with you my first season in Splinterlands, what I have learned so far and how I got to silver 1. I believe NFT gaming is the future and I wanted to find a game that would be fun to play. I have done my share of playing in the past, but not this kind of game before, so I started as a complete noob eager to learn. Note that I did not buy any DEC/cards, but since I am very bullish on this game, I have bought a small bag of SPS and I am farming some more on pancakeswap with my cake. I have read some posts, watched a few videos and I want to share some ideas that I found useful and that are working for me. Here are my stats soon after the end of my first season.

Having fun

Sure we all see and read the updates from the people that started some time ago and now their accounts are worth tens of thousands of dollars and we want to get there, but this is a process and it takes time. So I am focusing on having fun on the path.

Battle

Once I get my opponent I take about 30-60 seconds to do two things: (i) check the rule modification, mana cap and available splinters; (ii) look at my opponent’s last builds. This way I can come up with the best tactics for the current fight. Note that often we can be discouraged from a fight by seeing that our opponent has too strong cards, nevertheless I try thinking of the tactics to negate his build and just give it a shot. Even if I loose (and I often do), I look at what worked and what didn’t and adapt that for the next battle.

Renting

As a beginner the power is hard to get by. For me an efficient and affordable way to get up to 15k power (enough for silver 3) is renting common gold foils. I do not care which ones, so I just go for the cheapest available (currently about 1 DEC per card), they each give you 500 power. Sometimes you might get lucky and get a good one or a super cheap one, but these are rented out in seconds. I also try rare golds (2000 power) or legendary non-golds (1000 power). It can be annoying with many unsuccessful attempts, it all depends how much time you wanna be trying out for that great deal of discounted price. If you are renting a card which you also want to use in battle, make sure that the clock symbol is darkened and not yellow, otherwise you will not be able to use that card in a fight. Happened to me a few days ago when renting Mylor, had to rent another one and wasted 40 DEC.

Getting out of bronze

Especially when you come to bronze 1 it becomes annoying to fight against the players that are competing for the leader board rewards, with all those fancy upgraded cards. In this case I can easily loose 5+ battles in a row. What I usually do is stop playing for an hour or so and retry later. Perhaps there is a tournament starting that most join or something, but it usually works. The easiest tactics for me to get to silver 3 is just rent Mylor for one day (current rent about 40 DEC/day). With the unicorn mustang (to protect from Aldric’s magic), wood nymph (which you also have to rent for about 1 DEC/day) and earth elemental they make a nice combo if the mana permits. I also like goblin thief and swamp thing (which can be rented for about 10 DEC/day). Of course the rules and the opponent study are important as always and you should modify your setup accordingly. Also keep in mind that any build can be countered and if your opponent is doing his homework as well, he will know what is coming and you might loose. But in any case this build should take you to silver 3, which I find much more fun then bronze. I just love the rule modifications. Plus you get 2 chests for your daily quest! After in silver I am just renting enough power to remain in silver 3 on a daily basis and I try to add the needed power after I get a new daily quest. That way I can be on a lookout to rent also more cards for the corresponding quest.

Now what can a beginner like me expect to earn?

In battles: a win in bronze 1 gives 5-8 DEC, silver 3 gives 7-10 DEC and silver 2 8-14 DEC, of course there are daily fluctuations, but roughly those were the numbers I was getting. Note that I always try to have my capture rate over 80% to get close to max possible DEC.

Chest wise the rewards can vary a lot and you can find reports of people getting some really nice DEC/cards even in their first weeks. For me my very first chest gave me a sand worm, a very decent card indeed. Then until the season end I only got one more card, a demented shark and the highest DEC reward was about 20, plus a bunch of potions. I was in silver 2 a few hours before the end of the season, but managed to get a good streak of wins and was able to get enough rating for silver 1, so I tried several unsuccessful attempts at renting a legendary gold foil (giving 50k power) before finally managing to get one for 230 DEC. So I finished the season with 18 chests, which earned me 195 DEC, some potions and two common gold foils as you can see above, nothing spectacular, but I am really happy with the power earned, which means there is less I need to rent from now on. In my very first season I thus managed to get 4 common cards (2 of them gold) and my DEC was just over 500.

I hope this helps a fellow beginner or two :)

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