Splinterlands : a few insights for people just getting started

I do not claim to be an expert and am a relative newbie myself, having played the game for around 2 months. So, take these tips with a pinch of salt. I am welcome to suggestions by more experienced players too.

• Fire Splinter is probably the best to get started

The starter cards given with the splinter are all pretty good. Living Lava and Cerberus will be your tanks in most battles. Use Cerberus in low mana battles especially, the healing ability helps a lot.

• Use the heal ability more often

Some monsters like the Cerberus heal themselves and some like Wood Nymph heal the monster in the first position. If you have enough DEC, I suggest that you rent Cornealus. The high life and high heal can win poison battles with this single card. I have won many.

• Rewards get better the higher you progress

If it is your first few battles and you are getting fractions of DEC as rewards, trust me, once you have enough rating points after winning enough battles and move into Bronze league, your rewards are much better.

Once you have enough DEC, rent (buy if you can) high power cards that you can use too, to move up to silver league. I personally find low silver league to be more rewarding and slightly easier than high Bronze league. Also, you get 2 chests for completion of daily quests.

• You can play battles outside the daily quest limitation too

What I mean here is that there is no time or number limit to the daily quest. You can take as many battles as you want to complete the daily quest.

For example, if your daily quest requires you to win 5 battles with the death splinter, you do not have to keep playing the death splinter till you complete the quest. You may end up losing a lot of rating points and reduce your DEC capture rate unnecessarily. I am guilty of doing this too, it has become a habit, almost like I have to get the quest done first. But practically speaking, it is counter productive.

• Read the Splinter Bites

Before the start of every battle, a screen comes up with useful tips and information and some very interesting lore too. Read it!

• Winning by outlasting your opponent

You really can do this. You don't have to kill every monster on the opposing team to win. In Poison battles, the heal ability of monsters like Cornealus keeps it alive even when it is not attacking in the first position.

In normal battles too, if you reach round 21, all monsters start losing life every round from then on by 'fatigue', so if your monster is able to heal itself, you will win by fatiguing the enemy to death.

• Play by the battle rules

This is very obvious I know, but when you are just starting out, you don't really tend to look at the battle rules carefully. Select your team according to the rules always.

• Use more snipe monsters in rulesets where all monsters have blast ability

This is an extension of the previous tip. Yes, you will end up damaging 3 monsters with one attack! That's why Yodin Zaku is so awesome with snipe monsters.

• Learn from you enemies

This applies especially when you are losing too many games. Losing because of the enemy having all high level monsters is quite rare compared to losing because our strategy was not right. So, study the enemies' strategy - placement of monsters especially.

• You can do more than just play

Really! This is a very rewarding entire ecosystem ! You can blog about Splinterlands and earn rewards. You can take part in the weekly art challenges if you are the artistic type. You can share your battles and take part in the weekly battle challenge too. All this earns you rewards.

And I feel we are just getting started here. There is a lot more potential and room to grow. Thanks for reading and hope you found this helpful. I will post a picture of one of my entries for a previous week's art challenge. See you in the next one.