I started playing Steemmonsters/Splinerlands somewhere around October last year. At that time the Alpha packs were sold out and Beta packs were for sale and still are till today.
I got the Beta starter pack and started to level up my Beta cards. The first months playing the game I totally ignored the Alpha cards. I didn’t understand what is special about them why I will be buying them when there is only Beta packs now for sale. It looked like a too much bothering to me to sell beta and buy alpha, when they have the same characteristics and are fighting the same.

Only after the tournaments were introduced and there was dedicated tournaments for Alpha cards, I saw an extra value in them.
I decided to swap all of my cards from beta to alpha! It took me about a month, but I managed to do this. The cards were at silver to gold level at that time.

The price of the Alpha cards was not much higher than the Beta ones. It even happened that some legendary Alpha cards were cheaper than the Beta ones. I wrote about that in this posts Which One Would You Buy? . Alpha cards cheaper than Beta! The Alpha cards also need less card to level them up. It was a bargain. But as I mentioned I only managed to get them to gold level. At the time I didn’t have aspirations to go higher in the game and was playing it just occasionally.

But the tournaments got me, and I started playing more and more with my ambitions growing. I won a couple of low level tournaments and this got me excited. Next, I won the SeedGerminator tournament and received nice rewards from the promo cards later. With those I Maxed out the Selenia Sky Alpha summoner. Now I was ready for the big league.

DEC made the Alpha cards a lot more expensive

Just when I was gearing up to level up my gold level cards to max DEC was introduced. One of the things with the DEC was that the Alpha cards are receiving more DEC per battle won. Just in a matter of days the market took its turn and the Alpha cards become a lot more expensive then the Beta one. In most of the cases at least double, sometimes even more.

The hardest thing when leveling up cards is to level up the summoners. Those are more expensive then most of the cards, except for the legendary ones. I had only one summoner maxed out, Selenia Sky and with that one I managed to get into champion league the last season. Splinterlands - From Gold to Champion.

Now I need to max out some other summoners. I went for the water one and maxed him out to level 7. Getting a summoner from level 7 to 8 takes almost the same number of cards as to level 7. I will be OK with the level 7 for now 😊.
This the market for the water alpha summoner at the moment. It is the most expensive alpha summoner of them all. I need 23 cards to max this summoner and I will be lucky if I get them at price 1,5$ each.

Note that the prices can be very volatile and change fast. These are cards with low supply. There price can go up very easy.

Next on the list to get to level 7 is the Earth splinter. Here is how she stands on the market right now.

To get the Earth Alpha Summoner to level 7 I will need around 50$ at the moment, and to level 8 a 100$. I will be doing this and then will see how it goes. Having more summoners maxed out means I will be more competitive on the board. I’m now around the 80 spot and struggling to stay in the top 100 until the end of the season. Last season I finished in Champion 3 league and was just 100 points to Champion 2. The difference between Champion 3 and 2 is 60 more reward cards. That is something to fight for 😊.

Also having more maxed out summoners will give me an opportunity to go for the daily tasks. At the moment I’m missing those since I have decided to go for the highest spot on the ranking.

So, I will be maxing out the water and the earth alpha summoner but will think about the others. Should I try to maxed them as an alpha summoners or go for the beta. Alpha summoners are expensive so maybe I will have just three of those for now, and the others will be beta.

Any suggestions are welcomed :).

All the best
@dalz

Other Splitnerlands related posts

• DEC per Card
• Splinterlands - From Gold to Champion
• What to do with the DEC?
• Choosing between Alpha and Beta