Hello everyone! I've been playing Splinterlands now for a little bit more than 2 months and wanted to share my experiences and what I've learned about the game along the way. Hopefully this is able to help other beginners that are confused with what to do or how to improve their gameplay. I wanna start off by saying that this game is awesome, and I think that you can get a lot out of this game even with very minimal spending.

As the title suggests, I haven't put that much money in the game and I'd like to think I've been pretty good at optimizing what little cash I used in rising through the ranks using mostly rentals and rewards from daily quests. For the past few seasons I've been playing in the Silver 3 league. For my first blog post, I'm gonna share my general rental strategy. I promise that the methods I use are super affordable, and I hope they're able to help some of you out there that might be struggling to remain profitable while renting to Silver.

General Rental Strategy (start of the season)

1.) The first thing I always do is go to the marketplace on Splinterlands and sort by price (some people prefer to use peakmonsters, but I find this easier to use for this first step).

2.) Then I'll filter by each splinter available and go through them one-by-one. Now I quickly go through the cards available and look to rent the cards that I think are strong and I don't own. I'll go through what cards I think are strong at the Silver 3 level in a later section. Then I'll rent out pretty much all of these cards that I think might be useful to me even in just very specific situations for the entire season (14 or 15 days) but ONLY if they are extremely cheap.

What I mean by this is that pretty much every single card I rent out costs me only 0.1 dec per day. There are some exceptions of course, if I think I really need a card and it costs somewhere around 0.2-0.4 dec per day. But I pretty much never rent out anything for the entire season that costs 1 dec or more per day. As you can see, my strategy relies more on strategy and versatility than just flat-out overpowering my opponent.

This might seem a little bit excessive, but essentially I'm renting out a card for 1.4 or 1.5 DEC for the entire season. And at the Silver 3 league, I get around 7-10 DEC per win. If a card helps me win even just one game, then it's already more than paid off itself.

3.) At the end of every season, I always re-evaluate the cards that I rented. If I felt that it was helpful for me that season, then I use peakmonsters to renew that rental. If not, then I don't rent it out again and am able to cut down on the cards I need to rent. If I could add, one good thing about this rental strategy of mine is that people hardly ever cancel my rentals. Since the cards I'm renting out are really cheap, they aren't really affected by the end of season spikes in price. Renting for Collection Power is another difficulty, but I won't cover that in this post, and there are lots of good posts out there that could help with that issue. Although to be honest, I think it is a problem without many good solutions at the moment.

Additional Daily Rental Strategy

• One more thing I do at times is to rent based on my daily quest. If my daily quest ends up being on a splinter I struggle with, then I don't mind spending a little bit more DEC on renting a card for only 1 day so that I can get my daily quest rewards. (more on what cards I think are worth it later)

Cards per Splinter

• Here I'm just quickly going to highlight some of the cards that I think are very valuable per splinter given their power and cost. Note that this isn't an exhaustive list of the cards that I rent, just pointing out some of the cards that I thought would be helpful.

Fire

Exploding Rats
Yeah, the 1 health is terrible, BUT this thing is super strong under the Equalizer ruleset. And like I mentioned above, at 0.1 dec/day, if it helps me win one game then it's already paid itself off.

Efreet Elder
Fire low-key has some great magic damage. I tend to combo this as well as some of the other magic users with the Dragon summoner Delwyn for some unexpected magic damage from the fire splinter.

Some of the other magic users in Fire are a little bit more expensive, but Naga Fire Wizard, Beetle Queen, and Flame Imp are all under 0.4 dec/day currently).

Water

• I would say in general here, the usual OP magic strategy is always gonna be powerful. Beyond that though, the Water splinter can also pump out some good melee damage.

Demented Shark
With the demented shark's Inspire ability, you can find some good synergy with sneak/opportunity/reach cards like Wave Runner, Feasting Seaweed, Pelacor Bandit, etc. Additionally it's really good in rulesets where Melee monsters can attack from any position.

Bonus:

• There are a lot of other good cards that I would consider renting out for a daily quest, but definitely not for the entire season since they are too expensive such as: Torhillo the Frozen, Lobstradamus, or Djinn Oshanus.

Earth

• I'll admit that this is probably the splinter that I use the least since I find that a lot of the cards here are quite expensive. With that being said:

Centauri Mage

• With 9 hitpoints and the Return Fire ability, this is extremely good to put in the second slot of your lineup. Really good synergy with Delwyn as well (I admittedly think magic is really strong at the Silver level)

Wood Nymph

• Extremely good synergy with the Unicorn Mustang card as a tank. A little bit more expensive (around 0.3 dec) but well worth it for the earth splinter in my opinion.

Bonus:

• Mylor is pretty over-priced in my opinion, but I have rented him out for a day a couple of times since he can be a pretty guaranteed win if your opponent doesn't have the right counters. Additionally, Oaken Behemoth can also single-handedly win you certain games as well.

Life

• I think the Life splinter is pretty underrated. There are so many good cards that you can get here for cheap.

Lorna Shine
This summoner is really cheap for what it's worth and extremely powerful in certain rulesets.

Venari Crystalsmith
Cheap. Gives you heal and 1 damage, just a really good card.

Temple Priest
Two magic damage and again, really good synergy with Delwyn.

Crystal Werewolf
Prices for this one fluctuate wildly throughout the season, but I see it go for 0.1 dec at times. Because of its Silence ability, I can use this with the Clay Golem card to essentially neutralize opponent magic lineups.

Death

This splinter is really interesting in my opinion. A lot of the times I use them if I have a sense of what strategy the opponent will use and I try to counter them.

Nightmare
This card is really good with the Enrage (Spreading Fury) ruleset. The extra speed makes him difficult to hit, then he has increased damage with blast.

Venari Bonesmith
Along with other magic cards in this splinter like the Death Elemental, Boogeyman and a few others, they have AGAIN good synergy with Delwyn.

Grim Reaper
Really good damage and that affliction ability is essential against certain healing lineups.

Owster Rotwell
This card is great. Extremely good with the Bone Golem to just destroy enemy magic lineups.

Bonus:

• Harklaw can also be worth it. I think he's extremely undervalued as of now. With the -1 melee/ranged attack summoners plus his Shield ability, he's an awesome tank.
• Ancient Lich is also something worth looking into as he deals massive damage.

Dragon

• I honestly love this splinter, although some of the cards are quite expensive so I don't rent a lot of Dragon cards.

Naga Brute
Really strong versatile tank because of his void armor ability. Gloridax Soldier, Dragon Spirit, and Djinn Chwala are other options and potentially better depending on the ruleset.

Serpentine Mystic
Really cheap magic damage, affliction is great, and great synergy again with Delwyn.

Summoners

• I honestly think these 2 cards are must-haves. Brighton Bloom is almost an auto-win for the Earthquake ruleset. Although I do even use her if I just want some extra dodge capabilities on my cards.

• And I think it's pretty clear that I'm a big fan of Delwyn. When the water splinter is not usable, the opponents hardly ever expect someone to use a magic damage lineup, and so Delwyn usually destroys them. He just has so much synergy across all of the different splinters. Additionally, magic users are actually pretty cheap to rent outside of the Water splinter.

Neutral

• Neutral cards are awesome cause you can use them across different splinters (partly why I love dragon too).

Sand Worm
Super strong especially in the reverse speed ruleset.

Gremlin Blaster
Again, probably pretty weak under most circumstances, but with the equalizer ruleset, he becomes quite strong. Same goes with the Battering Ram and Hobgoblin.

Gelatinous Cube
Really good tank, as well as for the poison ruleset.

Bonus:

• Prismatic Energy, Almo Cambio, and War Chaang can also be worth it at times.

Conclusion

Well that went on longer than I thought it would. Still, I hope the information I provided might be useful to some of you guys out there. One thing I do want to point out is that all of my rentals are level 1 cards. Others out there would suggest to invest in 1 or 2 splinters, get high level monsters and summoners for those and just focus on them. I'm sure that works for them, but personally I prefer the strategy that I outlined above. It gives me more opportunity to play with all of the cards and know the different strategies of each splinter.

Feel free to let me know in the comments any reactions or questions you might have. If you have any suggestions as well or requests (giveaways, specific info, etc.), let me know and I'll try to make another blog post about it.

Note: I noticed that some of the card prices now are more expensive than when I rented them initially about a month ago. So that would be another good reason to just keep renewing the rentals that you currently have, since it seems that rental prices will just increase overtime for the most part.

For the newbies out there that want to get into the game, feel free to use my referral code: https://splinterlands.com?ref=phonsoswag

I get some benefits if you sign up using that, but I'll be sure to make it worth your while by either sending you some DEC or delegating some cards to help you get started. Just reach out to me and let me know.