So you've come to Splinterlands whether it's because you've seen that you can earn money, because you've heard the community is super awesome, because you love card games and now you see that you can do it digitally, etc. Coming to this game, you've probably started a battle, and thought, "Hmm, well what guy do i pick, the fire guy, the water guy, the earth guy?" and this is great! There will be 3 screens choosing characters and setting up your battle: The first page that you're brought to is the page of your opponent, rule, etc., the next page being the summoner page, and the last page being the characters within the summoner that you've chosen. The first page is important, and you'll probably see that it consists of these six types of Splinters: Fire, Water, Earth, Life, Death, and Dragon. This page is crucial to look at while starting to learn how to play Splinterlands because it tells you everything that you're going to be working with/against in the battle. A list of these things that you want to look at is:
-The Ruleset
-Recently Played Teams
-Elements
-Mana Cap
-Always be aware of your time
The Ruleset is super important and crucial to look at before you start choosing your cards, because some cards might be placed or used differently in the battle according to what the ruleset is. Some rule sets might consist of: Aim True- Where attacks won't miss, Armored Up- Every monster will get +2 shield, and so forth. A link to a page with all of the rulesets possible is posted below. It's important to look at the ruleset because you want to make sure that for instance, if the ruleset is +2 shield, that you don't use a ton of attack characters, but instead, you might use magic because shield isn't affected by magic, meaning that you won't have to break through both layers of that shield before bogging down on your enemy's health! https://splinterlands.fandom.com/wiki/Category:Rule_Sets
The next thing that is a big determining factor for winning in Splinterlands is looking at the enemy's Recently Played Teams. This tells a lot about the playstyle that you will be playing against in your battles. For instance, referring to the picture above, it's important to see that this player likes to play with Life and Earth. So for my attack, I'm going probably assume that for this battle, they will use either Life, or Earth, and I can work around that and start strategizing what I am going to do to defeat my opponent. The game will show you the last 5 elements that have been used in their battles.
Over time you'll start to understand your cards, and that's where the time comes into play. Every battle gives you 3 minutes to decide what cards that you are going to use in your battle, and sometimes 3 minutes seems like it's not enough. Always make sure that you're watching the time when picking and figuring out what each card does (especially when you're starting, as you aren't sure what any of the abilities do), because if you run out of time, you wont have a fully army to go into battle with.
When deciding what cards to use, mana is one of the most important things to look at. Every card has a mana count in the top left of the card. While picking a summoner, it's important to note that not only your monsters use mana, but summoners as well. Most of the summoners down in lower ranks tend to use around 3 mana, but once people start getting into higher ranks, sometimes they rent summoners that will use more or less mana. When picking your cards, it's essential to realize what amount of mana you're using. Each card that you use will be added to the Mana Cap, and the mana of all of your cards together cannot exceed over that amount that's been assigned. Below is a picture of all of the summoners, where you can see the mana count in the top left of each of the cards as well.
As this is a guide for beginners, I will only briefly talk about the Elements. One big thing that I wanted to point out is once you get to a certain rank, the game will start limiting what elements you can use (for each battle it will change) for each specific battle. As it's not essential to the brand new beginners in the game, I'll leave it at that.
<- For this battle you can see that only Life, and Fire are able to be used.
So it's been a little bit of time and you start winning a bunch of battles, and you might ask yourself "Now what?" As you start gaining Rating, you realize that maybe you're starting to make it out of bronze, hooray! But wait... something seems off. You realize that the game is telling you that you need to have 1000 power in order to move up a rank. This is normal, it's not just you! Power is obtained through having possession of cards. It may seem a bit frustrating at first, but there are several ways to go about doing this. You can ask to be delegated power, in the Splinterlands discord (The community is amazing, and has a LOT to offer), you can go and buy card(s) that you'd like to use, or you can go and rent cards off of peakmonsters.com. As a beginner, I would definitely recommend renting cards, because it is so cheap! You might be thinking "Well how do I rent?" And it's simple. People put their cards up for rent, so all that you have to do is go into the website, search the card you want, click the little rent button, and it's yours! Starting out with renting one day at a time is good because if you change your mind and you don't want the card anymore, you cancel the rent and you're finished with it. Once you're renting something, it'll look something like this. It will have the time until the rent is up, and the price that you're currently renting it for.
As you might be going to rent, you're going to realize that it will cost you DEC, which quite simply, is the in-game currency that everyone uses. It can be obtained by donations, gaining it from winning battles(after you get out of bronze III), giveaways, etc. This is why I recommend as a beginner, going into the discord and telling someone you're looking for power, or just a little bit of DEC so that you can start renting and gain power from it then get out of Bronze III, and gain it for yourself. Also, make sure to do your daily quests so that you can earn more cards and credits, contributing to your assets in this game.
At this point in time, while playing Splinterlands, you've started to get a general gist of the game, and it's vital to realize that this game is going to take a lot of effort of your own to learn how everything works, and most importantly, a bunch of time. I hope that this guide has helped every single brand new player to this game, and that as you go throughout your playing career in Splinterlands, you can each learn how to become better. I hope that this can influence/impact you all in a positive way, and I hope that even though I'm a VERY new player myself and probably don't know a ton, I hope that this can impact someone!