Its been a while since I joined Splinterlands, so today I wanted to talk about how my journey has been so far.
But before that, I think I'll talk about my crypto journey as a whole, as it plays a huge part in me getting into Splinterlands.
*Disclaimer: Not financial advice, probably dont follow? idk
The first time I really learnt about crypto was in February, where a friend of mine was buying some Ethereum. Before that, I had only heard of Bitcoin but never put much thought into it. This friend of mine was really bullish on Ethereum but most of us didn't know enough to buy into it. Fast forward to May, Ethereum reached $4000, making my friend some tidy profits. It was around this time where everyone wanted to get a piece of the profit, myself included. So being the noob that I was, I bought Ethereum at its peak. xD Unsuprisingly, it dipped, leaving me with some Ethereum on my hands, worth hella less than what I had bought it with.
After this experience, I decided to keep my wits about me and not FOMO into everything lmao. So I did some research into cryptos, staking, and somehow or other found out about blockchain games and Play2Earn, specifically Axie Infinity. Of course, I didn't join because by that time you needed like $700 or something just to start. After that, I specifically focused on finding out more about Play to Earn games, and chanced upon Splinterlands.
Finally back on topic xD
I first found out about Splinterlands around end July. It was my first encounter with Play-to-Earn games, so naturally I was intrigued. At that time there wasn't as many players as there are today, and various changes haven't been made, so it was still possible to earn in Bronze rank. After a few games, I was immediately hooked. The gameplay was pretty fun, and it was possible to EARN from this?!? It was amazing. I bought the Spellbook and officially started my adventure.
^battling since July!
Overall, I think my experience can be summarised into 3 sections:
1) Learning
about the game, about hive, about play to earns
After going through the Splinterlands tutorial, instead of heading into battle immediately, I went straight to the How to Play page and started reading upon abilities. Can't win battles if I don't even understand what the cards do, i thought, so I just sat there and read.
I also liked to watch matches play out as a whole so I can understand synergies and what went wrong where. I had a whole excel sheet where I recorded matches and stuff xD It didnt really work out in the end cuz i wasn't using it but you can see the effort I put into this game lol
Dont know if its clear but here is said excel sheet, was a pretty hardcore Mylor user last time xD
2) Investing
After being more comfortable with the game, I was considering putting some money into this game. Remember how I said I had some money in Ethereum? Well since I was down and my money was stuck I had this big brain idea of using it to fund my Splinterlands journey. And so I did. I sent Ethereum to Hive Engine and sold it there for the highest bid... yeah, lost some more monies there. Eventually I would learn to use exchanges like PancakeSwap to get my SPS and sell that for HIVE. But for now, all was good. I had my HIVE now, and I was ready to spend it.
Now, its been a while and I don't remember what I spent my initial money on, but it was either a decent silver team or a Plot of Land.
Either way, I got them both eventually, and even more. I bought SPS, PLOTs of land, cards and DEC. In total I think I invested/spent a combined total of around $2000? (Idk my finances are a mess) It might not be alot of money for some of you, but for me it was a chunky sum of money. Of course, I only used money that I could afford to lose, but it still hurts if I do lose it.
Eventually, there was this huge spike in players, and everything suddenly became more valuable.
And I sold the summoners for my Silver decks once I saw their prices rise 🙃
I used the DEC earned from this sale to buy other cheaper cards in hopes that they too, would rise. In particular, I bought a LOT of reward cards when Chaos Legion reward cards were being introduced. Most of them didn't moon or anything, but some are worth around double their price now, such as Djinn Oshannus. I only bought one copy back then, so I'm not selling, but still 🤑
Encouraged by my gains, I eventually put another ~$1000 in, most of which I used to buy another Plot of Land, and the rest in SPS.
Here are my holdings now, the SPS I hold has been increasing steadily through the daily airdrops and staking rewards, and cards are retaining their value, if not increasing
3) Growing
This is the stage where I would place myself in now, I'm no longer looking to buy land, SPS or anything like that, but instead focusing on growing my assets through airdrops, playing the game to earn DEC and just overall appreciation of my holdings.
I did think of buying Chaos Legion packs, but Voucher prices are still really high. I've sold some of my Vouchers and using some of that HIVE to buy SPS, while some others I used to branch out into other HIVE games, such as dCity. I'm also trying out other Play to Earn games not on the HIVE platform, such as MIR4, League of Kingdoms, and more. I'm in the works of making a post about some of them, so stay tuned!
Speaking of which, I have also been making posts and such to hopefully better engage the community here at HIVE, though to be honest I can still improve on this part.
This has been my whole journey so far, it was pretty fruitful not gonna lie. How has your journey been? Is there anything you would have done differently? Personally I would have liked to have found out about PancakeSwap earlier, they have an SPS swap which I think is lesser fees than selling my ethereum or BNB on Hive engine.
If you stumbled upon this post and have not yet signed up for Splinterlands, feel free to do so using this link here, I can delegate you some cards to get you started :) it aint much, but i hope it'll help you
Thanks for reading!