It's not uncommon when you play a game to want to level up your characters as quickly as possible to give you the best chance of winning. In general Splinterlands doesn't differ completely in this aspect, although there are some times where levelling up your cards might not matter, and then other times where it will actually put you at a disadvantage! Let's take a look at some of these scenarios.

Let's take a look at the Splinterlands Leagues. First off we can see that each league has a ranked battle rating beneath it. This represents your overall performance in the season and can go up or down depending upon your win/loss rate. The image above shows us the range of ratings for each league.

Next we can see the League Rewards screen. This again shows the ranked battle rating with card powers below. So considering the follow example, let's break this down.

So here we have a scenario where although your rating would put you into Gold III, you are limited to Silver II as your card power is too low to progress any higher. So if we take into account the images above and below of summoner level limits, we can see that there is little point in you using a level 3 legendary monster, because in silver there is a max level limit of 2 for such a monster. This illustrates our first point, that there might not always be any point in levelling up your card. So always check where you are sitting in terms of battle rating, card power and level of your summoners allowed in your particular league, it might save you spending some money.

So generally when you level up a card it will increase its attributes, not only raising its attack, armour and health, but also potentially increasing its speed. Not something you want for Reverse Speed ruleset where the slower your speed, the higher the chance you have of evading attacks and striking first. You can see a great example of this below with the Sea Monster from the water element. You can see that at level 2 it will already increase its speed, meaning in the above ruleset there is now a chance it won't hit first and there is less likelihood it can evade incoming attacks.

Then we have the Keep Your Distance ruleset where monsters with melee are not allowed to be used. There are a number of extremely useful cards out there that have low mana to use and/or have important abilities. At lower levels these cards don't have an attack, but once you start to level them up you may suddenly find they can hit back. This can be useful sometimes but in this particular ruleset can leave you without those handy monsters. Here are a few examples below. You'll see that the 1 mana Ooze has that useful ability Slow, but if you take it to level four it suddenly now has a melee attack and can't be used in this ruleset. Similarly the 0 mana Chicken is a great buffer in low mana matches but if you take it to level three it has a melee attack and again can't be used in this ruleset.