This is an experiment to see whether it's possible to get anywhere in Splinterlands without paying in any more than the initial start up fee of $10.
So it's week 7 and I'm halfway to making back my initial outlay on the game.
I bought my first summoner, but I'll need 3 to reach level 2 and with them costing between about 500 and 700 DEC for the untamed ones, that could take a while. The average earnings for a win at bronze II is about 3+ DEC, so building up enough to buy new cards is incredibly slow, unless you luck out with a nice DEC reward for the daily quest.
I bought a Crustacean King as well, to give my water splinter a bit of healing advantage. Sadly, at level one it has no attack of its own, just it's healing ability. Something I completely forgot about in the first match I used it, so I didn't play it very well!
There have been some little updates on the battle screen and it now displays where you're at with regards the collection power as well as points ranking. It looks like you can also choose to stay in the lower leagues now, even with enough collection power to go up a league, which is an interesting change.
Gameplay still has a fairly nice balance, unless the daily quest is with a particularly weak splinter for me, then I just get trashed. I know, I don't have to use the quest splinter for every match, but it's a challenge to see if I can select well enough to win anyway. I think I'm slowly getting a reasonable balance within all the splinters, however. I could still use some hard hitting ranged attackers for some of the splinters, though.
Recently I've been coming across some strange abilities coming from some new summoners and I've only just found out where they're coming from. Yes, I'm way behind the times, because the Azmare Dice were introduced 2 months ago to replace the essence orbs which had run out. The AD summoners are selling on the market for a similar price to the Untamed ones, so it could be an idea to grab some of those as they offer some useful abilities. ...and I just accidentally bought Qid Yuff while checking what the price would be in DEC...I guess I'd better try it out. It's armour piercing, so only useful if the enemy has shields and the attacker has a strong enough attack to take the shield out and then some. Not terribly useful at this league.
What now remains to be seen is if I can make the other half of the outlay by week 14 now that the game rules have changed.