Last week I started playing Splinterlands. Obviously much too late (to have already made a lot of money), but you can't change the past can you. I'll give a short update on what I've been up to so far and how the investment side of the game goes.

First steps

Thanks to some encouragement of Hive account@fullcoverbetting, I finally started last Wednesday. I quickly went through the tutorial and read a bit of the "How to play" page. Then I found out I first had to buy the Spellbook ($10/21.4 Hive) before I could start playing. No problem, because I basically got most Hive for free (not counting the hours of writing and curating...).

Then I started playing and I found out I even had one card myself: a Sea Genie:

I vaguely remembered I once won it in some kind of contest. Turned out it was worth $1.5, so that's not a bad start at all.

I have to say that it took some time to get used to the gameplay and how to position your cards the best. It helped me to watch some games at normal speed (because my lack of attention span/patience, I used "skip to result" before). I did manage to climb to Bronze III relatively quickly and got a nice bonus for that at the end of last season.

N00b mistake

Some days later, I somehow browsed to the "Open" page and found out I also had a Beta pack. I really don't know how I got that one, but another nice surprise. Unaware of the consequences, I dragged the pack into the well and got five, not necessarily brilliant, cards back. Another bit of the investment back I thought.
Since the existence of packs got me interested some more, I went to hive-engine and found out I could buy another pack there. Turned out they are worth some 150 Hive! How stupid could I be by just drowning it in the well (for cards worth like 2 Hive together). It's not often that I feel such a noob...
By the way: why the hell do people buy those packs at those high prices anyway? Does anybody know? I'd be happy to know more!

Investments and return

Well, then the financial part of the story. As said, I had to buy the Spellbook and I also bought some Quest potions (10+1 for 15.58 Hive), thanks to the tips by the aforementioned Peter and Hive account@costanza. I have to say, they really rock, because it makes the daily quests much more worthwile. Amongst some potions, I got an 2k DEC chest, a 500 DEC chest and some nice cards (like the ones below today):

Card Value

According to Peakmonsters, my cards have a total value of $12.6. This is already more than the cost of the Spellbook, so I'm pretty happy with that.

Dark Energy Chrystals (DEC)

As said before, my DEC got boosted a lot. I'm now at almost 2.7k, worth around $20. Again a great return compared to the 15.6 Hive (about $7) I used for buying the potions.

SPS tokens

I also did get some SPS from the airdrop. Turned out that was largely thanks to the Beta pack too, which made is much less the days afterwards. Fortunately the 2.5k+ DEC does compensate for that by now. In total I have $3.33 worth of SPS (as shown below). I'm not quite sure however what to do with it. Should I sell it now, stake it in order to get some more or just leave it where it is? What would your advice be?

Total return and ROI

In total my assets are now worth around $36 (which corresponds to about 75 Hive). Compared to the 27 Hive I invested, it means I'm already in the green after one week (with the return on investment being 178%). In fact the (annualized) ROI is about 9,000 % (for sure the highest it will ever be, because I won't get this lucky every week). Not bad at all!

Want to play too?

If you got interested and want to play the game too? Consider using my referral link, so we can both profit of it a bit.
https://splinterlands.com?ref=erikklok