I had been hearing about Splinterlands way back in the Steem days when the name of the game was Steemmonsters. A couple of my friends like 
The issue is that my sole interest in participating in this blockchain was to blog, hold coins and chat shit with the fun people of crypto land. I did that quite well and excelled at it. If you get on a time machine and meet me by this time last year to ask if I'd be playing Splinterlands and I'd have said no, so how did I go from that into the Addict that plays almost 50 battles a day and onboarded my sister and girlfriend?
Chance
On one random day earlier this year(February 11th to be precise), I stumbled into a tweet by Kenn Bosak, where he was talking about Splinterlands and did a giveaway. I can't say I was overly enthused by the game but he offered a voucher to become a part of the game and I thought to myself, well, why not?
I even have screenshots of the short conversation in our Twitter DM where I asked questions about the game, and he explained them to me through short videos and stuff. I also wanted to know if my cards "die" after battles and stuff. Don't judge me
Well, I thought it was the right question to ask considering I had never played a card battle game before at the time and had no idea what I was getting into.
The First impression
My first impression was "hold up, this is a way too much for me to process while playing a game. I tried reading the rules and there was so much information there that I got overwhelmed and just decided to shelf it for a while. After a week or two passed, I tried playing ranked battles with the cards I had and surprisingly, I won the battles easily.
The First Tactics
As I said, I didn't know anything about card battle games or the techniques involved. I didn't know who was special and who wasn't. All I knew was that there were a bunch of cards with numbers beside them and when I throw them into battle, I win games.
I made some noise about joining the game and received support from other players. People like 
My first favourite
There were two major reasons why I liked this card but you have to keep in mind that I didn't know anything about the game; not a strategy, special abilities or anything. I was a clean slate looking at pictures on the screen. The two reasons were;
- It looked like a giant robot and I like giant robots. I also figured that in any universe, a giant robot will be lethal because they shoot rockets and stuff.
- Secondly, and this is very important is that I thought that the higher the mana cost, the better the monsters. So, in my mind, this card was among the best monsters in the game.
Learning and Growing
As time went on, I started noticing cracks in my so-called brilliant tactics of putting Goblin Mech and anybody else. I started noticing that certain monsters had special abilities that influenced battles but this is as a result of the fact that I watched battles more often.
I picked up a few tricks here and there from my opponents and started familiarizing myself with the battle rules as well. I knew there were rules, and explanation on how to play the game made available but I never actually brought myself to read them because I felt like it wasn't necessary.
After a while, I started playing the game fairly regularly, but not quite as often as I do now because it was exclusive to my laptop and I wasn't always with my system. I learnt about the daily quests and figured that I could do them to earn rewards and such.
After a while, I became a lean mean Splinterlands machine, playing regularly and sometimes overpowering opponents with much better cards than me.
The Best Season Ever
I think of myself as a Splinterlands overachiever because, in the last three months, I have seen amazing growth in my strategy and application in the game as a whole. I have combined the cards loaned to me by my friends with the ones I've invested in and achieved unprecedented heights regularly.
Around May, I celebrated entering Diamond 1 as my greatest ever achievement. I remember entering that rank and thinking I'd have a nosebleed from being so high, yet here I am today, regularly entering Champions league like it is nothing.
My best ever season was actually last season where I squeezed into Champion 1 and even momentarily entered the top 300 players. It felt so surreal to be that high and to get there, I punched way above my pay grade.
Making it to champion 1 was very emotional for me last season. It felt like my due reward after spending all the effort in investing a decent sum of money into my deck, battling for hours every day to accumulate DEC, completing all the daily quests and participating in promotional campaigns. Five months of playing the game, I grew from a total novice to the highest rank of the game but I'm not done yet because my target is to enter the top 100. Everybody up there better watch out now because I'm coming.
