Now, I have been away for close to 6 months not posting or even putting my new Splinterlands deck to use. When I last played the game it was actually known as Steem Monsters. At least now you do not have to wonder if that is two words or one word- if you know what I mean.
Things really changed massively and over the course of 3 days I have been familiarising myself with the new system and the new exciting features that have been added into the Splinterlands ecosystem.
Yes, I will be referring to the game as Splinterlands from now on. :)
Things have come a long way since the time we used to manage tournaments on Discord. Now it is fully automated. I participated in my first tournament today and won one match before my pack was overpowered - unfortunately.
Nevertheless, for you that has just cracked open a fresh deck of monsters and summoners, there is a solution to help you climb up the rankings and earn more rewards.
Renting on Peak Monsters
Peak Monsters is my favourite marketplace for everything related to buying and selling cards. Recently an option to rent cards was added which created a whole new market and ways in which you could use the cards.
- This will not be an in depth tutorial on how to rent cards. I will definitely be making a video for that and post it up on YouTube and Dtube. I know I struggled to understand the renting feature so I will make sure to do that in my next post.
In my case, I was struggling to crack into Silver 3 due to my low BCX cards and players who were gate keeping with incredibly superior decks.
In particular, I was facing up against a Life Splinter that included an Epic Level 2 Air Elemental at least five times. I was simply stuck in Bronze because I did not have a card that could counter the speed and strike strength of the Air Elemental.
My first thought was to buy some Bitcoin and convert to Steem and eventually buy the card from the market which would have cost me $3.30.
I couldn't do that because every single person I could buy from was asleep.
- I had just finished my Fire quest which would have given me one card in Bronze. I wanted to get to Silver to claim the quest reward so I could get two cards.
That option went straight through the window gratefully. It forced me to remember that it was possible to rent the card that I wanted, for the period I wanted. The problem was, I did not know how to rent cards.
After a bit of research and trial and error I was able to understand the process and picked up an Air Elemental from the marketplace just for a single day.
Now, from the image you will realize that it is a level 6, but pay attention to how much I will have to pay for it.
- I have a Level 2 Life Summoner so it automatically limits my epic cards to Level 2 as well.
Since I am renting for a day I will only have to pay $0.07 to 
Yes, I could have bought the card instead of renting but the point is, you don't have to. With just a couple of Steem, you could have yourself a maxed out deck for whichever Splinter you want for the amount of time you need it.
I was able to crack into Silver 3 shortly after and picked up a Rare Mushroom Seer and Javelin Thrower with a minimum value of $0.135.
I therefore came out of it all with a profit despite it being negligible. The big prizes are higher up in the rankings after all.
Watch out for a in depth tutorial on how to go about renting and particular pitfalls you might encounter (that I encountered) while renting.
All the best!