Hey there fellow Steemians and Splinterlands Players!
As this is my first post, let me just quickly introduce myself:
My name is Hendrik, my close friends usually call me Hedwig. You might get to know the full story of how that came about at a later point ;D
I'm 26 years young or old, however you want to see it. I'm working in the fields of IT-Security and focus on project management. Due to my father being computer affine, I've been tought and raised around computers since I was a little kid. I truly love my dad for showing me the realms of logic, information, creativity and fun that I call computers and the internet. There surely are also negative sides, but you'll learn to navigate around them in a caring and loving environment.
20 years later this evolved into a deep passion for crypto projects and the steem blockchain being only one of them, but definitely growing in interest with the addition of Splinterlands in 2018. I heard about it before but only decided to fund the Seedgerminator campaign after my friend @Nanadar 
Initially, I planned to hold onto my BETA packs and trade them when they are depleted. But my curiousity was bigger..
So exactly one week ago I decided to send the packs over to my account. At first I only wanted to open 68 of the promo and beta packs. But after doing that and reading an article about the statistical advantage of opening packs with the Gold Potion, I decided to open the rest of them doing just that. My luck wasn't extra-ordinary but it wasn't too bad either.
If I remember correctly, this was a day before the season would end. So I decided to just test out my newly obtained cards and quickly fell in love with the game. After joining the discord I got to know members of this helpful community and decided to pursue a little progress and fun with this game.
On the last day and my second day of playing, I managed to get into Gold I, saving myself 30 cards + 5 bonus cards from a potion.
This literally was a last second gift and pretty dramatic fight beforehand. I was on a 3 fight winstreak that I managd to get in the last 4 minutes before the season ended. This fight started just 20 seconds before the season ended and was when 
I have recorded the pack openings and will share the videos at a later point, when I have time to finally edit them. But here is the winning screen. I was very proud :)
That gave me a lot of confidence and I wanted to try out the tournaments that are happening so frequently. So I joined everyone of them and practiced with my different decks until I thought I kind of figured out, what works for me. After some brutal knockouts from Champion players in Diamon Tourneys, I decided I stick to gold and below, with even gold being a tough challenge. But over the last few days I managed to place several times and earn atleast something worth-while for the time spent with the game (while my cards seemed to become more valuable with every day).
First, I managed to get a 3rd place in a Tournament:
Aaaaand just a day later this happened:
Celebrating my FIRST Tournament win!
The tournament was the "Win BATTLE Tokens!" that is hosted multiple times per week by 
.
Every participant received atleast 25 BATTLE (~0.35$)
In my first round of playing (BO1) I met 
The final two fights were against
I want to thank all the people that have helped me in the discord and especially my man 
Currently planning to regulary post and upload conent (also on youtube)
Until next time,
Hendrik ;)
P.S.: To all the US Steemians, Happy Independence Day!