Hi guys,
in this post I want to go over why right now is a great time to be starting with Splinterlands! This might also be interesting for players who already have an account, but took a break from the game or who aren't sure wether or not they wan't to invest (more) time and money into Splinterlands.
Let's get into it!
Soulbound Reward Cards
We've already talked plenty about the new soulbound reward cards and you can read up on them in detail in the official post. But why is that so important for new players?
The new reward cards are no longer "just" a few cards that are a good addition to your deck. They now consist of a whole set of 43 cards including summoners. This means that by playing the game and earning reward chests you can get all the cards you need to play, where as before you had to at least buy or rent the summoners in order to play the cards you earned. Granted you need some collection power and cards in order to earn reward chests in the first place, but I'll be going over how to acquire those further down below.
For now I really want to point out the fact, that you can basically get maxed out summoners and monsters (which are actually pretty strong from the looks of it) for every splinter to play as high in the ranks as your skill permits you to from reward chests.
Those are all cards I pulled from one daily focus of silver chests (15) today.
Take into consideration that every other player has to earn these cards through daily rewards as well. There won't be whales that have these maxed out on the first day, because they can only get so many chests and it's still luck if and which cards you pull.
Everyone who starts earning chests from the very first day (yesterday) these cards went live, will have an advantage over players coming into the game in the future, because your cards will be leveled up by then, when they need to earn them over time.
Low cost of Entry
In order to earn rewards you need to own a Spellbook (which costs $10 and will give you $3 of those back worth in Credits) and get to Bronze 3 in ranked and therefore own a minimum of 500 Collection Power. You also will need some cards besides the starter cards, because those will induce a penalty, restricting you from earning rewards. That being said there are two ways to start out for new players:
- Renting
Which is really cheap. For the $3 you get in credits when purchasing a Spellbook, you can rent cards for a whole season in Bronze league easily. Once you got your first rewards, which will include Packs and SPS besides cards as well, you can sell those to cover your costs and repeat the process until you have enough reward cards to fully play them without the addition of rentals / starter cards.
- Buying
Which is still considerably cheap when compared to previous prices during the last bull run. If you want to own your assets buying is obviously the way to go. It will be way more expensive than renting, but still relatively cheap. You don't need to max out all the splinters right away. 2-3 splinters with summoners and a few meta cards are enough to be competitive in every league except for Champion probably.
There are plenty of YouTubers like Bulldog1205, which have made videos on budget decks for the current set of modern cards, that you can check out. You can then decide wether you want to buy or rent those cards.
Market Conditions
The past couple of weeks looked pretty good for the whole crypto market, as bitcoin went up quite a bit and pulled Altcoins with it.
The value of the Chaos Legion set went up considerably as well. But and this but is important: We are still in a bear market! And we are still far far away from previous Bitcoin (and Splinterlands assets) highs. This means there is a lot of upside for Splinterlands assets such as cards, because 1) we have previous values at certain Bitcoin prices and once Bitcoin goes back to those levels we might see these values again, 2) historically assets go up when they are out of print, which will be the case for Chaos Legion in March at latest, so it's very likely we will surpass these values some time in the future.
That being said I think right now is a good entry point to acquire assets, if you're planning on holding them for some time. There's always the possibility of things not working out and assets going lower again and that's why I wouldn't ape in (I would never do that), but it looks like a pretty great time to dollar cost average in.
Tournaments and Land
Tournaments
Are currently worked on and we had a new mode with the Ghost Card Tournaments introduced not too long ago. This is a tournament where every contender has access to all the cards, which makes it an even playing field and enables players without deep pockets to win huge prizes. Obviously you need to be very good at the game to take home prizes from a tournament like that, but I believe these tournaments will be hosted more frequently and the best way to improve your skill and gameplay and therefore your chance of winning something is by playing the game and learning about the cards.Land
Is still quite some time away, but from what Matt said in the last Town Hall, it will be a whole game in itself. You will need lots of DEC to build buildings on the land and leveled up cards to work those buildings to produce resources and earn. This will ultimately increase the demand for cards and DEC though and starting the game now and slowly but steadily building up and stacking your assets might prove very fruitful with land on the foreseeable horizon.
Summary
I think Splinterlands is great and fun and I always believed the assets I acquired through playing, blogging and reinvesting would appreciate in value in the long run. As of yesterday, with the update of the new reward cards, I feel like the cost of entry into the game is almost zero while the rewards are extremely good. Yes you won't be able to sell any of the cards you earn until they go out of print and we don't know when that is, but they open up the possibility of playing at the highest levels without any investment into the game, besides the $10 Spellbook, where you can earn both SPS and Packs which will most likely go up in value with the next bull market, the ending print run of Chaos Legion and the implementation of land.
I can only encourage anyone and everyone who is interested in Crypto Gaming and Play2Earn or who stopped playing Splinterlands, to come and start playing (again)!
Disclaimer
None of this is financial advice. These tips are for educational purposes only and might all fall out of date as both Splinterlands and the Crypto Market in general are subject to constant change.
Start playing Splinterlands today!
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Previous Posts
Check out my push into gold league: Part I, Part II, Part III
Check out my 5 tips for new players series: Part I, Part II, Part III
Hope you enjoyed the read. Have a great day and until next time!
Pinkmank45