My Steem Monsters Collection - Update

I had already mentioned how I got my first Steem Monsters card from a giveaway (if you don't know what Steem Monsters is, you can find out by reading my previous post on the subject). Despite becoming interested in the game, I wasn't sure whether or not to get the starter pack, and had thought I'd end up having just a couple of cards. To my surprise, my collection has actually grown quite a lot just in a few weeks!

So far, I think I've been lucky at this Steem Monsters thing. Not in the sense of getting rare cards, but in the sense of actually getting cards. I won two more cards at the giveaway where I had gotten my first one, plus a booster pack with five more cards. This left me with eight cards. Then, an unexpected wild opportunity appeared, and I managed to buy 34 cards from a user who gave up on his collection, for a total of... $1.2 SBD! Apparently, those were from the time when the starter packs contained 30 cards instead of 15, which means I got all the 30 cards from the old starter pack plus a few more, for less than the price of a booster pack! I simply couldn't resist. Then I entered an event by Hive account@cryptkeeper17 where he had been giving out cards to people new to Steem Monsters, and he unexpectedly gave me another bunch of cards! :D And suddenly my monster collection is past the halfway point already.

You can check the whole collection on the said page at Steemmonstersdb.com, which is a site created by Hive account@blervin and allows us to see any user's deck, many statistics about various aspects of Steem Monsters, and also has an interface to the official monster market.

Speaking of which, the Steemmonstersdb.com site is way friendlier to screen reader software and blind people than the official Steem Monsters site. It's not perfect (there are some images and clickable objects with no text here and there), but it's usable, including the market part (the market at Steemmonsters.com is practically unreadable by screen readers).

I hope Steemmonsters.com gets accessibility improvements before battles start, or some third-party develops an accessible site where we can set up our battles. I had left a suggestion for a fix in a comment to one of the official Hive account@steemmonsters posts a few weeks ago, and then brought the issue up again recently in a comment to their feedback post. Let's see if this will result in something.

Back to talking about my collection, I have a few duplicate cards already. I know there's the option of selling them or combining duplicate cards to level them up, but I don't think I'll be doing any of that until they reveal what exactly each card does. Maybe there's actually a practical use for our hordes of Giant Rocs, who knows :P .

Anyway, after all these surprising strokes of luck, I feel that there's no turning back anymore, and that I need to get into this game for good! Ironically, even though I probably have all the cards from the starter pack already, I'll still have to buy the starter pack to qualify for tournaments (planned to begin in September 2018).

So, I decided to save up and try to get the starter pack before August ends. I began an #upfundme campaign (basically crowdfunding through upvotes) to gather the required SBD. All the post's SBD and STEEM payouts will go towards the starter pack, which costs $5 USD. The first upfundme post is here. I plan on publishing upfundme posts once a week (at most twice a week if progress is too slow) to accumulate SBD until the goal is reached (hopefully). If you'd like to help me out, just upvote the upfundme post. All upvotes on the upfundme posts are much appreciated. Thank you to anyone who upvotes!

Edit (2018/08/12): the first upfundme post paid out and expired. Here's the second one.

Let's see if this stroke of beginner's luck will continue, and if I can get the starter pack before September.