As a new player joining the community I couldn't find many great guides for players like myself who want to get good quickly. This is the advice I wish someone gave me when I started playing Splinterlands.
TL;DR:
- 🤑 If you want to get to the highest league (champion) it's more efficient to invest money in the game as opposed to your time.
- 👹 Pick 2 splinters to buy cards in, which will allow you to have a strong team in roughly 93%+ of the cases.
- 💯 Buy cheap, but max level cards.
Invest money 🤑
First of all, you will need to spend $10 on the summoner's book just to unlock all the features of the game. This is obvious and communicated very well upfront. This is a one-time investment, probably designed to raise the entry cost for people who create bots for this game.
However, about 10-30 minutes into the game I realized that by levelling cards you gain an advantage over people/bots who haven't levelled up their cards because for the same mana cost you get more stats and/or monster abilities.
You can, in theory, level up cards just by playing the game, but I reckon that it might take you at least a month or more to make any sort of reasonable progress and you can effectively skip all that by investing some cash.
It may sound cliche, but time is money and often people forget about this when it comes to games... This is even more true in this game because in higher levels you earn greater rewards. You can earn over 100x the rewards you get in the starting leagues (novice/bronze).
To give you an example, winning my first games earned me 0.1-0.2 DEC and I was winning maybe 50% of my games. Currently, I'm earning about 10-20 DEC per game and this can go even higher - I've seen battles granting 30-40 DEC.
What to buy 🤔
Now that we've established that it is more beneficial to invest $ to skip the initial phase of grinding let's get to the specifics of what to buy.
Buy cards in 2 splinters 👹
The first thing that happens during each match is that you need to pick a splinter. Based on my anecdotal observation, each splinter appears in roughly 75% of games, which means that if you buy cards only in 1 splinter you will not be able to use those cards 25% of the times. If you buy cards in 2 splinters you will have a strong team in 93.75% of cases, which is more than enough to quickly climb through the ranks.
Buy cheapest max level summoners 🔮
This wasn't obvious from the start, but buy 2 cheapest max level summoners - summoner levels allow you to summon higher level monsters and your overall team level is way more important than a bonus that your summoner gives.
Cheapest max level summoner doesn't necessarily mean a common summoner, because you need to combine a lower number of cards for higher rarity summoners, which works out to a lower overall cost. For example, at the time of writing, you can buy "Jarlax the Undead" [Epic rarity, Beta edition] or "Kiara Lightbringer" [Epic rarity, Beta edition] for ~$35.
Buy cheapest monsters 💯
This game is fairly well balanced in regards to monsters being of a similar power level given their cost irrespective of their rarity. Indeed, higher rarity monsters are generally better, but max level common or rare monsters are much stronger than a low-level legendary monster. Also, early on in the game (up to the highest league), simply having a higher level monster was more than enough for me (at the time of writing this I have an 83.33% win-rate, which you can see in the monster explorer, which is another cool tool built by a community member).
I could easily find max level common and rare monsters in the range of $4-$10. Buy these monsters for your chosen 2 splinters and any neutral ones that you can find. The edition of the card doesn't matter if you are not going to compete in events, which have special restrictions.
Also, shop in peakmonsters.com, because they give you a nicer interface when buying cards as well as the price history of each card so you don't overpay.
Bonus tip ⏱
Don't worry about energy capture rate until you get to the champion's league because rewards for daily quests go up the higher your league and these rewards far outweigh the DEC you get by playing in lower leagues. Once you are in the champions league it might be wise to get the DEC capture % back up by doing only the daily quest.
Conclusion 👑
Full disclosure - at the time of writing this guide, I had $490 + $10 in the game, which is way more than I needed to to get to the champions league, hence me writing this guide 😅. There's a lot more that you'll need to learn about this game, but these 3 tips should easily get you to the champion's league with $100-$200 spent on the game.
If you find this useful or you have any questions, let me know in the comments.