If you want to win more of your Wild or Survival battles, then you're going to need to get as many of your cards to MAX-level as possible. The Modern league will reward you with a lot more SPS per win, but it's a rich man's game and doesn't allow for bot play which you're going to need to use unless you have the self discipline to play the game every hour on the hour 24/7 so I'm not going to mention it in this tutorial.
Get Your Bot Playing
The Archmage Bot is the best autoplay service that I know of. (If there is a better service/bot, please let us know in the comments.) You have to purchase one of their tokens on Hive-Engine and join their Discord server. Once you have the Archmage token in your wallet, you'll need to find your posting key so that the bot has the necessary authority to interact with your account. Don't worry about them hacking your account because they are a trustworthy service and can't do any financial transactions without your active or master keys anyway. They do take a third of your SPS winnings, but it's worth it because the bot will win way more than you would ever by yourself. There are lots of different tweaks and settings, but the only one I highly recommend is turning it on to alternate. This will automatically switch from Wild and Survival modes, which will also help you keep your energy up so you can go nuts anytime you want to play in Modern. This will make it so the bot plays in Survival mode until it gets your energy back up before it switches back to Wild mode.
Archons
If you are a new player, then you have joined Splinterlands at a wonderful time. Archons, which used to be called summoners, were always very expensive, but looking at the market today, you can see that the cheapest MAX-level archon is less than $7. You're going to need to get one archon of every splinter, including a dragon archon, so you and your bot always have a chance to win, no matter what the rulesets are. Looking at today's prices, I'm quite jealous of new players because I spent hundreds of dollars on these cards, but I'm not mad that they've dropped in value because they have paid for themselves over the years. I sometimes finish seasons on the leaderboard with these cheap Chaos Legion archons, plus my MAX-level dragon archon, so don't think you need to spend a lot on fancy archons. You will need MAX-level archons if you want to use your MAX-level cards, though, so don't get ahead of yourself and pick up MAX-level cards before you get the archons, or they will be useless unless you rent MAX-level archons.
The Market
Buying and opening packs is a lot of fun, but it's no way to get your cards to MAX, as it's unpredictable and random. You may get lucky and open a super rare card, but in all my years of playing Splinterlands, I've only ever opened one Gold Legendary card so it's better to just scoop them up off the market on the cheap from people who've quit the game and want to sell their cards cheaply in a rush. Make sure your filters are looking at both Modern and Wild cards because Modern cards are way too expensive and will probably only lose their value as they retire to the Wild. At the top part of the screen, you'll need to select cards to be shown from cheapest to most expensive, or the arrow up option, and you'll also want to choose the MAX-Level option as well. There are a ton of great MAX-level cards for around $2. It's been that way for a long time, but if and when we enter another bull market, you'll be kicking yourself for not buying these cards up when you had the chance. Just because they are only $2 doesn't mean they suck. It just means they were way overprinted when the team was overly optimistic in the last bull run. These cards are still winners and must-have cards in any deck.
Reward Cards
Some super rare and expensive promo cards completely smash and dominate in battle, but the founders of the game wanted to reward real players over whales, so some of the best cards in the game are the Reward Cards that you get for free simply by playing the game. This is a screenshot of my recent Chaos and Rebellion common reward cards. They would be very expensive to buy off the market, but every card you see here was won over and over again until I had enough to combine them into MAX-level copies. They kick ass. They win. And best of all, they were completely FREE!
This week's Splinterlands Community Engagement Challenge:
@splinterlands/splinterlands-community-engagement-challenge-teach-and-triumph
Amazing art by the Splinterlands community:
@splinterlands/splinterlands-art-contest-week-357
