I already did two articles on Parallel in the last weeks and needless to say, I'm pretty excited for the game as it has this whole early days of Splinterlands feel to it. Built in a bear market and still in Closed Beta, I can almost smell the potential for a huge payoff during the next bull run. But as a question by @mercurial9 reminded me in my last article, jumping right into the game isn't quite as easy if you don't know where to start, what to get, and how to optimize your earnings. So in this article, I want to do just that - give you a full guide of how to set you up, what to expect in terms of earning, and what best to avoid. Let's get right into it!
First off, you need access to the game. It's still in Closed Beta and there's no official way to get approved right now, so this is going to be your first hurdle. There are two options that should work. You can either ask in their Discord or you can ask them on X. Just be polite, tell them you are interested in the game, and you'd like to give it a shot and chances are pretty good they'll set you up within minutes. This worked well for me and everybody I've brought to the game thus far had no issues being admitted either.
Once you are in, there are two possible options to go in terms of earning potential. You can either go full free2play and only take part in the battle pass or you can acquire a NFT deck and start earning Prime - their native token - on top of it. Personally, I would advise you to go for both as the returns are pretty good and investing into a deck to start with is also going to really help you with the battle pass as well.
Assuming you want to go for both, let's talk about earning their token first. Each day, you earn Prime from your best 5 wins in that day. Prime earning per match are determined by your rating, a possible win streak, and most importantly the percentage of NFT cards in your deck.
Even a single non-NFT card is going to drive your earnings down a cliff so there's really one option if you want to earn any meaningful amount of Prime: Go get a full NFT set to play with. This is a bit complicated as there are several collections out there and there are both options available on Ethereum and on Base. There's a lot of nuance to these different sets but we won't go to deep into that part because if we are only interested in optimizing our earning, then there are only two sets we need:
The first one consists of all commons and uncommons that were available in the original starter decks (which are no longer available). If you want to get any cards, this is the first collection you should look at. Living on base, fees are almost non existent and most cards only cost a couple of dollars max.
Any card you can't find there you may find in the latter set. Echos are replicas of first edition NFTs that other players have minted. While others may take pride in owning a true original, in terms of earning, these Echos count as NFTs just as much as the originals from Ethereum and since they are way, way cheaper, there really is no point in getting them unless you are a collector.
As there aren't too many cards in the game yet, assembling a competitive tier 1 deck isn't super expensive. My Shroud deck is made up of only commons and uncommons and I still manage to play in the top 100 without too much of an issue. If you want to see what I'm running, you can import the code down below into the games deck editor:
CB-380,3xCB-386,3xCB-231,3xCB-381,3xCB-422,CB-213,3xCB-385,3xCB-232,3xCB-103,3xCB-218,3xCB-236,3xCB-384,3xCB-204,3xCB-233,3xCB-205
Getting all cards shouldn't cost you more than about $150 and for now, those are really all you need once you understand the basics of the game. There's one meta deck that is favored against you, while all others are either balanced or favoring you. Once you get a hang of the game, you can expect to make about 0.04 Prime per win, putting you at 0.2 Prime per day. While Prime is moving up and down at the moment, it's price is mostly somewhere around $3. So 0.2 Prime a day equals $0.6 a day which would amount to $219 a year which is already more than you'd have to pay for the deck. Pretty wild, huh? It doesn't stop there, though. There's also the battle pass which I talked about just a couple days ago.
For $15 a month, you can unlock the premium track which will allow you to mint one new and exclusive NFT per battle pass. We are only in the 2nd month of the battle pass system so there's no telling how the value of these exclusive NFTs will develop but the first one at least is worth about $100 right now. So if we assume this to stay at about that level, that's another $1200 of value for an additional $180 a year. If we put all this together, you'd need about $330 of investment to expect a total return of about $1400 assuming you play regularly and don't skip too many days during the year.
On top of that, there are additional events, promotions, and so on. Shortly after I started the game, there was the so called Avatar challenge which allowed me to mint a Parallel Avatar NFT - a NFT I could sell right now for another $287:
In short, the earning potential is huge right now and after that early investment, there's only profit to be made. Obviously, I'm not selling anything right now. Just as during the buildup of 2020, I'm not going to sell anything and wait for the full bull to hit us in 2025. I just have that feeling I might end up with another huge payday once we get there... and you could too if you got into the game right now!
If you do have any questions regarding the game or what to get, feel free to reach out to me here or on Discord and I'm happy to answer anything I can.
And that's all from me for today, thank you all for reading and see you next time.