Hi everyone!
It's a big world in Splinterlands with so much to do and so many mistakes to be made, and since I'm running our two Splinterlands chapters as a game captain for my guild, I'm guiding and helping new players often, and I wrote a lot of explainer articles before, so this weeks Social Media Challenge is right up in my alley, I like to help new players, so for this week I'm writing a nice simple guide for them to help understand everything a little bit better and so they can enjoy it even more!
But first...What Is Splinterlands?
So, for people who don't know, Splinterlands is an online collectible card game using blockchain technology. Every card in the game is owned as a NFT and is traded on the Hive blockchain. It's the digital, modern version of Magic: The Gathering with some extra advantages like it's much easier to rent out cards to other players for profit, join tournaments and Guild Brawls.
Cards are available to buy and sell through the ingame marketplace as well as on third-party online marketplaces like Peakmonsters and Monstermarket. Winners can earn real money in the form of Splinterlands own governance token Splinterlands Shards (SPS), making it a lucrative platform for extremely skilled players with the best cards.
With your card set you battle other players, each card has it's own mana value, strengths and abilities and every battle has another mana cap and different rule set, in the higher leagues up to 3 rulesets combined, so if you can wrap your head around the do's and don't in this particular match better than your opponent does, you'll have an advantage already, making it a highly strategic game.
In February last year I already made a post about what you would need to start earning in Splinterlands, you can read this article here. It is a bit out dated, and prices dropped significantly since then, good for new players since you need less money to get started! The article in the link is from the buyers perspective, of course you can also borrow your cards to try out the game without any upfront costs and decide later if you want to buy your own deck, because in my opinion, owning is always better if you can.
Splinterlands works better on PC, so my guide is made for PC, I don't play on my phone EVER, for a reason... it's just trash imo.
So, first things first... you want to start as a brand new Splinterlands Battle Mage, you first need to create your account on the splinterlands website.
So as with any account, fill in your email address and a (strong) password.
I recommend on making your account with a password and not with a wallet because later we're gonna connect your account to the hive keychain, so it's more safe and disconnected from your other crypto games. So you have to click on 'create password'
Enter your email and confirm it in the box to the right, same goes for your password, and please don't make it too easy, you won't use your password often, in fact, I never use it, more on this later...
After this, you can change your In Game Name (IGN) choose wisely, you won't be able to change it ever again! with this, you're also creating a fully operational hive account, Splinterlands is run on the Hive blockchain, and you will find out later there is much more you can do with it.
Now we need to request the account keys for our new Splinterlands account, click 'account security' by clicking on your account name in the dropdown menu, then select request account keys in the new window (red arrow)
You will now get a email with a link in it so you can see your keys, copy paste this and save this OFFLINE, for example on a USB Stick / Flash drive, and keep it somewhere safe, I recommend to also print it out so you always have a non-digital backup, but again, keep it safe.
Your keys file looks like this:
Account Name: @******* <--- this is your user name of course
Master Password: this is only used for resetting your other keys
Owner Key: I don't use this one myself
Active Key: with this key you can play but also can transfer cards and spend SPS/DEC
Posting Key: with this key you can only play, but not send cards or spend SPS/DEC
Memo Key: I don't use this one myself
Next step is to make it easy for us to connect to our Splinterlands account but also be safe, the best way for this is Hive Keychain. You can download it here.
I recommend using Brave browser for playing splinterlands, you can get adds and when you click them you get a little bit of crypto for it (BAT) which you could sell and buy cards for!
After you download it you can make a chrome/brave extension from it and I recommend to put your posting and active key in the Hive Keychain, for normal use it's everything you need.
So keep in mind, with the active key, other people can transfer your nice Splinterlands assets to themselves, not your keys - not your cards! so if you see a hive keychain pop-up message from a site that asks permissions, always look what key it will use, most of the times it will say 'posting key' and that's ok, no harm can be done with it, it's used to let bots play accounts or make posts like this on various platforms in the Hive Ecosystem.
Wow! already a lot of info right!? and we didn't even get to start with the good stuff! the game itself!
well.. this is important so you better do it right.
Now your account is set up to start your Splinterlands adventure, you will start your battles in Novice league and you will play mostly (if not all) against bots who play the same setup over and over, to make you learn how to counter a team.
There are two different ranked battles: Wild and Modern - in Modern only the newest 2 sets and 2 mini sets that come with it can be played: Chaos Legion with Riftwatchers, and Rebellion. These sets already include a ton of cards, and you will have an advantage if you can remember what the cards abilities are, so learn them by playing.
Wait... sets?? what do you mean??
So over the course of the game, every once in a while a new card set is being released. Splinterlands started with only the Alpha set, later the Beta set, After that Untamed with the mini set Dice which sold out about the time I started playing Splinterlands in August 2021. After that Chaos Legion got released and after a while Riftwatchers got released. On December 5th 2023, the latest set, Rebellion launched, again changing everything, bringing new meta's to the game.
So this is important again: when you're going to buy cards, you need to pay attention to the set, to make it simple I made this picture:
Splinterlands offers two types of cards, Summoners and Monsters. Each time you battle a ranked battle, you will select your cards which forms part of your deck. Your deck will consist of one Summoner and up to 6 Monsters. The Summoner Card has abilities which affect the Monster cards.
Your Summoner Card has powers which affect the whole monster team, so it can buff your own team or debuff the enemy team.
Splinterlands cards look like this:
Splinterlands cards have 3 types of attack:
- Melee (saw icon) in the stats to the left
- Archers (arrow icon)
- Magic (Blue cloud with lightning icon)
Below the attack type is a number, that's the cards speed, from 1 to 6: the higher the speed difference the bigger the chance of missing the attack. Magic attacks can't miss, unless the target has the Phase ability.
Speed is very important, because if you can strike first and kill the enemy before it can even hit you, you can determine the outcome of the battle before your opponent has even made it's first move.
1 key missed attack can change the outcome for some battles!
The stats to the right are armor (shield icon) and health points (heart icon).
Melee and Archer attacks hits armor first, Magic attacks bypasses armor and go straight to the health points, there are some rule sets which changes this but you'll learn that eventually.
Melee can only attack from the first position unless they have an ability like reach, sneak or opportunity.
Archer can attack from every position except for the first position, unless it has the close range ability.
Magic can attack from every position.
Know we know this, it's wise to keep archers in the back of our teams ;)
Buying cards
If you want to buy your cards, it's best not to use the ingame market, they take a 5% fee.
I buy my cards on https://monstermarket.io/ they give 60% of the fee back to the buyer in DEC, you can find the returned DEC in your Hive Engine wallet.
When you have a lot of DEC on your account, you can also make bid buys on https://peakmonsters.com this way you can place bids below the current market price, and might get some nice deals!
Regular and Gold Foils
All cards have regular foils and gold foil versions, the gold foils are NOT stronger for the same level, but for every gold foil card in your team you get a 10% bonus in rewards when you win.
Also, gold foil cards start at a higher level to begin with.
Rarity and Levels:
There are four types of card rarities:
- common (grey)
- rare (blue)
- epic (purple)
- legendary (yellow)
Needless to say, legendary cards are more stronger and valuable as common cards, and require less cards to combine to bring them to a higher level.
Leveling cards can give you new abilities and stronger attacks, but for a higher level card you need a higher level summoner. So if you buy lvl 4 common cards but only have a lvl 1 summoner, your lvl 4 card will only be a lvl 1 in your battles.
So for this example I used the rare water summoner Kelya Frendul, at you can see in it's stats, at level 1 it can only summon lvl 1 cards of all rarities. To upgrade it to lvl 2, you need to combine 5 lvl 1 cards to make 1 lvl 2. This process can NOT be reversed, so in reality, 4 level 1 cards are burned by this action in creating your level 2 summoner!
With this lvl 2 you can now use lvl 3 common cards, lvl 2 rare cards and lvl 1 epics and legendaries, if you can, I recommend building at least a deck with lvl 2 rare Chaos Legion summoners, as they are the cheapest now and so you have an advantage over players with only lvl 1 summoners. Higher winrate = higher profits and more chests at the end of your focus of the day.
On to the battles!!!
It's finally time for some action, we're ready to click the battle button when you borrowed or bought your deck!
I'll fight a battle as an example and explain:
So for this battle we had 43 mana to use, water and death are not allowed, no armor ruleset AND all ranged attackers have the snipe ability. In lower leagues you get only 1 ruleset at a time to help you get used to it :)
My opponent likes to play magic, tip: don't spam the same strategy or element every time, now there's a big chance he's gonna play magic again.
So on snipe rulesets, I like to put a marter card in the 2nd position, it will get killed first, boosting the attack for my first and third card.I had some luck that in the second round my tank was able to hit first and killing the enemy tank, if this wasn't the case, I might very well have lost the battle. So with strategy, a good set of cards, also a little luck (RNG) is needed!
you can watch the battle unfold for yourself here.
That's the battle part, just grind your way trough the daily battles and earn chests every day, you have a full 50 energy bar when you start, every battle consumes 1 energy and 1 energy regenerates every hour. So you can play 24 battles every day. For maximum profits just don't let the bar ever reach 50 :)
You can also buy more energy, I never do this.
Next is the Guilds part: Guilds give you a small bonus in your earning for every battle, and let you fight in guild brawls, to earn SPS and Merits, with merits you can buy Gladiator Packs, which contain very strong Gladiator cards with the bloodlust ability. They can only be used in Brawls, or with the ruleset 'are you not entertained?' or when you have the soulbound summoners with the conscript ability.
You're welcome to join my guild of course! We are Non Fungible Gaming, and have our own discord channel where we just hang out, help each other and discus tactics. you're welcome to join us by clicking on this link.
We have a main guild that's currently looking for higher players to fill the more niche frays, and a 2nd guild to help new players, train them, help grow their decks and support them where we can.
Some last words... it's A LOT to learn, try and learn all the different abilities, take notes if you have to, try to memorize the cards and their abilities and their mana value. You'll have a advantage over your opponent if they can't.
Learn to understand why you lose, if you lost. and if you don't - share the battle link to someone more experienced (or in our discord) to help you improve your battles.
Good luck to all of you out there! and most important... Have fun!
Thank you for reading!!!
If you haven't made an account already, please consider using my referral link to sign up, I'll happily send the amount I get for your signup back to you in DEC or SPS to help you start.
Have a great day!
Sources: For my thumbnail I used a background from @golemoverlord, when you're not playing this game as a splinterlands player, you're missing out!
I made a post with more info about Golem Overlord here.