My first 2 weeks in Splinterlands so far...

}

Hello everyone! This is my first post in Splintertalk. I had several ideas on how I would go with my first ever article in Splintertalk, but I decided to go with my experience about the game so far.

How I got into Splinterlands

Since I liked playing card games (Magic: the Gathering, Yu-gi-Oh!, and Hearthstone), I stumbled upon Splinterlands while searching for P2E NFT games. At first I was not convinced since it looked simple and it was pretty much about the card's power levels. I'm not a fan of play to win games, but I registered in the last days of July anyway. I bought my spellbook after too much convincing from my wife.

Novice-Bronze days

After purchasing my spellbook, I immediately breezed through the tutorials. Then I started playing the fire splinter with this guy:

Without prior knowledge on how the cards worked, I clicked the Battle button and placed the toughest, hard-hitting melee summon in the front line and several ranged summons at the back. I was thinking, "if my frontline can't die, the folks at the back can freely hit." Boy, I was so wrong. I tasted my first defeat against this guy:

After seeing my squad being decimated by the typical Bronze-level lineup, I was like: "hey, the tutorial mentioned that I should play the fire splinter against the death splinter! The tutorial must be a scam!" The gamer in me didn't want to lose, so I spammed the Battle button until I got into Bronze III.

On the second day, I researched about the abilities and kind of memorized how they looked like. Playing in mobile isn't as user friendly as in the desktop. Then I met this guy:

Me, still playing the typical fire splinter lineup on Novice, got matched up for the first time against the water splinter. I was impressed on how the water splinter squashed my tank like it had no shield nor abilities on it. So I decided to copy my opponent's lineup as much as I could using the ghost cards provided. It put me into a winning streak for 2 days, to a point that I'm at the top 800s of the Bronze league (back then).

Day 4, I still have no idea how to earn cards. I calculated that it would be several years before I actually acquire one. Then I stumbled upon the Card Rentals tab in the marketplace (yeah, it took me 4 days or more to actually find that tab). I rented some cheap cards for the water splinter to further propel my rankings to the top 500s. Until the following week, I really thought that the water splinter is one broken splinter and it dominates a lot of games in the Bronze league.

Day 8, my first match that night (I usually play at night) is against this creature:

I never thought that one creature could decimate an entire team. The amount of damage that my team could never match the amount of healing that this guy receives every turn:

"Hmm, legendary cards are really game breaking." So I decided to check if I could rent them out. "My wife will kill me if I spend this much in a game that I'm still trying.", I said to myself. So I went for the next best thing:

With my 3rd splinter (earth), I continued playing until I reached the top 300s of the Bronze league. I had enough ratings to the point where I can progress to Silver league if I only had enough power to get through. So I decided to rent a lot of cards, some that I won't really use. Unfortunately, it was still not enough to propel to the Silver league. Luckily, I stumbled upon some articles on how to rent cards for cheap to boost my power level to the next league.

Ending

Several days of winning and losing, I finally got enough cards to boost me to the Silver league. On the 13th day, I'm finally at around the top 400s of the Silver league with rented cards alone. Hopefully I could save enough DECs to own my first summoner. I'm really liking the earth splinter a lot since it shuts down most of the melee strategies due to the Thorns ability and the inherent toughness of the earth splinter cards. So far, I'm really liking this game a lot. I hope that most of the card owners out there would rent their high level cards to new players like me for a longer duration.