Today I am going to talk about a dilemma that most of the new players face when they start out playing Splinterlands. After a while you start to notice that some players have a lot of Legendary Summoners and Legendary cards and these cards are way more powerful than the Common or Rare cards a beginner typically will have. 

It is natural to get an urge to throw a big wad of moolah and stock up on those glimmering Legendary cards. If you are rich and have a long term conviction in Splinterlands then I don’t see anything wrong with that approach either but today’s post is about the pre-rich (short on liquidity or you can call poor also) players who are careful about their spendings.

When I started out playing Splinterlands I had to think a couple of time before spending $10 to get the Spell book so you can imagine I usually run pretty thin on liquidity.

I have never thrown money to stack up my card portfolio but played regularly over the years to build up my collection. I have to admit it was easier in the early days when you will get cards as reward which were not soul bound and could be traded immediately in the market. 

I would carefully analyse which cards were improving my win rate and which I was not using at all. I would sell cards I don’t use to level up cards that help me win.

Do Legendary Summoners Improve Your Win Rate?

A simple generic high level answer is a Big Yes! Legendary summoners give you quite an edge over the regular common/ rare summoners. For this reason they are way more expensive too. You should not lose heart if at the moment you do not have funds to pick up some legendaries rather focus on which legendary summoner you think will be most effective for you and start saving up. 

Meanwhile you can start experimenting with strategies which can help you give a good fight to a player will a loaded stack of legendaries with your bunch of Rare/Common cards. 

Let me add a disclaimer that no matter how much you strategise you still might end up losing against a line up full of legendaries but from my experience having a clear strategy gives you a level playing field and you might get a 50%-70% win rate which is quite decent considering the handicap you have in your collection.

Pick Your Favourite Element or Elements!

The first step is to identify your favourite elements and then build up your collections by levelling up the cards that are helping you win. Of course the golden rule is you level up the summoners first.

One of my favourite elements is Water and now I know very well which team I need to assign depending on what is the mana limit and other fight conditions.

Strategy Can Beat Legendary!!

Let me take a recent fight to show how strategy can overcome powerful legendary cards. In this fight the elements allowed included Water so I knew I will be able to put up a formidable team. When I saw my opponent use Lily Shieldpaw that is a powerful Legendary Dragon Summoner I knew it will not be an easy fight. On top of it my opponent combined this with Water element so he clearly had an advantage in terms of card selection. He seems to have an extended collection as he put in multiple legendaries like Carnage Titan, Chaos Dragon (I get a bit scared when I see it used by my opponents) and Wave Brood (very difficult to take out on the flank).

On paper his team was much stronger than mine in terms of considering the individual cards but what he lacked was a clear strategy by complementing the powers of different cards. I put Swamp Spitter at the end to Repair the armour of my Coastal Sentry. Plus my Flying Squid had Blind ability which made the enemy miss many of the melee attacks. In a long drawn battle this can be a game changer.

His Chaos Dragon did significant damage to my team in the initial rounds but once I took him out it was an easy win for me.

Bottomline is pick the element you like then the cards you think work best for you then patiently level them up after testing them in different battle conditions.

If you are interested to see the full match in it’s glory you can check it out here- https://splinterlands.com/battle/sl_9291459c28f95d31d0fcfd72af19c4e8?ref=sambtc

Cheers,

Sam