Hello everyone and welcome back to my Splinterlands blog! I hope you are all ok and doing great in your Splinterlands journey!
My PC died so I am a little bit hindered in my Splinterlands work, doing ranked battles and making posts on a small laptop screen isn't perfect but it's better as nothing, and I need those posts to continue so here we go, it is what it is! I'm glad my new PC gets delivered later today so I hope to be back up and running by the evening, when I've set everything up.

This weeks Social Media Challenge is the same as last weeks, and it's a big thing! My favourite game is already six years old, and while the general bear market has already passed, for Splinterlands things are a bit behind and asset prices are probably at their lowest point ever, however, listening to the town halls the team is working their ass off to improve the game every day and since Matt took over, I feel things are getting a lot better again!
To find out how you can participate in the challenge yourself, you can find the Splinterlands post here.

So, after last Tuesday maintenance, the Land Prefix Titles are live, giving a boost to players who own 5 or more land plots, when I heard about this update I had 4 plots running, so I decided to buy a cheap plot and put cards on it I had in my account, a common plot was only $13 plus the $5 power core and I got my 5 plots and the 'Warden' title, earning a 5% boost to my ranked play earnings, this isn't much you might think but over time, this can add up and when you try to improve everything just a little bit at a time, you might be amazed what this can bring you in a few years!

A lot of drops make a shower.

So now I've got this cool item in front of my name, it looks pretty cool!

Another thing Matt mentioned in the town hall is they are finally starting to fight the massive bot farms, the problem with them is that they paid the spellbook once, and bought a bunch of cards, and never put anything in the system anymore but they only extract value from the system, multiply this with thousands of accounts doing this and it's a real cancer pushing down the economy, prior, the team was always positive to bots, but finally they're listening to the community.
Modern League was already prohibited for automated play in any way, the plan for Wild League is that it will cost 2000 DEC for every season to be able to play, for normal players this isn't a problem, I am happy to burn the DEC when things get fixed.
The result will probably be more players will start to move to Modern, so Modern gets better to play for not maxed players, this gets fixed even more by adding more liquidity bots, while probably we will lose a lot of bot farms in Wild, so the daily active accounts there will be a lot less, and this will improve the SPS earnings for the players that DO play here, and end rating inflation hopefully.
With the end of the season close, we have just over a day left for this season, I'm in Champion 3 in Wild with my Gold deck, I don't belong here, at best I should be able to make it to Diamond 2, and the SPS requirements for these high leagues are crazy too, I don't have anywhere near the amount required, so all in all, this is going to be a lot better!

6 year anniversary theme

Well, this is just me rambling about my favorite game and nothing you didn't know when you follow the town hall or the recaps yourself, so let's get on with the main topic, the Splinterlands anniversary!

Since I already followed the guidelines in the challenge post last week, I needed to think of something else to make a nice post about...

What would I do, being a new player with the knowledge of an experienced player...

So let's say you're interested in Splinterlands, and have seen all these posts from me and my fellow splinterlands players spamming all channels, I've got to warn you, you might get more than you wished for! 😆
For me this also started as just a game, for almost three years later I'm still here and it really became a part of my life, I had never played a trading card game before but I've been a gamer from childhood, and into games like World of Warcraft, Starcraft, Call of Duty and Pokemon before I found out about web3, and that you could make a few dollars with playing games.

So, If I were to start today, what will I do in a few steps...

• The first thing you need to do is create a Splinterlands account with someone's referral link, mine is included in this link, let me know when you use it and I'll send anything I get for it to your account to help you get started.
  Then, you need to buy a $10 spell book to be able to play and earn, the $10 is partly revenue for the team because well, it's a company after all and they gotta eat too, and there's some cost to make you a hive account you can do a lot more with, like making posts like these, this is also included in the spell book price, you also get 3000 credits in your freshly made account to start buying or renting cards with, I'm not much of a renter, I rather own my cards, I don't like to make other people rich and in the end I still don't own them myself.
  Renting however, IS a good way to try the game before you make the decision to invest more to your account.

• After this, when you've decided Splinterlands is something for you, it's time to start buying, I made a more in depth post about starting Splinterlands with a step by step tutorial before, be sure to check it out.
  With what I know today, starting as a new player with today's card prices, I would start with $100 building a Silver level Chaos Legion deck and go from there, so I would buy all rare summoners: General Sloan, Obsidian, Kelya Frendul, Thadius Brood and Tarsa at max silver level, so you would need 25 BCX, or cards from each summoner. Also, I would buy a few Chaos Legion legendary summoners, but not all since I'm on a budget: I would buy Quix the Devious, Grandmaster Rathe and Immortalis at level 2, also max silver level. All of these will cost about $55, so I would have $45 left to build my deck with.

• Next is starting to buy all common and rare cards from the Chaos Legion set at Silver level, and with the money that's left top this up with the much needed epic and legendary cards, most of them are a must have, which ones? You're going to find out in battle, when you get beated by player, watch the battle, try to understand why you lost and when you see good cards you don't own, look if it's affordable for you, and remember, your deck needs work over time, Rome wasn't built in a day either!

• Next, join a guild! Not just any guild, find a team that has players willing to guide and help you in your journey, joining a guild is very important for multiple reasons, it gives you a small ranked earnings bonus, it gives you access to Brawls where you can earn SPS and Merits, which you can use to buy very strong Gladiator cards with, and it gives you an extra gaming dimension, being part of a community, working together so you can all earn more.

• To be able to earn, you need to have staked SPS as well, SPS price is really low now, so with the funds left I would buy at least 1500 SPS to start with, that's about $18 in todays price.

• Next? there's only one thing left: dive into battle, make a lot of hours on the battlefield, your brain needs a few weeks to remember the cards, the abilities and the mana value, memorizing them will give you an edge in battle, so just have fun while learning!

When you're looking for a guild, let me know, we made a second chapter specially made for new players, where I will personally guide you on our Discord server with any advice needed and some card delegations.

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!