Hi everyone! and welcome back to my Splinterlands Blog, for this weeks Social Media challenge we need to tell the tale of our journey as a Splinterlands player, and it's been quite a journey already in 2.5 years! Funny how you start something that grows bigger and bigger over time, so... let's go! 😆

To find out how you can participate in the challenge yourself, you can read the splinterlands post here.

For people unfamiliar with Splinterlands some basic info 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.

On top of that there's so much to do, whether you just battle, fight in guild brawls or tournaments to earn SPS tokens, scour the card market for some good deals to further strengthen your deck, or maybe to flip them for some extra cash, become a content creator about this versatile and revolutionary game on YouTube or like me, just with blogs, making a nice little extra that way or producing items and spells on the land plots you can buy.

When it all started...

I became interested in cryptocurrency, like many others during the bullrun in 2017, Bitcoin, reached a new all time high and many millionaires were born, but for the people who didn't take profit, saw their newly acquired wealth vanish as fast at arrived in the crash after the peak.
I bought my first BTC in May 2019, just €20 to try it out, and before I knew it my 20 doubled in value to €40... wow that's was easy!
No such thing as easy money but I learned that later....

Web3 gaming

As kids we all dreamed about making money playing games, and I spent sooo much hours on games like Railroad Tycoon and later Call of Duty and World of Warcraft, now with crypto this was really possible, I found my first Web3 game in 2020, and it wasn't Splinterlands, it was League of Kingdoms, just a fairly simple game building your village and leveling up everything, when I started I didn't knew how this simple game I just started for fun, would be very lucrative!
I started 100% free to play and when I leveled up my accounts I started to sell resources, making about $1500 in total in the next two years (yeah this is a bit off-topic but I'm getting there..)
I looked at Splinterlands without a lot of attention in 2020, and I didn't understand much of it, I never played a Trading Card Game before, and I decided to skip <-- poor decision looking back!

Fast forward, since I made quite a bit of money with League of Kingdoms I wanted something else, the game was full of bugs and it was getting boring to play, I did made some nice friends and joined a Web3 Gaming Guild, Non Fungible Gaming and I news about great rewards in Splinterlands got my attention again, so I put a little more effort in it, watched some tutorials on YouTube and decided to give it a go!

My fresh start in Splinterlands

It was August 2021 when I made my first account @nozem with some funds from League of Kingdoms, and started my ranked battles, back then we earned DEC for the battles we won, and the cards we could find in chests were pretty valuable, and not soulbound like they are now.
I remember pulling a Legendary card worth $40 in my first week with my $10 account 🤑 it was Ancient Lich.

With such great rewards, I decided to open a second account and be my own referral so earn even more rewards, so I made this account and put some more funds in to this account as well, rewards were crazy and I was able to make a lot of DEC with playing my two accounts back to back, and pulled some more nice reward cards like Axe Master, I still use in my battles.

With some other players in my Guild we started a Splinterlands Guild and I managed it (and still do) given a extra layer to a great game already - a nice community.

Back then, I didn't knew the importance of the different set releases and all that, Untamed almost sold out, and later Dice also, but I was still learning everything so I did buy some seperate cards but no packs.

Of course, when the rewards are this high it gets to a point where it's no longer sustainable and people find ways to exploit this and ruin it for everyone, and the bot farms arrived leeching funds from the Splinterlands Economy into their own pockets, taking profit is never wrong but there's a difference in taking profit and leeching.

So the nerfs started, they NEEDED to start for the game to survive, there's always a delicate line between earnings and sustainability in the long run, and I was loving every aspect of the game so I was fine with it, I just kept on grinding and growing my deck.

When Chaos Legion launched, it was the time for me to finally get some affordable summoners and level my deck up to Silver League, where today I still am, I really DO want to get higher in to the leagues, but it's very expensive with the SPS staking requirement alone you need $1700 in staked SPS to compete in Gold 1 and I'm only half way.

Last year, with the collaboration with the Wasder app, we had an inflow of new players so we decided to start a second Splinterlands guild, funded by Non Fungible Gaming, to help and guide new players earn more together and have fun, but the crypto winter continued and more FUD came and it got silent in web3 and crypto in general... VERY silent.
I'm glad the core team in our main guild just grinded on, we did lose some players there too unfortunately, every person has to make their own choices, and we only know if it was a good choice when we look back at it over time.

Splinterlands in my daily life

So over the years, Splinterlands has became a part of my life really, with all the things to do besides playing I mentioned before such as making blogs like this, I got a side hobby to fund my deck a little extra by collecting cans and bottles from the streets for the deposit money.
I'm also the guilds leader for both splinterlands guilds, managing this and guiding players is fun too.

I do my ranked battles every day on both accounts, so that's 1-2 hours daily, the only time in the year I don't is in the summer when I'm abroad with my family on holiday, family time is important too of course 😍.

Looking at my main account profile I'm closing in on a whopping 20.000 battles in both leagues combined!

and I did another 19k battles on my alt account!

When you're a new player and want some help, our guild is definitely the right place for you, I wrote tons of explainer articles for new players before.

My future goals in Splinterlands.

As I mentioned before, I want to be in Gold League at some point, but a lot has to happen before I can, I'm just a normal guy with a normal day job and a family so I can't put $1k extra into the game, well I could.. but I won't, in web3 it's just reality that you can't have it all because it's never enough, there's always something better you'll want, so new players reading this, you gotta be honest and strict to yourself, personally I put €20 personal money in my Splinterlands accounts on top of what I make with blogging and other activity on hive and other web3 games I use to grind money from, which I estimate is about $50-70 so in total about $75-95 every month, which isn't bad at all, but there are SO MUCH ways in the Splinterverse I can spend it on...

• cards handpicked from the market
• Rebellion packs
• Chaos Legion packs
• Riftwatcher packs
• SPS

And last but not least... the new Land Expansion land plots, workers to put on the lands and DEC you need to stake on your lands, I made a seperate section about how my land journey went.

My Land journey

So even before I started playing, land main sale happened and un-surveyed land plots sold for $25 each, meaning when land launched, you would be able to survey the land and see what rarity and terrain type you bought, I was totally not into this when I started, I didn't knew much about it, and I was way too busy building my deck anyway, in the months during the Splinterlands Big Bang, when everything went crazy and prices pumped, these $25 plots were selling for $800-1000... crazy!
I'm glad I didn't buy any at that time, then the crypto winter came, and land got delayed, and delayed, and delayed further, buyers had to wait almost 2.5 years before they could survey their lands, and then still they couldn't do anything with it, this is not one of the finest things Splinterlands did, and mistakes were made, but that's history and with Yabamatt as the CEO, I think we're in for a great future now.
Last December land 1.5 finally launched and we could start to build and work the lands.

Here is some basic info first.

Types of Claims

Plots - A Plot is the basic unit of Splinterlands land. In all of Praetoria, a total of only 150,000 plots will be sold to players. These plots do not make up the entirety of the continent, but only the player-owned portions. There will also be a mix of non-player-owned land that is controlled by the game.
Tracts - A Tract Claim is a unit of 100 total Plots. Every Tract is guaranteed to contain 1 Plot with a Keep.
Regions - A Region Claim is a unit of 1000 Plots. Every Region is guaranteed to contain 1 Plot with a Castle and 9 Plots with Keeps.

Totems

Totems come in the same 4 rarities (Legendary, Epic, Rare and Common) as Splinterlands cards. These NFT items can be placed on Splinterlands land to enhance the resource production of magical abilities of that land in various ways. They can also be tokenized and traded on TribalDEX and Hive-Engine.

Items and Spells

Items and spells will be new types of playable cards in the future of Splinterlands. Instead of a single round of drafting then submitting a team, there will then be a second round in which players have a chance to play items and spells to further affect the action of the battle.
Items and Spells are one of the main purposes and goals of the Splinterlands land expansion. Players will have the exclusive ability to produce Items and Spells, meaning that they will not be officially sold by Splinterlands from a supply. Players will have to rely upon the resources and crafting of their own land, and on the secondary Item and Spell markets managed by other players.

So as I mentioned before I started playing Splinterlands in August 2021,

I remember talking to a veteran player on discord, mistermister if I remember correctly, he told me I really should get at least one land plot, I really didn't knew what I was doing at this time and since land main sale already sold out and market prices were surging ($800 for a un-surveyed land plot) I knew this was not for me, and I better invested some funds into building a Splinterlands deck and just start playing the game and learning the ropes.

Fast forward, 2 years later NFG owns 2 Splinterlands Guilds, NFG Club - Legion I and NFG Club - Legion II managed by yours truly, I run two hand played accounts, one in Bronze, and my main in high Silver.
Since I'm investing a lot of time in this great game, I wanted a piece of this land pie too, just to experience this part of the game really, I watched some video's about land but much was unknown, and I bought my first common land plot which was now affordable due to the crypto winter and everything web3 related plummeted into a deep dark hole.

So, in June 2023 I bought myself a common land plot, with the little knowledge I did had I bought a plot that included the 'building in a box' to build a level 1 building for free when land 2.0 launches, DEC was still way under peg so I ended up paying 58K DEC for a $44 land plot, it was in Region 79.

When the new came land will launch at the beginning of December 2023, I decided I wanted another plot because one would need to produce grain for me to be self sufficient and the other plot could produce something else, to be determined later.

November 30, I bought my second common plot, for, looking back now, REALLY CHEAP only $28.50 and I read somewhere that your plots needed to be close to each other, or you would have to pay transportation fees, no plot were available at that time in region 79, so I bought a plot in region 78...
Yeah... that's not going to work... I found out later 🤣, you still need to pay the transportation fee that way.

Without plot available in my regions now, I needed to start over, that was not cool, I first waited a month to build my farm and I bought 30k grain peer to peer from a mav on discord to finish my buildings before I came to the conclusion the best thing for me to do is sell and start over again, but I locked my first plot for 30 days so I couldn't sell that right away, lucky for me, I forgot to lock the second plot, I looked at what a decent price would be at the time for that plot in my region and other regions around it, most common plots were listed at $65 - $75. But since I only paid $30 in total with the grain for it, I listed for $60 for a fast sale and announced it on the Buy / Sell channel in Splinterland official discord where a player contacted me right away and bought my plot...

Wow, so I made a mistake - and I doubled my money with it 🤣

With some outside funds I had ready to fund my deck and earnings from blogging about Splinterlands, I bought two plots, in the same region this time 😇

1 rare plot that already had a finished grain farm, and 1 common plot I was planning to build a research hut on it, with the remaining funds I bought some Gold Foil rare and epic workers to put on to the land and start producing, and yes, finally, my first plot was up and running 😃

In the time I needed to build the research hut on the other plot, I could produce to 15K grain I needed to finish the building, so the waiting time wasn't that bad, I wasn't willing to buy the time crystals for this, since well... my funds are limited.

So in three days, my research hut will finally be ready and by that time my grain farm will have produced 15k grain, that's a nice timing!

But I wanted more... but not a single plot available in my region of course, and if there will be a plot for sale, it sure wouldn't be cheap... supply and demand and all that.
So I had some 'fun money' savings on the side line to put into the game so I bought myself two common plots in the same region and made sure one of them could still produce grain when 2.0 launches, so I needed it to be a River, Bog, Lake or Plains, the other wouldn't matter that much but I figured I'll best pick a terrain type I didn't own in my other region for diversity so Desert it was.

Two more plots at floor price!

One definitely had to be a grain farm so I build that one first, and loaded it with max level reward cards since they're just above $3 at the moment, and I made sure they would match my terrain boost type to get the 10% production boost.

My army of Pelacor Bandit workers lol 😁

The drawback of putting max level common cards on my plot is it needed a whopping 50k DEC staked on it, yeah.. that's $50 locked away, not gone... just locked.

So in just a little over a week, this plot will be up and running, but I'll need to buy some grain for it to finish my building by then.

My funds were really getting low at this point and it was my plan all along to just made sure to own two plots together, and later put a good work force on it, so I did start the construction of the Shard Mine, but only with the limited workers I had available and primarily because I didn't had the DEC needed to be staked on the land.

As it is for now... my shard mine will be ready in.... 53 days 😅

In a few weeks more of my blogging earnings will have paid out so I can put more workers on this plot too.

To summarize:

• I bought a total of 4 plots, 1 rare and 3 commons for $190
• Every plot needs about $60 - 65 in cards and staked DEC on it for a decent production rate, it doesn't really matter if you put max common reward cards on it (cheaper but more DEC staked) or rare / epic Gold Foils (more expensive but require less DEC staked, the max common card give a slightly better production rate for a few ($5 - 8) dollars extra.
• make sure you buy in the same region!!

Wow.. this is by far the biggest post I ever made lol 😁 sorry if it was too much and respect if you held on till the end!
If you're a starting player, seeking some guidance or just want to join us anyway, let me know in the comments and I'll invite you into one of the guilds!

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: I took some information from the splinterlands land site as well as the picture from land.