Splinterlands – Week 1 – Cards That Made An Impression

As a nerd to my core I've spent thousands of hours just sitting around tables covered in cards and dice, surrounded by friends, having some of the best times in my life. Somewhere along the way trading card games seems to have lost their way in the pursuit of selling ever more packs. And we kept playing for our love of the games. Splinterlands claims to want to change that through the use of blockchain technology to give back players control of their cards and choices.

But, is it fun? What else matters?

This week I decided to dive in head-first and find out and, while you’ll have to wait until this weekend for my full review, what I found has me very excited. The majority crypto-card projects share some of the same details, motivations, and executions. In the noble pursuit of putting real ownership of (now digital) trading cards back into the hands of the players the cards become NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) the player can control as they see fit. In this way you can buy, sell, trade, or even rent your cards. They are, after all, yours.

Cards in Splinterlands are all Summoners of Monsters (a coming expansion is bringing spells and item cards) with a single Summoner leading an army of Monsters. All the cards are one of various “Splinters” or colors (or multiple colors, or neutral … again, you know the deal). The Monsters form a line with a single monster in the “front” acting as a tank protecting those behind it. The monsters can have any of dozens of keyword abilities and stats about as you’d expect them (cost, damage, speed, armor, health). Nothing here reinvents the wheel and it all works fine.

As players will always be opening packs and creating new cards Splinterlands solves the inflation problem by allowing cards to be upgraded by merging them with other copies of the same card. For example, if you decided to upgrade your level 1 Skeleton Warrior you’d simple need to collect or buy four more level 1 Skeleton Warriors and merge all the cards into a level 2 Skeleton Warrior. If you want to get that level 2 Skeleton Warrior to level 3 that will take nine more level 1 Skeleton Warriors. As monsters upgrade their stats experience small beneficial changes.

That said, look through the market for higher level copies of cards you are looking for. There will often be a cheap level 4 or 5 copy of the card for cheaper than it would cost for you to upgrade your own. If you’ve spent as many hours as I have thumbing through bulk bins to find the gems to build a trade binder you’ll immediately fall in love with the market. If not, don’t let it intimidate you and understand there are a ton of really good cards out there for less than a dime.

When I played my first handful of games I encountered what makes Splinterlands really special. When you and an opponent are matched you are both presented with a mana amount and up to two unique rules for the match. The mana amount is often between 12-40 but goes as high as 99 and this is the amount of mana you have to spend on your 6 monster deck. Next are the custom rules which warp gameplay and deckbuilding all the more. Sometimes you’ll be forbidden color, high or low mana costs, have all your Monsters enter with no armor, or be forbidden to use Legendary Monsters. However these rules get extremely unique with attack types becoming forbidden (or strongly buffed), all monsters entering combat poisoned, or even having the battle take place during an earthquake that deals 2 damage to all Monsters each turn unless they can fly.

The entire concept of a “deck” is thrown out when you can’t plan at all. This mean you show up to the table with your whole collection, ready to use any of them, and genuinely needing all of them. It’s just also just plain fun and immediately reminded me of some of the things that, in my experience, make miniature based tabletop wargaming amazing. This makes wargaming skill-sets like being able to deploy an army against a unpredictable enemy quickly and having them organized for a strong alpha strike extremely useful. At this point, I’m hooked.

On the advice of another article I purchased my first card and went way overboard on a massive level 10 neutral tank (A Goblin Mech) and quickly realized an important rule: The monsters in your deck cannot be a higher level than your Summoner. As all the Summoners I owned were level 1 this meant I’d only be able to play the Goblin Mech as a level, bummer. Summoners are expensive as a rule.

The next thing I knew I was waking up. I had blacked out and spent $20 getting a handful of level 1 through 3. It’s really really easy to spend money in this game but they are in no way dishonest and genuinely owning your cards means you can simply sell them back if you decide. Or maybe that’s just what I tell myself in moments like this.

So now I have a Summoner I like for the colors I’m most interested in and hit the ladder, hard. Here are the friends I met along the way.

NEUTRAL CARDS:
Neutral cards tend to be boring and underpowered but can be included in any deck. It seemed like a good way to build my collection early was to aim for especially high or low prices Monsters to go along with the Summoners I had bought earlier. I ended up getting a solid foundation of a bug bulky tank (Goblin Mech) along with the kind of value I just can’t say no to: A very small but free to play creature that can go in any deck. While playing the Fire Shard I had really enjoyed using an ability that let melee based attackers hit when not the “front” position as long as they were right behind that Monster so I bought a neutral monster that cost the same mana and had more armor, score!

Goblin Mech ended up being a VIP of the week and will set you back $.06. Highly recommended.

WATER CARDS:
Water did not end up being one of the Shards I specialized in but I picked up a few flying caster types to learn about magic. In Splinterlands attacks have a chance to miss and flying really raises that chance. I feel like a strong flying deck could steal wins from much better decks far more often than they would give away losses but I’ll have to wait to test that theory for now.

LIFE CARDS:
Life was another Shard I chose to lean away from but I still ended up picking up some specialized cards based off stacking armor and clearing negative conditions. Sometimes these abilities work really well with a matches given rules and these two situational cards will make playing a Life Deck a no-brainer.

DEATH CARDS:
Death cards all looked cool and I love me a spoopy boii so I quickly ended up with some leveled up skeletons and a vampire. As I had also splurged on a cool level 3 Death Summoner I expected to use these a lot but have only been experimenting with Death Decks when the mana amount is low as they have a lot of opportunities to play defensively while not pouring a ton of points into a tank.

While I think these are some of the coolest cards I found, especially when built well together, I’ve not found a real reason to play much Death.

EARTH CARDS:
By the time I was looking at Earth cards I had already been climbing the ladder a while and encountered a weird artificial hurdle. The game was not letting me move from Bronze 1 league to Silver 3 league and was telling me to build my collection in size and quality. As I had spanked all the bronze leagues and wanted to get to that silver league I went and looked up the cheapest legendary cards and bought a few that were less than $1.50. That pushed my collection score up enough that I could enter Silver 1 league but still left me with a sour taste in my mouth.

I grabbed a few Earth cards that seemed like they might be useful but never ended up playing many Earth games.

FIRE CARDS:
When sorting the fire cards by cost I immediately noticed there were some very Monsters for less than a dime per copy. Grabbing them was one of the better ideas I had early and the Fire based heavy hitters were often who I played when faced with any 99 mana battle. These cards immediately started getting me reliable wins and climbing the ladder which felt really good.

The Molten Ogre is massive, has a good mana/health ratio, and has an ability that reduces all your opponent’s monsters’ attacks by 1. There is a unique rule that sometimes comes up where all the Monsters have the same HP as your tank and this guy really helps in all those matches.

All and all I spent about $40 on Splinterlands and feel like I have a great foundation for a collection and will be getting a stack of chests which should contain, I don’t know, good stuff? I know I can’t wait to find out! I do regret some of the more expensive cards I bought as it seems like 10 $.60 cards help a collection much more than a single $6 card, unless maybe that card is a key Summoner in your collection and much-loved neutral card that you’ll play nearly every game.

I know I spent about $2.65 for my annoying level 3 Furious Chicken and don’t regret a cent of it. Using unique battle rules and conditions to give him 11 health always puts a smile on my face and that’s the only rating system that means anything to me before.

Splinterlands is great. Come join the fun. And please use my link if you do so we can both benefit!

Also, please keep an eye out for more articles! I’m quite new to Publish0x and will be starting things off with a series on Splinterlands. Let’s go on this adventure together! Thank you for your time and attention. From the bottom of my heart, every comment/like/tip means the world.
-m3ss