Hi everyone! I'm back from a two week Splinterlands break, it's the one time in the year I stop everything for about two weeks to spend time with my family and relax and read a book for a change but now it's good to be back in front of the PC and today it's time for another explainer post for Splinterlands, because the Community Engagement Challenge for this weeks requires us to do so.

Now we have a campaign mode explaining a lot, it's certainly easier to start playing the game then when I joined, in fact, I still remember the first time I looked at splinterlands, I skipped it because I didn't understand how to play since I never played a Trading Card Game before.

✨ Theme: “Teach & Triumph”
Every player starts somewhere — and your experience could be the key to helping someone else level up their game. This week’s challenge is all about sharing your Splinterlands wisdom through a tutorial. Whether you’re a battle-hardened veteran or a rising star, your insights can guide new and experienced players alike.
📝 How to Participate:
Pick a Splinterlands topic you know well — it could be deck-building, rule sets, ability combos, earning rewards, or navigating the new Frontier format

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

So, one of those things that was hard for me to understand when I started playing was leveling up the cards, not only the 'how' but also the 'why' because it gets expensive real fast!

Card rarities

Before I can get to the most important part of building your deck, I need to explain the different card rarities, in splinterlands we have four different rarities:

• common, displayed in grey
• rare, displayed in blue
• epic, displayed in purple
• legendary, displayed in yellow

Different sets come out every year, and they all look a little bit different, the key thing you need to look for is the rarity color and it's pretty obvious once you know about it.

I encircled the location where the rarity is displayed in the color I mentioned above, the top picture is purple so it's epic, the bottom picture is grey so now you know, you can see these are both common cards.

It's the same for other rarities, this icons in the image below are purple, so now we know these cards are epic.

In general, common cards are less expensive and less powerful than the higher rarity cards, but for a strong deck, you're going to need everything, the common and rare cards make the basis of your deck.

Now you know how you can SEE which rarity a card is, we're going to look at the differences, let's look at all the cards you have, you can go to your card collection by selecting 'items - cards' in the splinterlands menu on the top left part of your screen (this is on PC but it looks similar on a phone).

A new screen displays all cards you have, you can use filters to select what you're looking for, but again I'm trying to keep things simple so I'm just selecting one of the common cards, it doesn't matter which one for this purpose.

I picked the Venari Heatsmith for this example.

To go in to the card details, select the 'stats' tab.

Cards get stronger by combining them to level them up, every copy of a single card is called 1 CC or Card Copy.

Every rarity has the same amount of cards needed to level it up, so for the common cards, it takes five single cards, or five CC to combine them to a level two card, combining can't be reversed so think before doing this!

The list clearly shows how many cards you need for every level, for example when you want the Heatsmith to get the amplify ability, you're going to level it up to level six, combining 100 single copies from this card in to one level six.

Every rarity has the same amount of cards needed to level them up, so when we look at epic cards the same way you can see epics require a lot less cards to level them up, so you can see, low rarity means you're going to need a lot of cards to level them up, but at the same time, in general they are less expensive.

Higher rarity cards require less cards to combine but they are more expensive.

OK, now we understand this part, let's move on to the bottleneck of deck building, the most important cards in the game...

Archons, previously known as Summoners

So when you're reading about Summoners, it's important to know that not long ago, we used to what we now call Archons, Summoners... the team adjusted how we all should look at the game because now you - the player is being looked at as the summoner, it makes sense 🙂

In splinterlands, we have two card types, archons and monsters, all with the rarities I explained above, in every battle you have to select ONE archon and up to six monsters.

The archons are the most important, I'll explain why:

Look at a archon as the person who bring the cards to life on the battlefield, he or she summons your monsters, but a low level archon can only summon low level cards!

Remember how we got in to the card menu? Select items - cards in the drop down menu, now scroll a bit down in the left screen until you see the 'archons' tab and click on it, this will display any archons you can use in battle.

Exactly like with the monsters, archons come in all rarities, different rarity archons require different amounts of cards for them to level up, and can summon different card levels on their level, so again, just select the archons you like to use, and go to the 'stats' screen again.

Can you tell by looking at the card what rarity it is from what you learned so far?
The icon at the top is blue, meaning it's a rare archon.

A level 1 archon can only summon (or use) level 1 cards. So, even when you own a max level monster for this splinter, when you don't own a high enough leveled up archon, you won't be able to use it at the highest level and it will just be lowered to the level your archon is able to summon it at.

For example, if you mistakenly own a level six common card, but only have this archon at level three, we can see in the list in the row behind the level 3, it's only able to summon a level 4 common, a level 3 rare, a level 2 epic and a level 2 legendary card.

Understand? 😁

So, when you start building your deck, it's important to start with the archon, THEY decide what card levels you can use.

For starting players, it's best to start in the low levels, I recommend focusing on becoming a Bronze or Silver level player and see how it goes from there, also depending on your budget because they new sets are not cheap.

In the example above, Bronze means a level 3 archon, Silver means a level 4 archon, so, again... start with renting or buying archon, and build from there, there's no point in renting or buying higher level cards if you only have a level 3 archon.

Combining cards

So when we look at another card, in this case it's a summoner again, Dolfar Darflak we can see, to make a level 2 summoner, we're going to need five separate copies.

So, select the 'cards' tab again, in this list we can see I own seven copies for this card, I've selected five to combine it to a level 2.

This opens a new window, clearly telling you what's about to happen.

When I now select the 'combine', my five cards will be merged in to one level 2.

Keep in mind, this archon is of a different rarity than my first example, Dolfar has a grey icon so it's a common archon, when we look at 'stats' again, I can now see which card levels I can use in battle when I select this archonsplinterlands play2earn thgaming hive-engine dbuzz spt pgm neoxian bbh waivio.

Well that's it for this explainer, I hope this helps to get you started!

When you're a new player in need of some assistance, let me know and I'll be happy to help!

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!