Hey everyone, since we all are discovering the new modern format within our beloved game Splinterlands, and most content out there is made for max level cards I feel like I should counter that somehow and share my deck building process as a non-whale (shut up @cherokee4life, he calls me a whale all the time 😅) playing in Silver league again.

Wait.. you said a Silver deck right? I'm now playing with a Silver level deck, which means the max level cards that are allowed for Silver League caps, how to see that is easy, just go to one of your summoners (Items - Card in the top of your screen) and click on 'stats', so, Silver level means level 5 commons, level 4 rare, level 3 epic and level 2 legendary cards.

Expressions like that are commonly used by Splinterlands players but hard to understand for newer players, so it's good to explain that I think, in fact, I had multiple players asking me this exact question. 🙂

Deck Building

So I bought 10 Conclave Arcana packs in the pre-sale so I already had 50 cards to start with, not nearly enough to make my Silver set complete of course and we don't need every card on the max level, it depends on your playing style as well as the break points on the cards.

With break points I mean the level where a significant upgrade to a card is made, when I take the Stampeding Calf as an example, I can see when I upgrade it from level 1 to level 2 it only receives one extra Health Point (HP), considering every Card Copy (CC) costs around 6 cents at the moment, going from a 6 cents - 1 CC card and spending 4 extra CC or 24 cents extra for just 1 extra HP isn't worth it for me, however - at level 3 it receives one extra attack which is significant for me, it's what I call break points - so I look for them in my deck building.

I use the site MonsterMarket to see what cards are on the market, I like the overview this site gives me.

I already bought some cards when I came up with the idea of making a post about it so I will skip the first line, the last card I have bought is the Virid Venomancer, because it receives the Shield Ward ability, another break point because it gives the Shield ability to the card in front of it which can be a great upgrade.

Just select 'Conclave Arcana' on the left and it will display all cards.

I looked at the next card, the Bludgeon Hucker, but 2 ranged damage with the Snipe ability for 5 mana isn't great, and I already have a similar Rebellion Card that has about the same stats with more speed and one less mana, making it available for the Little League rule set as well.

Still, I think it's a good thing to own at least 1 CC of every common and rare card to have options in those rule sets that limit us in the cards we are allowed to use, so buying 1 CC is always a good thing.
I received this card in one of the pre-sale packs so I'm gonna pass on this for now.

Next is the Fenmoor Gorgon, which I do want! It receives the Demoralize ability at level 3, doing -1 melee damage to the entire enemy team, I'm going to need 14 CC for this card, and when I look in my deck, I already have 1 CC, so I need 13 extra.

Before I buy however, I first want to see what the price difference is between a Regular Foil (RF) and a Gold Foil (GF) because sometimes it's not a lot and the GF gives me a 10% boost in my earnings.

So, still on Monster Market, I now type in the name of the card I want, the Fenmoor Gorgon, so I first select 14 RF cards to see what my price total will be: 88 cents!

And then I check for the Golf Foil version... and in this case, it's actually cheaper to buy the GF version, that doesn't happen a lot, I would be happy to pay 20% extra for a GF version compared to the RF but I'll take this any day, it's a no-brainer and it shows, always check for this!

I do my buying on another site!

So, to start buying this card, I go to yet another site it's the Aqualis Marketplace because this gives even more fee rebate than Monster Market, and it burns a part of the DEC but I will not go in to that for now.

This is what this marketplace looks like, it's not as good looking and it doesn't work as smooth as Monster Market but because it saves me some extra DEC I can spend on other cards, I'm taking that for granted.
I type in the card name I want in the search bar indicated by the green arrow.

The new card images hasn't even been loaded in to this marketplace 🙃 but by typing in the name, and cross checking the price for the GF card on Monster Market, I know that the card I'm looking for is 83.5 cents, the broken images show a price of 83.7 cents which is close, so I click the broken image to open the next screen.

Here, it shows the correct price again so I know it's the right card.
So, I now click the top one (check the price because sometimes the cheapest isn't the top one) and click the BUY 1 BCX button.

note: 1 BCX and 1 CC is the same, we used to call every card copy BCX but it's hard to understand so the team changed it.

I now get a pop-up to confirm the transaction on Hive Keychain and the card is bought and about 20 seconds later I receive the in-game notification about the DEC fee rebate that's sent back to my account, for expensive cards this really adds up.

So, this is the process I go trough with all common and rare cards, and see which epics and legendary cards I want, some of them can be good enough at level 1 and because they're a lot more expensive this can be the reason not to level it up any further.

You want an example don't you?

Ok, let's find one... 😁

When I look at Mahkah Hemlig, it's already a strong card at level 1, and I definitely want it but at $7 to $8 per CC the difference between level 1 and level 2 is quite a lot and it 'only' gives me +1 HP and the Deflect ability, and because it's a magic card that means the deflect will only come in very handy when it fires against a monster with the Spell Reflect ability.

This can be a reason to only buy it as a level 1 and keep it there, depending on your budget.

So, this is it for this post, I hope this helps! Let me know if you have any additional questions, or different topics you want me to make explainer posts about and I will put you as a beneficiary for bringing the topic up.

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.

Also, when you require any help to get you started,let me know, I'm here to advice and guide new players and maybe I can help you with card delegations too!

Have a great day!