Hi everyone! It's time for another explainer post for Splinterlands, I had this on my list to make for a couple of weeks already and it fits perfectly in this weeks Community Engagement Challenge so it's now a perfect time to make it, killing two flies in one blow!

Challenge Theme: Tutorials and Tips from the Community
Do you have tips for climbing the ranks? Maybe you’ve found the best way to earn rewards or mastered the game’s economy. Now’s your chance to help fellow players by sharing your valuable insights.

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

So, the idea for this post was born out of a message I received from one of the new players I'm guiding, like many veteran splinterlands players I try to help new players starting their splinterlands journey because it's a great and awesome game, but it comes with a steep learning curve. It's important to help new players so they don't get discouraged because everything they need to learn is just too overwhelming for them.

I try to help with 1 on 1 advice and help on Discord, as well as card delegations to help new players get started.

This is the message I received:

and the short answer is of course something small but important this player overlooked, but was born because he doesn't understand one of the very basics of splinterlands just yet: card levels!

This topic was just overlooked by me, and probably by many other experienced players because it's been a long time since we started and it's just so very obvious for us, and don't get me wrong, I'm not making fun of the players who doesn't understand because everything is easy that you DO understand but first it has to be explained by someone, so here we go! 🙂

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

I don't want to over complicate things so for this post I will just focus on the modern cards, at this moment it's Chaos Legion and Rebellion cards, every set looks a bit different, the left card on the image below is a Chaos Legion card, the right one is a Rebellion card.
I encircled the location where the rarity is displayed in the color I mentioned above, it's 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 BCX (Base Card eXperience) but I think the experience part is a bit misleading here, because it implies cards get experience by playing them and they level up this way, it's what I thought when I started playing - THEY DO NOT!

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 BCX 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...

Summoners

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

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

Look at a summoner as the person who bring the cards to life on the battlefield, he or she summons your monsters, but a low level summoner 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 'summoners' tab and click on it, this will display any summoners you can use in battle.

Exactly like with the monsters, summoners come in all rarities, different rarity summoners require different amounts of cards for them to level up, and can summon different card levels on their level, so again, just select the summoner 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 summoner.

A level 1 summoner 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 summoner, you won't be able to use it at the highest level and it will just be lowered to the level your summoner is able to summon it at.

For example, if you mistakenly own a level six common card, but only have this summoner 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 summoners, 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 summoner, Silver means a level 4 summoner, so, again... start with renting or buying summoners, and build from there, there's no point in renting or buying higher level cards if you only have a level 3 summoner.

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 summoner is of a different rarity than my first example, Dolfar has a grey icon so it's a common summoner, when we look at 'stats' again, I can now see which card levels I can use in battle when I select this summoner.

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!