And... we're back with making another blog post for this weeks Community Engagement Challenge so welcome back, it's a Saturday today and it's the day I spend the most time on Splinterlands in the whole week, where I manage my lands, make a blog post and grind my battle energy down to 0 if I can.

This weeks Splinterlands Community Engagement Challenge is about making a post of our personal learning journey so far, and it's been a big journey already closing up on four years - in August I'll reach this milestone and with it, Splinterlands will also become the game I played daily for the longest period in my life, so far that's Pokemon Go. 😆

The challenge this week:

🧠 Theme: Splinterlands Learning Journey
This week, we’re taking a step back from battles and strategy to reflect on the journey — the learning journey, that is. Whether you’re a battle-hardened veteran or a curious newcomer, we all had to start somewhere. That’s why this week’s theme is “My Splinterlands Learning Journey”!

To find out how you can participate in the challenge yourself, check out 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, Monstermarket and Elmo Burns. 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 recources on the land plots you can buy and manage the lands with the workers on it.

Understanding the basics

Understanding the basics to be able to play in Splinterlands wasn't as easy as nowadays where everything is well explained in the new Campaign Mode, so without good explanation combined with the complexity of this game I decided to skip Splinterlands when it first got my attention in 2019 and I'm sure I wasn't the only one... Two years later and Splinterlands got my attention again and now I was more experienced with crypto in general and I learned how different blockchains worked by playing other web3 games as well in which I earned quite of bit of funds I decided to put in to my new Splinterlands account...

What was the biggest hurdle you faced when learning Splinterlands?

This was simply the fact of overcoming the complexity of the game as a whole, and it's what makes the game so awesome of course, but as a new player this is quite overwhelming.
Many players have a Trading Card Game background so they're used to the gameplay - I never player a TCG before so it was entirely new for me.

a battle screenshot back when I was a Silver player two years ago, things we're so different back then!

Which feature or mechanic took the longest to fully understand?

This has to be the fact that it can pay off to play against certain rulesets, simply because players don't expect this - what I mean with this is it's perfectly fine to play high damage melee units in a Briar Patch battle as long as the unit either has a lot of Health Points or Armor to protect it a couple of rounds to do enough damage to the other team before it dies, this is the same for the other rule sets like Spell Reflect or Return Fire.

Are there any specific players, guides, or moments that helped you grow the most?

YouTube is the perfect way nowadays to learn just about anything, and this was the same for learning more about Splinterlands when I started, I was following well known names like Dwayne and Bulldog but the problem this gave was these guys were playing at the top, and I wasn't and the difference is huge because it's just another game basically at the top or up to Silver League.

So I started following other smaller channels like NFO Guides and another guy I can't remember his name but with his followers he made a guild called the Krill Crew I remember, back then I already formed my own guild with the help of some friends I made in other crypto games in a bigger crypto gaming guild, covering multiple games in the web3 space much like YGG is doing but on a smaller scale called Non Fungible Gaming and so, with some help watching YouTube video's, reading other player posts and primarily just playing a lot I got more experienced to the point I started making my own tutorial posts to help and guide other starting players because there was (and I think still is) a gap between the high level content creators out there and the low level starting players.

My future plans and goals

With the new Modern League and the rotation from the 'cheap set' Chaos Legion out of Modern much has changed and to prepare for this I have been grinding really hard on a pace I couldn't keep doing for ever so I needed to make some radical changes.

With everything going on in Splinterlands, not only playing ranked matches but guild brawls, tournaments, making blog posts, scouting the market, managing land and land workers it's becoming a complex world with so many things to do, and because I'm an all-in kinda guy when I like something I got sucked in to the awesome world of Praetoria more and more to a point I was spending 2 hours on slow days and up to 6 hours on other days this was getting too much. 😅

But, with so much options it's really awesome be can plan our own journey and adjust it if it's needed to better fit into our lives.

For me this is a long term thing and because I'm already getting close to playing for four years, our lives are changing when the years pass.

Some changes I recently made:

• Put two bot accounts to work, so I could reduce my manual playing time while still getting value from my older cards.

• I bought more land plots because I believe in the long term play and the future of this game, land is expensive and slow going but once the whole plan is in play, it's going to be awesome.

Some plans that still need work:

• I am now playing FIVE accounts in total in brawls to help fill frays in my two guilds, I hope some days we will get more really active players and the guild system is getting an overhaul so I can bring this down to three accounts, giving me more time for other things both in Splinterlands as in real life.

• My land plots are only 50% active and the ones that are active still need upgrading as well, this is a long term plan which is fine, with all great things going on I decided a couple of months ago to up my monthly investment from €20 to €50 - combined with my blogging earnings this is over $100 account building every month, I'll get there eventually!

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!