Splinterlands Journey — Day 1: Starting Again

Today feels like the beginning of a new chapter in my Splinterlands journey.

I have played Splinterlands before, but this time I want to do something different. Instead of simply logging in, playing a few battles and leaving, I want to actually follow my progress and document the experience.

So I decided to start a 20-day journey.

This is Day 1.

The idea is simple. For the next 20 days, I want to spend more time with Splinterlands. I want to play more battles, experiment with cards, try different strategies, learn from my mistakes and see how much I can improve by the end of the series.

I also want to document the things that happen along the way.

Not just the victories.

The losses too.

The strange lineups.

The battles where I make a decision and immediately regret it.

The moments where a card performs much better than I expected.

And hopefully, some really satisfying victories.

I think that will make the journey more interesting because improvement does not happen without mistakes.

Starting with my collection

The first thing I decided to do today was simply look through my cards.

I didn’t want to immediately jump into battle.

I wanted to remind myself of what I actually had available.

While going through the collection, I realised something.

There are quite a few cards that I don’t use regularly.

Some of them I have probably ignored because I already have cards that I am more comfortable with. Others just never seemed particularly interesting when I first saw them.

But looking at them again made me wonder if I had judged some of them too quickly.

A card might not look impressive on its own.

Maybe its attack isn’t the highest.

Maybe it doesn’t have an incredible amount of health.

Maybe it costs more mana than I would normally like.

But then you look at its ability.

Or you imagine it working with another card.

Suddenly, it becomes more interesting.

That is something I want to explore throughout this series.

I don’t want to simply use the same cards because they are familiar.

I want to understand my collection better.

My first battle of the journey

Eventually, I decided it was time to actually play.

I entered my first battle and started looking at the ruleset.

This is one of the things I want to become better at during the 20 days.

Instead of immediately choosing my favourite cards, I want to think about what the battle is actually asking me to do.

The mana limit matters.

The ruleset matters.

The available Splinters matter.

The positioning matters.

And of course, the opponent matters too.

I started building my team.

My first instinct was to use a lineup that I already knew worked.

It would have been the easy option.

I knew the cards.

I knew their abilities.

I knew roughly what I could expect from them.

But then I remembered that I had started this series specifically to experiment.

So I decided to take a small risk.

I included a card that I don’t normally use.

It wasn’t necessarily the strongest card I could have selected, but I wanted to see how it would perform.

I submitted the lineup.

And then I waited for the battle to begin.

Watching the battle

Once the battle started, I immediately focused on that card.

I wanted to see whether my decision had been a good one.

At first, I wasn’t completely convinced.

The battle didn’t go exactly the way I had imagined.

There were moments when I thought I had made a mistake by putting that card in the lineup.

But as the rounds continued, I started noticing something.

The card was doing its job.

Maybe it wasn’t dominating the battle.

Maybe it wasn’t the star of the team.

But it was contributing.

And that actually made me think about how I judge cards.

Sometimes we expect every card to be the hero.

But a good team doesn’t necessarily need every card to be the hero.

Some cards are there to protect.

Some are there to support.

Some are there to deal damage.

Some are there because their ability creates an advantage later in the battle.

That was one of my first lessons of this journey.

The result wasn’t the most important thing

Of course, I wanted to win.

Nobody enters a battle hoping to lose.

😂

But after the battle, I realised that the result wasn’t the only thing I was interested in.

I was paying more attention to why things happened.

Why did one card survive longer than expected?

Why did another card get eliminated so quickly?

Was my positioning correct?

Could I have used a different summoner?

Was the card I experimented with actually useful, or did it just happen to survive?

Those are questions I want to keep asking throughout the series.

Because if I only focus on whether I won or lost, I might not actually improve.

If I understand why I won or lost, then the next battle becomes an opportunity to do something better.

One thing I want to change

Another thing I noticed today is that I sometimes rely too much on familiarity.

When you have cards that you know well, it is tempting to keep using them.

You already know what they can do.

You already know where you like to position them.

You already know the combinations that usually work.

But that can become predictable.

I want this 20-day journey to push me out of that comfort zone.

I want to try cards I normally overlook.

I want to change positions.

I want to experiment with different combinations.

I want to see what happens when I stop trying to build the team I usually build.

Maybe some experiments will be terrible.

I’m expecting that.

But some might surprise me.

What I want from these 20 days

By the end of the 20 days, I don’t necessarily expect to become some unbeatable Splinterlands player.

That’s not really the point.

I want to understand the game better.

I want to become more comfortable reading rulesets.

I want to understand my cards better.

I want to make smarter decisions when building teams.

I want to recognise useful combinations faster.

And I want to be able to look back at Day 1 and see that I actually improved.

It will also be interesting to see how my thoughts change.

Maybe by Day 10, I will be using cards that I completely ignored today.

Maybe by Day 15, I will have developed a completely different approach to building teams.

Maybe by Day 20, I will look at some of the lineups from this first day and wonder what I was thinking. 😂

That would actually be a good sign.

It would mean I learned something.

The journey has officially started

So that is Day 1.

Nothing spectacular happened.

I didn’t discover some secret strategy that will suddenly make me win every battle.

I didn’t become an expert overnight.

But I did something more important.

I started.

I opened my collection with a different mindset.

I played a battle with the intention of learning instead of simply getting through it.

I experimented with a card I normally don’t use.

And I started thinking more carefully about the decisions I make before every battle.

That is enough for the first day.

Tomorrow, I want to take the experimentation further.

I want to pick a few cards that I have barely used and see if I can build an entire strategy around one of them.

I have no idea whether it will work.

But that is exactly what makes Day 2 interesting.

Day 1 is officially complete.

Twenty days to go.

Let’s see where this takes me.

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