Tips for new players

Splinterlands is a fascinating TCG that is easy to learn but hard to master. After several months of playing, I'm still learning a lot about the game and its ecosystem. In that article, I share five little tips that can improve significantly your game experience. Don't expect groundbreaking revelations, just stuff learnt from experience!

Tip 1: rule sets have no impact on your daily quest progression
If you have a fight with Fog of War or Back to Basics and use a Kobold Miner, you will be able to complete a sneak quest. I noticed that almost by accident.

Tip 2: cards you use during brawls must stay playable until the fights are resolved
Or the fights will count as losses and you may lose your merit since you fled. Our guild learnt that tip the hard way. If you rely on rented or delegated cards, pay extra attention to rental durations to avoid accidental losses. You however don't need the cards when a fight is resolved and can rent/transfer/sell/delegate them freely.

Tip 3: never withdraw swap.hive from Tribaldex or Hive Engine
When you do a trade on Tribaldex or Hive Engine, odds you get swap.hive are high. That token is a wrapped Hive coin, a bit like WETH for Ether on Ethereum. Tribaldex and Hive Engine charge however a 1% fee to convert swap.hive to "real" Hive. The good news is that Beeswap has exactly the same feature costing just 0.25% per conversion!

Tip 4: look at the teams previously used by your opponent
If you are a seasoned player, that tip may sound obvious. It's however a good habit that improved my winrate tremendously. You can't win every fight but if you notice a spam on the last fights played (say 5 fights using Mylord and tons of fillers, Llama + Kron or Alric's blue magic), deploy hard counters and pray. That tip isn't that easy to implement because the UI is messy and you can't easily see teams used by your opponent when you are setting up yours.

Tip 5: the Combine All Cards button is your ennemy
After playing several weeks or buying packs, you usually end up with numerous single cards. Splinterlands upgrade system requires to combine them. That task sounds tedious and the UI has a button to do that for all cards.

The main issue is that combining all you have is often suboptimal for two reasons. Maxed cards are often harder to rent or cheaper than low level ones. Moreover, you may not be able to fully use your cards if you don't meet splinters and/or leagues requirements. The picture below shows you a lv4 Almo in kit: since I can mostly fight around Gold 2, maxing it doesn't really make sense for me (maxed cards however get +5% collection power, you have a small incentive to do so). And as you notice, I rent the lv2 and lv1 versions while using the lv3. That damn button would have taken that flexibility.