My first 24h playing Splinterlands (Or is is steemmonsters? STEEMMONSTERS?)

I thought I’d share my experience with my first day playing Splinterlands. Sorry if my terminology isn’t correct yet, I am very new to the game (obviously).

I got into Splinterlands a little indirectly, though I suspect it has been a common path recently. I stopped playing Hearthstone during the Free Hong Kong situation and found Gods Unchained as an alternative. That bumped me down the path of blockchain games, I remembered I had a STEEMIT account after reading GO articles published here. This all led me to finding Splinterlands (STEEMMONSTERS?) yesterday.

I tend to rush into new games these days. I used to read instruction manuals thoroughly but most of today’s games either force you through a tutorial or (much better) use design language to explain their mechanics. Splinterlands seemed to do that pretty well for me. it took me awhile to understand why monsters outside of position 1 were being targeted for example. Learning to hover over abilities to see what they do has helped lots.

After winning a few games i decided to buy the starter pack. For anyone else new to Splinterlands, the pack isn’t a season pass, just a one time purchase that effectively brings the game from trial into full version. I really like that they take paypal and credit cards for this purchase. I got my first GO genesis packs through Nifty Gateway, which let me buy directly with a card. This helped me bypass the actual exchanges for awhile.

The starter pack plus a few wins to finish a daily quest got me my first reward card. A little while later and I had made it to bronze II. Then (And now as of this morning) I started to lose much more frequently. I’m sure I need to improve my stkills dramatically, but I can’t help but feel like I’m starting to hit dects with better cards in them. To that end I thought I’d get a few cards off the marketplace or a few booster packs.

Sadly it looks like I can’t buy DEC or TRX or even STEEM easily with a card. The booster packs available are pre-order only as well. This leaves me feeling a little stuck. I should probably try and find a way of getting money into an exchange but it does feel like a lot of work when I just want to play some games. Hopefully I’ll place in some of the tournaments today!

I’d appreciate any advice for smoothing this process over! Also any really good infographics for learning the strategies would be wonderful.