But first let me introduce this aspect of my person to all of you: I like gaming, a lot. I am a hardcore gamer, whenever I really like a game I become a living encyclopedia married with a lot of time invested in playing. I love getting to really KNOW how a game works, I love understanding, breaking them down and reasembling them. It's also a deep form of meditation for me, whenever I'm in a game my brain is busy with the game and I enter an interesting understanding state that somehow brings me peace.

This started around 1995, I was already playing Advanced Dungeons and Dragons and absolutely loving the mechanics and amazing worlds behind it. Then, in a trip to Caracas to the hobbie store where AD&D was supposedly played I got introduced to a new game that was like AD&D but with collectible cards like the baseball ones. I watched like five games, understood very little of it but I was totally enthralled. The art was so magical and mysterious, the little stories on the cards were really amazing and the rules which I didn't understand seemed a little on the complicated side (Sorceries, instants, interrupts, whoa...) but I did want to learn.

On a trip to Caracas I got into my first tournament with a Blue/black deck with a nice curve and full of cheap critters, removal and discard with the non optimal 63 cards because I didn't know what to cut (an optimal tournament deck is always exactly 60 cards). I overran all my competition, I still remember the finals against a deck full of expensive cards like Shivan Dragons and dual lands but over 200 cards of size! So, I won that tournament with a deck of cheap cards but armed with a deeper knowledge of the game than my opponents.

That way started my career as a professional player of Magic in Venezuela. The high points of it were going to Brussels for the 2000's Magic World Championship as part of the national team and going to Argentina on 2001 for the last Latin American Championship.

Back to 2020 and Splinterlands. When I got deep into crypto around 2017, Steemit and Splinterlands were hot. A social media that ran over a blockchain with a CCG integrated that used the same tech for the cards. The gamer and crypto fanatic in me was really interested, but my interests on those time were more into the ancient medicine camp and on earning how to build Ethereum mining machines. So my curiosity had to wait three years, a hard fork, a pandemic virus and a lockdown to finally see what the Splinterlands vibe was about.

So my strategy was to read a couple of strategy articles to understand how the game actually worked. God, that was HARD. See, due to the nature of rewards of HIVE people are encouraged to create content about Splinterlands daily, but almost all this is "Battle of the day", "booster pack openings" and a lot of other content that aren't of any help at all for the new player.

But after a lot of work I found @marianaemilia and her Splinterlands Basic Strategies – Introduction – The Tank #01 the first actually useful, well written strategy post! I learned tons from that article, first that Splinterlands battles are more like Hearthstone: Battlegrounds or Auto-Chess than traditional CCGs.

First I got the 10$ of the summoner pass, the sacrifice to opt for the ranked rewards. To win something one has to sacrifice something this is a rule of the universe. I know that for some that is spare cash, but for a parent of a one year old, Venezuelan migrant on Colombia in lockdown due our current situation these 10$ were a hard choice. Would I get back that money? Let's see.

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Good, I got in, got my basic cards set and started playing to learn the game. Got in a couple of games and even completed the daily quest for a not so amazing reward at Bronze 3. So the conclusion was that the basic cards wouldn't let me ascend the ladder and as the rewards are heavily weighted towards the top leagues, fumbling with sub-optimal cards would only cost me money and time.

So I kept studying and found Steemmonsters | 31W-3L Beginner Deck Guide (Bronze 1 Rank in 70 Minutes) and this one was golden.

This guy gave me a setup, explained why there were in that order and what should I do with the changing rules of the game. Good! And it also was on the water splinter which is the equivalent of Blue in Magic, color that always has been my favorite color. So the next step was actually getting the cards.

It was already decided that I was going to rent the cards, it was really clear to me that the cards one uses as a new player are not the ones one uses when doing serious ranked play, so I didn't want to throw what little money I had on cards that I wouldn't use again.

Next surprise, the renting mechanism isn't integrated on the main game, one has to setup a profile on [Peakmonsters](https://peakmonsters.com/) where you can buy/sell and also rent cards. On this step was where I found out that my Splinterlands account was a HIVE account, so now I had to work around another set of keys. After running away from the mobile interface (it IS a pain to use in a cellular tech at the moment) I managed to set up the key with Hivesigner and got into the market. A little more complication, but I did actually rent all the cards I needed for less than 0.5 $ for at least a week.

I rented Alric Stormbringer lvl 1, Sea Monster lvl 1, Goblin Mech lvl 1, Cockatrice lvl 1, Grumpy Dwarf lvl 1, Crustacean King lvl 1, Cyclops lvl 1, Pirate Captain lvl 1 and Water Elemental lvl 1.

With this setup I managed to go in like four hours from bronze 3 to gold 1. Like a hot knife through butter. Also the rewards that day were way better than the bronze 3 ones. By that moment I was starting to grasp the card lvl mechanics and it was clear to me that to advance I had to upgrade the cards I was using. So I went back to Peakmonsters and rented a couple of death and earth cards aside from the higher lvl versions of my water cards to have flexibility because the splinter restrictions were appearing more often and having only blue cards was costing me more losses than in the lower leagues.

So with my new lvl 3-5 summoners and monsters I managed to get to diamond 1! So seeing the speed this was happening I decided to go all in and try for champion. So I got all my liquid hive and tokens into the account and rent me some max lvl summoners and cards. For a grand total of 4$!. I got my max lvl beloved blue cards and a couple of earth ones because my budget was almost exploding (it did explode tho I lost some rental contracts the next day for not taking the scrows into account).

Whoa, champion 3 to Champion 1 was gonna be a lot more work than I thought.

First of all the bots are fewer in number in the higher leagues so the auto wins for facing bots were few and far between and also around Champion 2 most people actually know what they are doing with their cards so the competition is real. Also the rules get a lot more restrictive for a very limited card pool like mine, so getting those precious win streaks was hard.

But 19 minutes past midnight i hit champion 1 with more than 12 hours left! YAY I DID IT!!!!

So with the sweet scent of victory I went to bed to have well deserved rest to wait for my 150 reward chests opening!

So after my investment and resounding success was it worth it getting to Champion 1? Well my collection went from 2.68$ and 93 DEC to 6.44$ and 3102 DEC, so I'm up aprox. 4$. So even, steven not the resounding riches I was expecting. Still there are some perks, getting all the daily rewards is better if you already start in a high league so the rewards add up during the 15 days the season is going on.