Splinterlands Ultimate Starter Guide

This article is a Starter Guide for all new players coming into the wonderful world of Splinterlands.

Get Started: Registration, Spellbook, Keychain, Discord, and App
Learn to Play: Key resources, abilities & rulesets, and Practice mode
Get Your Cards: Delegations, markets, and card packs
Get SPS: Different ways to get SPS
Next steps: Guilds, Land, and following content creators

1. Get Started

☑️ Register on Splinterlands using BRAVETOFU as the Referrer code to get lots of benefits.

☑️ Buy your Spellbook

Don't use a promo code, or the Referral code is voided and you lose the benefits above.

The Spellbook gives you several benefits, including:

The ability to earn SPS in battles
Sets up your account with a Hive wallet so you can use apps (e.g. for card rentals)
Lots of goodies, including starter packs and credits

Hive Keychain is essential to make everything you do in and around Splinterlands easy. It's a Chrome extension that gives you a safe way to interact with your Hive keys and lets you easily approve transactions to do things like rent/buy cards or transfer assets.

☑️ Join the Splinterlands Discord

The Splinterlands Discord is a great way to connect with other players, keep up with what's going on, and interact directly with the Splinterlands team.

☑️ Join the TPG Discord and check the "New Player" channel

TPG (The People's Guild) is a Splinterlands Content Creator who, among other things, hosts an awesome podcast on YouTube. They also have a Discord where there are multiple channels that can be useful to new users, including one dedicated to new users.

☑️ Get the App

🤖 Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.splinterlands.app&hl=en
🍎 iOS: Coming Soon

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2. Learn to play the game

☑️ Overview by @jedielf

This video gives a quick overview of battle mechanics in Splinterlands:

☑️ Complete Campaign Mode Book 1

This helps you learn the basics while also giving you Foundation cards, which are starter cards that will help you in the early innings of the arena. You also earn some Glint that can be used to buy a few Reward cards later on.

☑️ Deep dive by @roguepatton

Goes over all the details of how to get started, including battle mechanics, basic token information, and more:

☑️ Learn about abilities and rulesets

Abilities and rulesets give depth & strategy to Splinterlands.

Cards have abilities that do lots of different things (apply buffs or debuffs, adjust how they attack or support your team, etc.).

Rulesets are randomly applied modifiers that make every match different.

☑️ Use Practice mode

Practice mode (also known as Training mode) is a good way to test out strategies and start getting used to all the different battle mechanics in the game.

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3. Get your cards

☑️ Get Modern Silver deck for 30 days from BRAVETOFU

If you registered using BRAVETOFU as your referrer, you'll get a Modern deck for 30 days. Chat with me on Discord or X to get started. I'll do my best to have decks available at all times, but worse case you'll need to wait for someone else's delegation to end in order to get your cards.

The deck includes ~25-30 Modern cards and can get you to 2000-2500 rating.

☑️ Check the Tavern

We have lots of friendly Community members in our Tavern who sometimes find spare cards to delegate to new players. Go say hello, be friendly, and you might get some help.

☑️ Evaluate cards

It's extremely difficult to answer the question "Which cards should I rent/buy?" However, to give you a starting point, I suggest having a look at my tier lists which I've done for the last few editions. Note that I occasionally update these tiers as the meta changes and as I experience the cards more, and that they are just my own opinion.

☑️ Rent cards

Renting cards is an affordable way of getting access to more cards & trying cards out. Splinterlands has an easy and robust rental infrastructure, with tens of thousands of cards being rented every day.

@peakmonsters is, in my opinion, the best way to rent cards on Splinterlands. You can easily sort & filter cards. If you're playing in Modern, you can filter by Modern-only cards. At the start, I suggest renting SILVER level cards, which you can also easily filter by.

☑️ Buy cards

If and when you're ready to buy cards, I also recommend using PeakMonsters due to the great UX. There are several other options, however, such as the in-game market as well as options like MonsterMarket and Aqualis.

Buying cards is a great way to upgrade your collection in a surgical way. Check out tier lists, ask me, or see what cards are beating you to choose what you need to improve your deck.

☑️ Crack some packs

While it's not the most efficient way to build your collection, it is by far the most FUN way to acquire cards, and there's always a chance of landing big chase cards.

You already have some credits from your Spellbook purchase, so you can use those to buy a few Starter packs. Of course, you can also bring in some funds and buy yourself Standard, Alchemy, or Legendary packs. In those packs you can find valuable "Black Foil" cards that can single-handedly change your collection.

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4. Get SPS

SPS is the utility & governance token in Splinterlands. While DEC is used for marketplace transactions, SPS is required for you to earn in battle, grants special access to exclusive items, allows you to vote on governance proposals, can be burned for DEC, and also provides staking rewards (paid in SPS and Vouchers).

If you registered with BRAVETOFU as your Referrer, you'll have some SPS delegated to you. If you need more SPS, you can rent it or buy it.

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5. Next steps

☑️ Join a guild

Joining a guild is a fun way to start building some more relationships within Splinterlands, to get more Glint from your battles (the "Lodge" building of your guild gives a bonus based on its level), to participate in Brawls (guild vs guild battles), and more.

To find a guild with open spots, I suggest posting in the Tavern, in the TPG New Player channel, or posting on X and tagging folks you know (e.g. me) and the Splinterlands account.

☑️ Buy 5 plots of land

Land is a whole other game within the game. For most players, it'll be something they get into much later. However, if you're interested in the concept, you can dive in by looking at the currently available mechanics that are detailed in the first two whitepapers: Land 1.5 and Land 2.0.

For now, however, I suggest going to the Land marketplace and buying 5 plots of land, as this will give you a +5% bonus in rewards.

☑️ Follow accounts on X & YouTube

There are tons of great content creators to follow to learn about and keep up with Splinterlands. This is by no means an exhaustive list.

X/Twitter:
🐦‍⬛ Splinterlands official: https://x.com/splinterlands
🐦‍⬛ Yabapmatt (SPL CEO): https://x.com/Yabapmatt
🐦‍⬛ Dave McCoy (SPL COO): https://x.com/mccoy2016
🐦‍⬛ Blaze (SPL Marketing lead): https://x.com/RollingOTB
🐦‍⬛ SPS DAO: https://x.com/TheSPSDAO
🐦‍⬛ Clayboyn (SPS DAO project manager): https://x.com/Clayboyn
🐦‍⬛ Bravetofu: https://x.com/bravetofu_
🐦‍⬛ Goldmatters: https://x.com/Goldmatters_
🐦‍⬛ Dejota: https://x.com/Dejota_SPS
🐦‍⬛ AfterSound: https://x.com/AfterSoundMusic
🐦‍⬛ Bulldog1205: https://x.com/bulldog1205
🐦‍⬛ Splinterlands Land Guy: https://x.com/DigitalLandGuy
🐦‍⬛ SteveR82: https://x.com/R82Steve
🐦‍⬛ GhostlyBG: https://x.com/GhostlyBG

These aren't exhaustive lists. If you'd like me to add one, please write a comment below.

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I hope you found this guide useful. Please help me improve it and keep it up to date by letting me know in the comments if there's anything I've missed.

Images in this post were generated using AI.