Hello everyone! This is the first entry of what I hope to be a roughly twice a week blog detailing my entry into the world of Splinterlands.
I've been paying some attention to the world of cryptocurrency and blockchain for a few years (own a bit of bitcoin and ether on Coinbase, have used crypto to make various online purchases), but I have never dug in much deeper than that. I have decided that for 2021 I will work to better understand how distributed apps work, and whether it is actually possible to make a few bucks on the blockchain. To start, I will work on understanding and mastering Splinterland, but I may branch out from there as I get a feel for what else is out there.
A few ground rules for this experiment:
1 - my primary goal is to understand how the game works, how Hive works, how DAPPs work, etc. This is more important to me than becoming amazing at Splinterland itself.
2 - my secondary goal is to try to make a bit of money. I will invest a maximum of $2/day into the game, and hope to eventually be in a position to stop investment entirely and to generate any needed resources through the game itself.
So, with that I will jump into my thoughts on Day 1 of Splinterland!
I jumped into the game and ran through the tutorial in about 5 minutes (my account name is Brucolac) After the tutorial, I checked out my free cards. It seems that I received one free card, but other than that I am using the starter pack. My free card was a Drake of Arnak, which I think is given to everyone?
I played a few practice games to get a feel for the free cards and the interface, and then headed to the shop to start blowing coin. It quickly became clear that the spellbook is the ticket to entry for the game...so I plunked down the $10 (so much for $2/day...). I paid for this in USD using Paypal...because I couldn't figure out how to link to my coinbase account...lots to learn. I then plunked down another $2 for my first pack and got started playing ranked games. Not surprisingly, I lost most of them, but I started getting a feel for how the game worked and what cards I had in my deck.
After a few matches I headed over to https://peakmonsters.com/ to check out the market place. Leasing cards out is intriguing to me (everybody loves the idea of passive income!), but it seems like most of the prices are very low...I will need to investigate whether or not it makes sense to lease my cards out, once I get a few.
Overall, after screwing around for an hour or two, I have a ton of questions about how things work. I will list them here, and start tracking down answers in the next addition.
Questions:
How does the leasing market work - is it actually possible to earn returns on these things, or is the amount so low as to be meaningless?
Card prices - is it likely that the value will remain high over time? What has happened to the value over the last year or so? The charts only go back a month...
Am I better off spending my daily $2 on packs or on individual cards?
How popular is this game? How many people are actually playing it?
Thanks for reading, and see you next time!
