So far on my brief Splinterlands journey I have played all level one cards. With the new Chaos cards out, and summoners being accessible to a newer player on a modest budget, I have been contemplating purchasing some leveled up cards, which by nature of the game needs to start with a summoner. With zero experience under my belt in this arena I decided to rent a level two Tarsa and Obsidian. I considered adding Kelya as well, but the thought of trying to experiment with three splinters was a bit overwhelming.

To get a feel for playing with them I also rented a few level three commons for each splinter as well as a couple level three neutral monsters I thought may play well with each team. Admittedly it isn’t a completely fair test as I will likely build the decks out with other complimentary cards, but at roughly 16 DEC per day it is a low budget experiment whose results will hopefully lead to better decisions when I actually make a purchase.

The first day I went in with the wrong mindset and forced the cards I had rented and lost six straight battles. Not a great start. I took a deep breath and attempted to use the cards as I normally would. The experiment wasn’t going to give me any worthwhile data if I changed my approach.

With a change in mindset I started to get a better feel for the best lineups and started to see better results. I haven’t had the time to go back and study all the battles and give any hard data, which I hope to do as the weekend approaches, but what I saw as I was battling was encouraging. The extra health, attack or speed here and there seemed to be winning those battles in which I would normally lose by a hair. A perfect example I can give is the level three Chaos Agent won me a battle simply by the upgrade of Dodge gaining me an extra two rounds of hits.

Day two the Splinterlands luck was with me and I received a Fire quest. This gave me the perfect opportunity to test out Tarsa at level two. I started off going on my longest win streak ever with 12 straight victories. I made some good choices which helped, but several victories were against similar, non leveled up, lineups.

Two days is not the largest set of data, and I will need to look more closely at the battle log, but so far I am impressed what a leveled up summoner adds to the game.

Anyone have thoughts if the new summoners will drop in value even further as the general sale goes live? I started playing in late October and I was resigned to the fact that I may never be able to think about leveling up a summoner, but for roughly $25 a level two summoner could be mine. It is hard not to pull the trigger.