I've been so busy lately that I had to spend some time away from Splinterlands. After catching up on some of Bulldog1205's videos, I realized a new look at my card set was in order. What I found caused me to do a complete rethink of the type of cards I was buying, and me me consider doing a complete Splinterlands reset.

Mana rules

Lke most new players, when setting up my deck I considered only one thing: raw power. What I did was to consider cards that had a lot of punch, thinking this would allow me to win many battles and set me up nicely for the early leagues. As it turned out, I'd be proven wrong.

Operating with blinders on, My eyes saw the biggest numbers and that's how I built my deck. As a busy student, I didn't have much free time to view tutorials and avoid making the mistakes that now stand out like a sore thumb. That old saying" "You don't know, what you don't know" couldn't have been truer in my case.

So I'd send my freshly-minted team off to war and ended up losing more battles than I should have. To be certain, I did win a number of them, but could only dream of those long kill streaks that I kept hearing about. Clearly, there was something I wasn't including that would help optimize my deck for maximum performance. This is where those videos started teaching me a new approach, that would change the way I saw the game.

What hit me for the first time, was the importance of choosing quality low mana cards that would require less of the precious substance than some of the less efficient, high mana ones that made up a good portion of my higher-end purchases. Prepping for rules like 'Little League' hardly entered my considerations of what to buy.

When the time came to choose who to send into battle, there would inevitivly be too few points to ensure my crew was competitive. It got to the point where I hoped the game would roll me 30 points, so I'd have enough wiggle-room in order to build the team that I wanted. The issue was that selecting the right kind of cards wasn't possible due to constant mana constraints. This is why hearing Bulldogs breakdown was so important to me. In short, it changed my game.

So I gave up the Chaos Dragon card, in order to focus on ones with a better attack to mana ratio. We want our guys to punch above their weight, and bring home more and more victories. The other thing is to level these guys up and hopefully one day, maxed out. Making these changes should result in a higher win percentage over time. This in turn will help make this incredible game even more fun to play.