When a new player joins Splinterlands.com, he/she receives a set of starter cards, these playable cards are usually available in Chaos and Untamed booster packs, and starter sets only have common and rare cards.
These cards are very easy to recognize due to their dull colors, have an "S" tag on the top-right corner, and they only show level 1 with a star instead of a level bar. The below-given image shows some typical starter cards.
On the other hand, when you own or rent any card, it will look vibrant in colors, has no "S" sign, and you'll notice a level-up bar below the card's title.
It is also to be noted that Starter Cards do not have any "Card ID", but if you own or rent a card it will show up as its Card ID, to reveal the Card ID of a card, simply visit the cards' section and click that card. The below image shows a unique number of each owned card in the Card ID column in the table.
Yes, starter cards are for practice, because the new reward system urges you to use either owned cards or rented cards for eligibility to receive DEC tokens, Focus and Season Points.
Reason: The starter cards are not counted as assets, because they don't have any real value and identity on the blockchain. In the blockchain world, an asset must have a unique identity or a contract address to be recognized as an asset, which can be a contract token or a Non-Fungible Token (NFT).
Starter cards are available to anyone who creates a Splinterlands account, in the previous reward mechanism a player could participate in ranked battles after buying the Spell Book and earn daily focus chests and season rewards, which did not seem to fit with the ideology of using actual NFTs to play and earn. Anyone who created an account bought the Spell Book and started playing with free cards for actual rewards, rather than bled the reward pool to accounts who played without having any actual NFTs. That caused the reward ecosystem to be abused repeatedly with so many accounts that only cared to get rewards playing with free cards.
Mixing starter cards with owned or rented cards in a battle is fine, but it will drastically reduce your Rshares. As per the document posted by Splinterlands:
Each "starter card" used in a ranked battle win will REDUCE the reward shares earned, with 100% starter cards = 0 reward shares
Thus, upon using all starter packs, there will be no DEC and season or focus points.
Case 1
Now, look at the above battle stats, the player has won the battle, but he has earned no Reward Points or DEC because he has used 100% starter cards, which is mentioned under "Reward Reductions".
Case 2
The player has used 80% owned or rented cards and 20% starter cards, but he still managed to get Reward Points and DEC, but he received a 20% penalty on total Rshares for using a starter card. It means that the rewards could be more than 29 RP and 0.004 DEC.
Case 3
In this case, you can notice there is no "Reward Reductions" penalty showing up in the reward statistics pop-up because the player has used 100% owned or rented cards which benefited him to get 100% Rshares.
As we have observed from the 3 cases presented above, it is important to upgrade starter cards into owned cards to get 100% Rshare and receive Reward Points and DEC without any penalty.
Starter cards are available in Splinterlands Market and other 3rd party marketplaces either for purchasing or renting.
A typical blockchain game needs some investment to be stacked in the gaming ecosystem to become a participant in the reward pool, and a player's earning rewards depend on the total investment, Splinterlands is also following a similar method. If a player owns or rents good cards his winning chances may be increased so as his/her reward shares in the reward pool.
I think the information I have shared with you will help you understand the benefits of owning and renting game cards rather than playing with starter cards. If you have any questions or feedback, do write in the comments section to interact further.
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Information Source Splinterlands Help Section
