NOTE: Some of this information is repeated for the sake of those who might be reading a post from this series for the first time. For those of you who have been following this eXperiment, scroll down and begin reading at the Current Status section.
This is the next installment in my experiment in building a Splinterlands account from scratch without additional monetary investment after the initial Spellbook purchase. I am chronicling my journey so see if this is a viable activity and, if so, how long will it take to reach that level (I'm shooting for SILVER...after that, we'll see).
In lieu of all of the recent changes in Splinterlands gameplay, a few months ago, I started an experiment to see if a new player could build a viable account without any monetary investment (besides the Spellbook, of course). I created a brand new account for my wife and started playing it (you can read the previous installment in this series HERE). Initially, I don't expect this account to make much progress, so I will work on creating a posts (or maybe two) per season. If things begin to get interesting, frequency should increase.
When I initially created this account, I was several days into a season. Even though I was playing this account with a bot, I was unable to accumulate enough points to earn a Season Chest at the end of that season. I wanted to see if it was possible to earn a chest with a bare minimum account that only contained a few cards that could be purchased with the original 3000 credits and starter cards. However, during my first full season, I was able to earn a single season chest with the few cards this account currently owns. It would have been nice to obtain a new card with that chest, but hey, SPS is progress.
I also began entering card giveaways to see if I could increase the collection before the season ended. To date, I have not been very consistent in entering said giveaways so the collection until recently. Since this is be best way for me to acquire new cards at this point, I will focus more on finding the time to be more consistent in these efforts and increase my entries as time goes on.
If you read the previous post, I have been dealing with an issue where the bot keeps urping for one reason or another (stops finding matches for one or more of my accounts thereby forfeiting matches and/or disconnects entirely). When it does, I stop earning FP and SP and I have to shut the bot down for an hour so that it will reset. Since I discovered this, I have made a point to keep a closer eye on its progress and even though the errors have not stopped, the down time has been reduced. It looks like I may have caught it early enough this season that there is still enough time left to earn a Season Chest (fingers crossed). I may have to contribute a few manually played games to see if I can give a boost to the RP.
In the past couple of posts, I have been able to relate my surprising success in winning a few new cards for the collection. In these giveaways, I am trying to focus on winning cards that this account does not already own (whenever there is a choice). This recent winning streak has encouraged me to find the time to continue my efforts in entering these giveaways. And now I can say, I may have been going about this the wrong way from the get-go. Since my last post four days ago, I have managed to win three more cards.
I won this one from 
Then a couple of days later, I won another one from
Finally, this morning I found this one from 
In addition to these cards, I won 111 DEC from 
These three new Reward cards, along with the one I talked about in my last post means I am now up to a whopping SEVEN Reward cards (one won in a Season chest, four won in giveaways, and two purchased with my original coins). I'm cooking with gas now!
Along with that, I have won one Riftwatchers card and 249 DEC in the past week, as well. And all of this from entering about 12 to 15 giveaways per day.
In my first post, I stated:
If you have any suggestions on how a new player can progress without having to invest any outside influx of capital, I'd love to hear it. Also, if you are a new player that has questions about anything I am doing with this account (or anything else, for that matter), leave me a comment...
Unlike my two previous posts, I did get some response in my last post.
In one interesting and informative comment, 
Beginner tips:
There are two contest that are well worth your while to enter but only with one of your accounts. If you are lucky and get their votes it is worth 8-10 Hive vote per post.
Splinterlands has two or more contest each week for blogging.
Social Media Challenge:
https://www.splintertalk.io/@splinterlands/splinterlands-weekly-curation-challange-january-3-2023
Share your battle:
@splinterlands/share-your-battle-weekly-challenge-dragons-january-4-2023
You can find the official contest in the splinterlands discord. https://discord.com/channels/447924793048825866/452179790934573064
Since most of my battles are run by the bot, I don't have a good frame of reference to be able to "Share my battles", but the concept of the "Social Media Challenge" might be something I could work with. I just hope my little eXperiment would be worthwhile reading.
And to those of you who just took a little time to let me know you read my post, thank you for making me feel like this eXperiment is not falling on deaf ears (it doesn't take much to make me happy).
As always, I have set the entire Hive Rewards for this post to go to the account that is being used for this eXperiment. Also, any rewards (PIZZA, CTP, ALIVE, etc.) submitted to this post are also forwarded to this account and will be used to build toward purchasing additional cards when enough has accumulated. In addition, if anyone joins Splinterlands from one of the links in this post, they will be indirectly providing support to the eXperiment, as well.
As you read, I was able to pick up some more new cards as well as some DEC for the collection from entering giveaways. I now have a renewed interest in this pursuit and will make it a top priority going forward. Who knows? Some day, I may end up winning enough to push me up into Bronze II tier on a regular basis so that I can start making consistent progress.
"The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step." - Lao Tzu
NOTE: Individual card images provided by Splinterlands developers (see Splinterlands Card Images by Level).
