Splinterlands: Main Stage in Wild

My love for eSports in Splinterlands came at a crossing at Splinterfest as I surprisingly found my way into the Top 16 after the first day of the Wild format Tournament. I had not expected to get very far knowing the amount of great players we had in the audience. However, there were a number of well-known players that often occupy the top spots in ranked play that were not at the tournament which provided me the opportunity to tiptoe in to the last day of the tournament. With the rewards being very enticing, I actually got nervous when getting up to play my first matches.

There was a little bit of issues with organization but in the end I think it worked fairly well as the 16 of us competing had a good understanding of what to try to avoid with some sort of etiquette between us. I have heard of some complaints along the way after the fact but I believe that given the first go at it, it was a great experience from both an observer and as a player. It was truly exciting to see others go up against each other with a level playing field although I often think that my advantage is the great Collection I have. However, if we want this to grow we will need to get everybody excited for these types of events.

To my surprise, I won the first round of the first match which encourage me to ”try hard” as gamers would say to continue to move forward in the tournament. After losing the second round, I tightened up a bit and gave it some more thought in order to get past the first round at the very least. I was happy to win the first match to advance to the next round before knowing that my next opponent was waiting for me already. This caught me a bit offguard as I was watching others still playing and thought I had some time to rest after the first round.

I quickly realize the availability of new cards that I hadn’t even know about which would help me win the first round of my second match. However, I think winning the first round put me into a comfort zone about my skills on creating a team. I didn’t have a very good ruleset that I dominate for the second one but I thought that I had put some extra dynamics with the team but was just wrong. My opponent easily countered my set up which I normally run looking for speed as an advantage but it turned into a weakness. Onto the tiebreaker!

Playing this tournament reminded me of how much I miss the bracket tournament style on the website as the new battle anytime format is not as engaging as it once was. However, I know it’s being used to leverage the global audience and use the base that we currently have. Since I haven’t been used to this bracket tournament, I felt overwhelmed going into the tiebreaker match for the second round. It was another rule set that wasn’t comfortable for me and I made the mistake of not leaning on what have you gotten this far which was relying on speed.

In fact, speed would be my enemy in this round. I was able to have a good chance in battling my opponent but I ran into a number of misses due to the speed my opponent chose in his team selection. I watched my chances of getting some new plots of land for my collection go away pretty quickly. However, I was not sad as it was an adrenaline rush for me who had not even thought about being in the position to say that I ended Top 8 at the first ever Champion League Tournament at the very first Spinterfest! I was happy to see those that won were very outgoing and celebrating with the crowd as we see in eSports very often.

Even though I had just lost and was eliminated from the tournament, I stuck around to watch the rest of the community rally behind the others that remained. It was exciting to see many of the team members from Splinterlands coming in and watching closely. Aggy was one of those that was looking very excited to see how the reactions from the crowd and those around the players were acting. I think, as I have said, that Weird Beard now has a better budget going into the next iteration of this event. I don’t even think it has to wait for the next Splinterfest for us for us to put together an eSports event for the main players of the game. I know I wouldn’t mind paying to watch given my experience at Splinterfest!