Hi everyone, welcome back to my Splinterlands blog, I already made my Battle Mage Secrets post earlier this week, but didn't really had a nice idea for the Social Media Challenge for this week so I decided to wait a little, and hopefully something nice would come up while I was doing my regular Splinterlands grinding.
To find out how you can participate in the challenge yourself to earn some $ to fund your deck with, you can read the Splinterlands post here.
So, I had just claimed my chests from yesterdays battles, not much besides the basic stuff and some sps, mainly potions I already have plenty of and I'm never going to use in these numbers, then I was doing some ranked battles and it actually was a battle I lost due to a faster card than the one I own at a lower level, so I was comparing if it's worth it in my opinion to upgrade it, and then I thought 'why not make a post about this happening now and explain it'. So let's go!
So it was this fight, that I lost, Silent Sha-Vi was dodging too much, speed is so important! I really like this card in my deck, I currently own a level 3 Gold Foil.
From level 3 to level 5, I'm getting 1 extra speed and 1 extra HP, so I'm checking Monstermarket.io for card prices and compare Gold Foil to Regular Foil prices first.
Why not buy straight from the in-game market? for every purchase you do, you're paying a 5% DEC fee to Splinterlands (maybe it's 4% now with 2% burn), when you buy from monstermarket, you get 60% of the fee returned to your hive-engine wallet, not much maybe but every little drop helps!
I'm not owning a Regular Foil for this account, so the cheapest option would be to buy a level 5 from the market for $1.965, let's see what the Gold Foil price is...
Goid Foil price is $2.488 so it's only 53 cents more expensive to get a gold foil, well worth it for me!
ok, so I've decided to get a Gold Foil, now first let's check on peakmonsters.com what the bid buy price for GF Silent Sha-Vi is, because when there is a lot of difference, it can be worth it to have a little patience and save some money.
High Bid is 44 cents, 5 cents below my buying price, so when I want to make a bid and have a little patience, I could potentially save about 25 cents but I don't have any guarantee this bid is going to fill and it might sit there for weeks or months so for this purchase, I decided to just buy it straight from monstermarket since my $0.498 / BCX was already 3 cents below the other cards that are available.
But to explain everything, let's demonstrate how you can enter a bid yourself..
First, you go to the peakmonsters market and on the right type in the (partial) name of the card you're interested in, for me this is Silent Sha-Vi now, when you search, you get both the Regular Foil as the Gold Foil, when I click on 'bid' a new window will pop up displaying the bids for this card, the highest bid at this point is $0.442 cents / BCX so when I want to bid the get to the top, I need to bid higher, so I click on 'make bid'.
Again, a new window will pop up to fill in my bid details:
I want to outbid the highest bidder but not by much, so I put in a bid for 0.443 cents per BCX.
I need a total of 5 BCX to get my level 5 Gold Foil
The highest level I want to buy is a level 5, like this it could also partial fill and buy separate cards as long as they are the same or under my bid price.
So, again, no guarantee this bid will ever fill, for all I know the guy I just outbid is a market bot and it will just outbid me again so that's why for this purchase I straight bought it, for cards I consider 'nice to have' I do have a lot of bid buys open at all times.
When I'm done, I click 'confirm' and the bid will register on the market.
So for this purchase, I bought from monstermarket, I bought the level 5 Gold Foil Silent Sha-Vi for 3260 DEC, and because I bought it at monstermarket and not from the ingame market I got 78 DEC returned to me.
Of course I already owned 1 BCX Gold Foil Silent Sha-Vi so I could also just buy 4 extra BCX and combine it with the one I already had, but since the price was a little lower for the level 5 and I can transfer the 1 BCX to my alt account that was just using a level 3 Regular Foil, and rent that one out, so, as with everything in this game, sooooo many choices!!
one more tip: lock your more expensive cards! just for extra security IF your account gets compromised, your expensive cards are locked so they can't be sold or tranferred, select your new card, and click on the padlock icon.
I just lock all cards I only play on using them myself for 30 days, the maximum amount to lock, cards I might want to sell one day I lock for 7 days.
That's it for this week, I hope this helped some of you to make good decisions for the cards you want to buy.
Thank you for reading!!!
If you haven't made an account already, please consider using my referral link to sign up, I'll happily send the amount I get for your signup back to you in DEC or SPS to help you start.
Have a great day!
Sources: For my thumbnail I used a background from 
I made a post with more info about Golem Overlord here.
