What's Your Five-Year Plan With Splinterlands?

2 Year Plan?

6 Month Plan?

I'm not joking. The real winners of this game are the ones that aren't afraid to look ahead, getting down to some serious planning. Splinterlands ain't going anywhere, so maybe it's time to think about long-term strategies, rewards, maximizing your play and growing your deck.

Obviously you're going to be playing Splinterlands forever. This may sound far-fetched, but trust me, we're going to keep wowing you.

Rundown of My Play

@ChrisRoberts

With my account I usually finish out the season right on the cusp of Champion. Sometimes I even slide into Champion III at the last minute. Achieving Champ earns an additional 20 reward cards at the season's end, so it's always worth it for me to make the final push.

@MonsterSpirit

I also play with @monsterspirit, an account @CarrieAllen set up over a year ago to prove that rewards could be earned for no expense beyond the $10 starter pack (and that the game would still be fun to play). Honestly, I have more fun playing with the @monsterspirit account, trying to figure out how to grind a few more summoners out of my meager (but necessary) daily rewards. A good season for @MonsterSpirit is reaching Gold III.

@CarrieAllen

Finally, since Carrie doesn't usually have a chance to do her Daily Quest, I knock that out for her each day on her @CarrieAllen account. If I can get Carrie to Diamond, I will have had a terrific season.

Level is Irrelevant

As you can see, I play with accounts of several different levels. @MonsterSpirit accepts no help from my account; she has to do it on her own. With each deck, it is crucial that I'm always strengthening the cards I play with and selling the others.

No matter which account I am playing, I seem to earn rewards that are perfectly proportional to the power behind my deck. So for me, it's a matter of simply growing each deck as quickly as I can. That starts with summoners.

Summoners are Everything

Sometimes there are monsters that I really want to play, but to buy them would be downright irresponsible when I'm so perpetually behind on summoners.

What Have I learned About Summoners?

1. Once they are out of "print," they get too expensive for me.
When I was stocking up on Alpha Alric Stormbringers at less than twenty-five cents a piece, I didn't figure I would ever be playing with a max Summoner worth around $300. I just wanted a good Summoner to play with. In fact, all my Alpha and Beta Summoners are combined to over a thousand dollar value, but I'm starting to wonder why I haven't sold them yet. I don't keep charts and graphs, but I would guess that I have gained at least 10x on my Summoners.

But I only want to buy them when they're cheap. I had to give up on the Epic Beta Summoners once they shot up to over $2 each, so now my sights are set on Untamed.All Rare Summoners are still listed below a dollar, and I think there's room for them to drop a bit more as we get into the middle of the Untamed supply.

2. Increasing level Summoners are 100% necessary to grow your deck.
I remember Aggroed talking about this from the very beginning. "Summoners are gonna be important, people," or something like that I remember him saying. It was easy to recognize very early. The Summoners are in a class of their own... literally. They are necessary to summon the monsters. A high level monster is nothing without a Summoner with which to call it.

With @MonsterSpirit, I must resist the urge to buy Monsters and Booster Packs because buying Summoners is such a priority. When Beta Summoners saw their last price boom, mine were each at level 2, with no hope of reaching level 3 under the new prices. I had to cut my losses and sell the Beta Summoners. But with the STEEM and Dark Energy generated from the sales, I was able to get the same Splinters' Untamed Summoners to level 3, a significant improvement.

I imagine that by the time Untamed is over I will have gotten some of my new Summoners to level 4, and I can only hope that when I repeat the process with the next set, perhaps then I can get the new Summoners to level 5.

In this way, repeating a slow but reliable process, I will grow my MonsterSpirit deck to nearly max levels in the course of about three years.

3. Legendary Summoners are simply out of my reach.
I don't play in tournaments. If you play in tournaments, you may have use for a single-BCX Legendary Summoner. If you're like me and you hardly ever play in tournaments, the Legendary Summoners are far more valuable as trade tokens than playable cards. Think how many Wizard of Eastwoods I could get for a single Prince Rennyn.

I understand, they're cool and legendary and stuff. You want them. But if you sell the higher valued cards quick and dirty, you'll just end up with a bigger collection.

4. Reward Summoners are undervalued, as long as they're rewards.
Two words. Daria Dragonscale. I'm holding 6 max Darias and a handful of singles. I remember purchasing them a long time ago (for less than a quarter each) and thinking: "These are gonna be worth way more. It's just a matter of time."

I cannot stress this enough. Reward Cards are only reward cards when they're being given out as rewards. Does this make sense? If people get them for free, for some reason they're willing to sell them for cheap, but only as long as they're still getting them for free.

With almost every example, we have seen a significant rise in the price of a Reward Card once its supply runs out. I'm willing to bet that even the least playable cards (Rusty, I'm looking at you...) will soon see a spike as well.

5. Old Summoners can be sold to buy multitudes of new Summoners.
I'll stop rambling about Summoners soon, but first, I'm thinking about selling some of my highly valued Alpha and Beta Summoners. What do you think? Are they overvalued? Will they fall as more Summoners are released because so many people are strategizing as I have described?

The fact is, by selling I could take some handsome profit, but I'd still be able to max out the Untamed Summoners with a small portion of the proceeds. But if the Untamed Summoners are someday going to be valued just as highly (or higher), shouldn't they be the ones I'm after now?