My Splinterlands Land journey as a 'smaller player'.

Hi everyone! and welcome back to my Splinterlands Blog, I'm mostly covering the Splinterlands challenges to further funds my accounts, but today I like to share my 'Land Expansion story' as a regular player because what we see most in video's and articles are players with very high level accounts and a lot of plots, even complete tracts but as a normal or small player we can also participate in the land expansion, I don't mind being the little fish 😆.

For people unfamiliar with Splinterlands and the Land Expansion some basic info first.

But first... what Is Splinterlands?

So, for people who don't know, Splinterlands is an online collectible card game using blockchain technology. Every card in the game is owned as a NFT and is traded on the Hive blockchain. It's the digital, modern version of Magic: The Gathering with some extra advantages like it's much easier to rent out cards to other players for profit, join tournaments and Guild Brawls.

Cards are available to buy and sell through the ingame marketplace as well as on third-party online marketplaces like Peakmonsters and Monstermarket. Winners can earn real money in the form of Splinterlands own governance token Splinterlands Shards (SPS), making it a lucrative platform for extremely skilled players with the best cards.

With your card set you battle other players, each card has it's own mana value, strengths and abilities and every battle has another mana cap and different rule set, in the higher leagues up to 3 rulesets combined, so if you can wrap your head around the do's and don't in this particular match better than your opponent does, you'll have an advantage already, making it a highly strategic game.

Types of Claims

Plots - A Plot is the basic unit of Splinterlands land. In all of Praetoria, a total of only 150,000 plots will be sold to players. These plots do not make up the entirety of the continent, but only the player-owned portions. There will also be a mix of non-player-owned land that is controlled by the game.
Tracts - A Tract Claim is a unit of 100 total Plots. Every Tract is guaranteed to contain 1 Plot with a Keep.
Regions - A Region Claim is a unit of 1000 Plots. Every Region is guaranteed to contain 1 Plot with a Castle and 9 Plots with Keeps.

Totems

Totems come in the same 4 rarities (Legendary, Epic, Rare and Common) as Splinterlands cards. These NFT items can be placed on Splinterlands land to enhance the resource production of magical abilities of that land in various ways. They can also be tokenized and traded on TribalDEX and Hive-Engine.

Items and Spells

Items and spells will be new types of playable cards in the future of Splinterlands. Instead of a single round of drafting then submitting a team, there will then be a second round in which players have a chance to play items and spells to further affect the action of the battle.
Items and Spells are one of the main purposes and goals of the Splinterlands land expansion. Players will have the exclusive ability to produce Items and Spells, meaning that they will not be officially sold by Splinterlands from a supply. Players will have to rely upon the resources and crafting of their own land, and on the secondary Item and Spell markets managed by other players.

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I started playing Splinterlands in August 2021, I already looked at this game before but didn't understand a lot of it and decided to skip it, I wish I didn't! When I read a lot of good things about it, I looked into it with some more dedication and it got me hooked quite fast, I joined with a lot of new players, rewards were awesome, even unsustainable...
Untamed packs almost sold out when I started and I started investing a little in my account with money I made with another Play2Earn game, League of Kingdoms.

I remember talking to a veteran player on discord, @mistermister if I remember correctly, he told me I really should get at least one land plot, I really didn't knew what I was doing at this time and since land main sale already sold out and market prices were surging ($800 for a un-surveyed land plot) I knew this was not for me, and I better invested some funds into building a Splinterlands deck and just start playing the game and learning the ropes.

I was already a guild member of Non Fungible Gaming because we played League of Kingdoms together, they already covered multiple games at the time and we decided to launch a Splinterlands guild to help each other and earn more together.

Fast forward, 2 years later NFG owns 2 Splinterlands Guilds, NFG Club - Legion I and NFG Club - Legion II managed by yours truly, I run two hand played accounts, one in Bronze, and my main in high Silver.
Since I'm investing a lot of time in this great game, I wanted a piece of this land pie too, just to experience this part of the game really, I watched some video's about land but much was unknown, and I bought my first common land plot which was now affordable due to the crypto winter and everything web3 related plummeted into a deep dark hole.

 

So, in June 2023 I bought myself a common land plot, with the little knowledge I did had I bought a plot that included the 'building in a box' to build a level 1 building for free when land 2.0 launches, DEC was still way under peg so I ended up paying 58K DEC for a $44 land plot, it was in Region 79.

When the new came land will launch at the beginning of December 2023, I decided I wanted another plot because one would need to produce grain for me to be self sufficient and the other plot could produce something else, to be determined later.

November 30, I bought my second common plot, for, looking back now, REALLY CHEAP only $28.50 and I read somewhere that your plots needed to be close to each other, or you would have to pay transportation fees, no plot were available at that time in region 79, so I bought a plot in region 78...
Yeah... that's not going to work... I found out later 🤣, you still need to pay the transportation fee that way.

Without plot available in my regions now, I needed to start over, that was not cool, I first waited a month to build my farm and I bought 30k grain peer to peer from a mav on discord to finish my buildings before I came to the conclusion the best thing for me to do is sell and start over again, but I locked my first plot for 30 days so I couldn't sell that right away, lucky for me, I forgot to lock the second plot, I looked at what a decent price would be at the time for that plot in my region and other regions around it, most common plots were listed at $65 - $75. But since I only paid $30 in total with the grain for it, I listed for $60 for a fast sale and announced it on the Buy / Sell channel in Splinterland official discord where a player contacted me right away and bought my plot...

Wow, so I made a mistake - and I doubled my money with it 🤣

With some outside funds I had ready to fund my deck and earnings from blogging about Splinterlands, I bought two plots, in the same region this time 😇

1 rare plot that already had a finished grain farm, and 1 common plot I was planning to build a research hut on it, with the remaining funds I bought some Gold Foil rare and epic workers to put on to the land and start producing, and yes, finally, my first plot was up and running 😃

In the time I needed to build the research hut on the other plot, I could produce to 15K grain I needed to finish the building, so the waiting time wasn't that bad, I wasn't willing to buy the time crystals for this, since well... my funds are limited.

So in three days, my research hut will finally be ready and by that time my grain farm will have produced 15k grain, that's a nice timing!

But I wanted more... but not a single plot available in my region of course, and if there will be a plot for sale, it sure wouldn't be cheap... supply and demand and all that.
So I had some 'fun money' savings on the side line to put into the game so I bought myself two common plots in the same region and made sure one of them could still produce grain when 2.0 launches, so I needed it to be a River, Bog, Lake or Plains, the other wouldn't matter that much but I figured I'll best pick a terrain type I didn't own in my other region for diversity so Desert it was.

Two more plots at floor price!

One definitely had to be a grain farm so I build that one first, and loaded it with max level reward cards since they're just above $3 at the moment, and I made sure they would match my terrain boost type to get the 10% production boost.

My army of Pelacor Bandit workers lol 😁

The drawback of putting max level common cards on my plot is it needed a whopping 50k DEC staked on it, yeah.. that's $50 locked away, not gone... just locked.

So in just a little over a week, this plot will be up and running, but I'll need to buy some grain for it to finish my building by then.

My funds were really getting low at this point and it was my plan all along to just made sure to own two plots together, and later put a good work force on it, so I did start the construction of the Shard Mine, but only with the limited workers I had available and primarily because I didn't had the DEC needed to be staked on the land.

As it is for now... my shard mine will be ready in.... 53 days 😅

In a few weeks more of my blogging earnings will have paid out so I can put more workers on this plot too.

To summarize:

• I bought a total of 4 plots, 1 rare and 3 commons for $190
• Every plot needs about $60 - 65 in cards and staked DEC on it for a decent production rate, it doesn't really matter if you put max common reward cards on it (cheaper but more DEC staked) or rare / epic Gold Foils (more expensive but require less DEC staked, the max common card give a slightly better production rate for a few ($5 - 8) dollars extra.
• make sure you buy in the same region!!
   
  
  
   
  
  
  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: I took some information from the splinterlands land site as well as the picture I used for my thumbnail.