What did I learn in the Bronze league of Splinterlands?
After competing for months in silver or higher leagues after a few last minute rental cancellation I found myself in the bronze league again and I decided to challenge myself in this environment by using only starter deck cards. The first part of the post will be rather grim, but I will close off with a few tips and strategies. I would like to highlight here, that my goal was not to get out of the bronze league as soon as possible, but to get a feel of what it is like to play there.
This pretty much summed up my experiences of the first week in the Bronze league.
I started in Bronze 2 and quickly fell to Bronze 3. I have tried to write down the strategies of my opponents, learning the basics in the different mana setups. I quickly understood that on this level it makes no sense to check the opponents last played cards, as they were playing according to pre-set line-ups, which might change drastically between different mana pools. So I tried to adapt, and was then pending between the Bronze 2 and 3 leagues.
I was also surprised that rulesets are present from Bronze 2 already, when I last played in Bronze these started to appear only at the end of Bronze 1.
BOT ALERT!
What made the struggle even worse, was that every fight I was going against bots with unpronounceable names and number endings. That means that your opponents will fight with a team who has a high winning chance, and in most cases will fight to your bitter end. As there are multiple lineups, which are also evolving, it is a bit hard to guess what strategy to use to get forward, but sometimes it worked out on my favor. I could fight myself back into the mid of Bronze 2.
I was taking the whole think casually, if you put some time into it you can get further.
...The cherry on the top was the random number generator, which often made my team miss and somehow the opponents bots teams less so. The computers should stick together. Skynet is near!
...and the DEC rewards
When I started playing in Bronze league with only 1000 CP in September I could rent myself up to Silver 1 league and end the season with 5-600 DEC of surplus, from which I bough a few cards. Now the rewards in Bronze 2 are around 0.1 DEC... This is enough to rent a few good cards and with the lower rent cost at season start it should be possible to move up to higher leagues. With chaos legion general sale coming, we might see even cheaper rent which would open the doors to the silver league for normal players, but bots as well...
As the season end is near I won't try to rent myself higher, but I will do so in the next season and see what how it will work out for me.
The light at the end of the tunnel
So lets get to the meat of this post. My 5 cents to new players:
 | Start Early : Before you buy a Spellbook play some ranked games in the mobile up, and create an overview of the current strategies (or find someone with this info who will help you) |
|---|---|
 | Experience the playstyles : The best time to start playing is end of a season and the beginning of a new one, because players loose ranking points after a season end and you might encounter winning strategies. Write them up! These experience will help you rent the right cards when the time comes. |
 | Invest : The best start with Splinterlands is to buy the Spellbook and at least 1000 CP (at current prices this is at least another $10), so you can fight in Bronze 2 without the fear of your rent's being cancelled. This price might fall even more when the general sale starts. |
 | Connect with others : The Spinterlands community is a welcoming one in my experience. Join it on Discord, reach out on PeakD or 3Speak, Twitter or anything that comes to your mind and share your journey |
AND HAVE FUN! This game and it's community has a huge variety of opportunities where you can express yourself!
Line Ups in the Bronze league
And at the end a few base lineups I encountered quite a lot. These lineups can be expanded/changed. They just show a bit of the current Meta in Bronze so you might think of counter strategies.
Life teams are high mana and utilize General Sloan and Pelacor Arbalest usually with the Truthspeaker card.
Dragon teams are on the other hand a variation of the Death team with Drake Of Arnak.
With this I will end this post. I hope it was interesting for you, see you on the battlefield! :)
Pictures were taken from the site: https://www.pexels.com/
Divider is the work of the magnificent flauwy.
Great post! I agree with all your 5 cents.
I actually like to recommend renting a handful of the cheapest from each rarity, and giving the playstyles a try out. (Also worth trying out some summoners if you can)
For level 1 cards, and using the cheaper options, you can actually rent like 150 decent cards for under $1 for 1 day and get a good feel for all the cards. Though that can be a bit overwhelming if you aren't already familiar with card games or peakmonsters.
I totally agree with you, there a lot of valuable cards for 0.1 DEC available at the moment on the market, which can easily make the difference in bronze and silver as well.
!pizza for the valuable comment :)
Great tips! Perhaps another suggestion I could contribute is to master/rent 2-3 elements first before expanding to the rest. Cheers!
Thanks for sharing! - @mango-juice
