Hey everyone and welcome back to my Splinterlands blog, today is a Saturday and it's about time I start with making my seconds posts for this weeks Splinterlands Blogging Challenges, a great way to earn some extra funds to invest in your account as well as to spread the word about this great game.

Last week I made another explainer post, A Guide to Deck Building and Card Combining, I recommend to read this before this post, at this is an addition to it and goes in to the different ways in how to best buy cards and what to look for.

This weeks Community Engagement Challenge is to make another explainer post.

Challenge Theme, Tutorials and Tips from the Community.
Choose a Topic: Pick any aspect of Splinterlands—deck building, battle strategy, earning rewards, managing your collection, or navigating the in-game economy.

To find out how you can participate in the challenge yourself, check out the Splinterlands post here.

So, let's go!

Looking for break points.

Not every card is worth leveling up to certain levels, they only give a slight increase in stats compared to what it will cost to level up, I look for what I call 'break points' in cards, important increases at certain levels, for example when a monster gets +1 in attack power or receives a new ability at the next level.

I'll show you what I mean!

Let's take a loot at Wailing Wraith, this card is currently selling for around 36 cents on the secondary market, at level 1 it already has it's key ability: armored strike, it has 1 attack, 1 speed, 1 armor and 2 health points.
Considering you need 4 more cards to bring this card to level 2, and you will only gain 1 speed, nothing else for around $1.50 that's not much, so in my opinion the break points, or key points if you like are at level 3 where this monster gains 1 extra attack damage, at level 4 where it picks up a new ability affliction and at level 6 where it picks up another new ability rust.

Again, always consider your summoner levels, you won't be able to play a high level card if you don't have the summoner for that particular splinter at the appropriate level!

One more example!

Let's look at Torch Vizier, it's worth 32 cents per card at the secondary market at this time, why am I mentioning it's price? We can only spend our funds once, and we want to spend as less as possible but maximize our deck strength with it, a cheap 5 cents card can be worth leveling to gain only 1 extra speed, but a 1 dollar card is another story.

Leveling this card to level 2 gives 1 extra attack damage, so that's worth the money for me, getting it to level 3 isn't because it will only gives 1 extra health point for spending over 3 dollars. The next point of interest is at level 4 where it picks up the reflection shield ability, a pretty versatile ability, protecting from blast in the second spot and protects itself when it's hunting monsters with thorns, especially against those nasty Tofu teams!
I have this card at level 2 at the moment but at some point I'm definitely planning to get it to level 4!

Different ways of buying cards, their benefits and drawbacks.

Cards can be bought in different ways, I'll explain each one to you but first, we have to decide on which card I'm going to buy and make it an example for this post...

So, Solace Ashinach is the card I want to buy, I will be a Silver level player after the modern rotation in April so I want to have it at level 2 to also have the Spell Reflection ability.

Here are the options to buy this card.

• In Game, just use the 'For Sale' tab in the picture above.
  Benefit: Easy,no need for different sites.
  Drawback: 6% market fee.

Currently there is a 6% market fee. 4% goes to the marketplace where the transaction occurs and 2% is burned.

To be honest, this is the worst option available and I NEVER use it! 😅

• Monster Market.
  Benefit: 60% fee rebate and a lot easier to search cards in.
  Drawback: Currently not the best fee rebate out there but a great back up option.

Note: the repaid fee in DEC is sent to your Hive Engine wallet.

• Aqualis Market.
  Benefit: 70% fee rebate and a portion of the remainder of the fee is burned, so this is a better option for the ecosystem as a whole.
  Drawback: The site is a bit unstable so sometimes it's down, when I really want to buy a card fast, I use Monster Market as my backup. When I post in Aqualis Discord the market is down, it's usually fixed the same day.

Note: the repaid fee is sent directly to your Splinterlands account, so it's a little easier.

• Peakmonsters Market.
  Benefit: Save money when your bid gets filled below the market price.
  Drawback: You need to have patience and there's no guarantee your bid gets filled.

So let's get on from here and I'll show you my process which I always use, on Monster Market, I scout the market for good deals because I like how everything is clear and it's easy to search for everything, it isn't said I buy the cards here, in fact, this is only my backup option but it's the best way to scout the market in my opinion, so just type in the first letters of the card you're looking for and it will show you the card.

So, both the Regular Foil and the Gold Foil cards are displayed, you see two prices for both cards, when we look at the Regular Foil, the $3.024 is the current lowest price for a combined card, the $3.225 is for 1 BCX cards, so you're just buying one copy, or a level 1 card, let's click on the Regular Foil card to see more price details!

As you can see, a max level is for sale at $3.024 per BCX and for a total of $33.62 but when I want to buy a Silver level I need three cards for it, there are actually three sellers selling a Silver level card at the moment!
The best price is $3.183 per BCX (BCX means Base Card eXperience, meaning just a single copy) or for a total of $9.55

Now we know the market price we need to compare!

Now I go to PeakMonsters Market, on this market you're able to put in bid buy orders at a lower price, of course it's just a BID, so you need to wait if this gets filled because someone has to be willing to sell you at a slightly lower price than current market value, sometimes the difference between the current market price and the highest bid is really small so I end up buying straight from the market but sometimes it's worth it to have a little patience!

This is how the site looks, type in the name of the card you're looking for on the right (green arrow in the picture).

No need to type in the whole name, just 'Solace' is enough.

When we look at the Regular Foil again, we can see the highest bid at the moment is $2.915 which is quite a bit lower than current market price at $3.18!
Keep in mind you won't get a % market fee repaid with this option.

So this time, I'm placing a bid buy and with some luck it's getting filled within the next couple of days, saving me some money.

Let's click on the Regular Foil card 'BID' tab, marked by the green arrow in the picture above.

We can now see the list of bids listed, so there's one bid for $2.915 and the next one is $2.75
Considering it's market price at the moment is $3.18 I could of course bid just above the current price but this bid is maybe out there for longer and it's not filled, so I'm going to put a bid for $3.00 per BCX, let's click on the MAKE BID tab, market by the green arrow in the picture above.

A new window appears, I put in my bid at $3 per BCX, I want 3 BCX in total to get to Silver level, and my highest level card can be 3 BCX, meaning I'm ok to buy an already level up combined card for this price.
If you leave this 'Highest Level Card' at 1, you will only buy 1 BCX cards.

Then I click confirm and now the bid is getting registered... now all we need is time, and a seller! 😁

I also want to show you the way I use when the difference between high bid and market value is very low, say in this case the high bid was already at $3.10 so the difference would be only 8 cents per BCX, no point in putting a bid order in then...

Let's calculate first how much fee I would get returned when I would buy at Aqualis...

Total price was $9.55 and a 4% market fee (2% gets burned) on that would be 38 cents, I would get a 70% fee rebate so in this case that's 26.7 cents!

So let's do as if I would go and buy it from the market at this point (I'm low on funds so I can't at the moment LOL)

So we head over to Aqualis Market and type in the name in the search box, indicated my the green arrow in the picture below.

Click the regular foil card to open the buying window...

Then select the card you want (green arrow) to buy and double check the total price, and when you're sure click the BUY 3 BCX tab (red arrow)

A Hive Keychain window will open for you to confirm the transaction and you have bought the card, after like 30 seconds the repaid DEC will be back in your account.

*Note: When you don't have enough funds, there won't be an error message, the purchase will just fail.

*Second Note: You need to have DEC for this option, credits won't work I think.

Well, that's it for this week already and one more explainer post to add to my Tutorial Overview post you can always check if you want to learn something about splinterlands you don't yet understand.

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.

Also, when you require any help to get you started,let me know, I'm here to advice and guide new players and maybe I can help you with card delegations too!

Have a great day!