Splinterlands - 6 Ways to Earn Free Cards + Bonus Tip
Splinterlands (aka Steem Monsters) is an online collectable trading card game (TCG) which runs on the Steem blockchain. Unlike similar games such as Hearthstone or Pokémon TCG Online, in Splinterlands each individual card is a digital asset in the form of a non-fungible token (NFT.) In other words, each card is owned by the player and cannot be taken away by the people who are running the Splinterlands game. You are free to buy and sell cards on the open market or even rent them out to earn a passive income.
The game costs just $10 to join, which gets you a starter pack of 30 cards sufficient to begin playing. There is no obligation to spend any more money after that initial ten bucks. Like any TCG you're going to want to regularly expand your collection beyond the first 30 cards if you want to stay competitive in the game. In this post I'd like to show you six ways you can grind out free cards right now. Also check out the bonus tip at the end!
Ready to play Splinterlands? Click Here to Sign Up!
1 - Daily Quests
By far the easiest way to regularly obtain new cards is to complete the Daily Quest. Currently the daily quest is always the same: Win five ranked battles with a particular splinter. So you might get Earth splinter or Life splinter, for example. You simply hit the Ranked button in the Battle page and pick a team from the appropriate splinter. After five wins like this you will be able to claim your reward. You will get free Reward cards depending on the rank you hold when you claim your reward. For example, I am currently in Gold III league so when I claimed my rewards today I got 6 free reward cards. As you can see from the screenshot above I got lucky and pulled 3 Common cards, 2 Rare cards, 0 Epic cards and 1 Legendary. I could sell that Legendary card on the market and it would get me enough money to buy about a dozen Common cards if I felt like that would benefit my collection.
2 - End of Season Rewards
If you go to the Battle page you will see a countdown clock showing you when the current season ends. Each season lasts two weeks. At the end of a season each player receives a number of free Reward Cards depending on the highest league they achieved during that season. You don't have to maintain your position in that rank. For example, I've unlocked Gold III league which entitles me to 22 reward cards at the end of the season. If I happen to lose a bunch of matches and drop down into Silver I league I will still get 22 reward cards at the end of the season. This is a great way to get a whole bunch of new cards twice every month.
3 - Win Cards in Contests
There are several contests every day which you can enter and win new cards. Most of these contests are hosted here on Steemit. You can look for contests by scrolling through the trending posts using the SteemMonsters hashtag:
https://steemit.com/trending/steemmonsters
You can also sometimes find contests running on YouTube. If you enter several contests per day you are bound to get a small trickle of extra free cards coming into your collection. Most of these contests will outright give you the card but sometimes you will win a delegation. If you win a delegation, someone will lend you a card or set of cards for a certain amount of time and then take the cards back. This can be useful to temporarily increase the strength of your deck. It often means that you will earn a higher rank than you could have gotten otherwise, which in turn means more daily and end-of-season reward cards. I have personally received about ten free cards as well as five delegated cards in the past few weeks. The five cards in the above image are owned by someone else but I am allowed to use them until the end of April. That will get me through the current season and the next. I hope to have upgraded my own cards enough during that time so that I don't miss the delegated ones as much when they go back to their owner.
4 - Affiliate Referrals
Splinterlands/Steem Monsters has an referral program which rewards users who sign up new players. This is tracked through the use of a referral link. You will earn 5% commission on every verified purchase your referral spends in the game, including the initial $10 starter pack. This commission gets paid out in the form of Steem cryptocurrency which will get sent to the Steem Wallet associated with your Splinterlands account. For each person buying the starter kit using your referral link you will earn about 50 cents worth of Steem. If someone that you referred decides to buy a $2 booster pack you will get 10 cents worth of Steem. If one of your referrals buys $200 worth of booster packs you will get $10 worth of Steem. Any rewards you earn through your affiliate link can be used to buy individual cards in the marketplace or booster packs from the shop. Of course you don't have to reinvest this revenue back into the game through buying cards. You can simply cash it out for your local currency on your preferred crypto exchange if that is your desire.
Use my Referral Link to Sign Up: https://steemmonsters.com?ref=jeremycrow
P.S. Sign up for Splinterlands (aka Steem Monsters) using my referral link above and leave a comment here letting me know. Once I have verified the referral I will send you five random common cards as a free gift. This offer will be valid until at least the end of April 2019. Contact me after that date and I will probably still honor the offer if you ask nicely. :)
5 - Tournaments
Every single day there are several tournaments running. The majority of these are free to join. The rewards vary but typically include free cards, booster packs and/or cryptocurrency. If you get cryptocurrency it is usually in the form of Steem, which you can easily use to buy new individual cards or booster packs. At this point there are usually about $250 worth of rewards to be won from tournaments every single day.
Today I got 16th place in a tournament and won 50 BATTLE tokens, which on the open market is currently worth about 1 STEEM. I could easily sell the token for Steem and then use that to buy cards. I could probably pick up around a dozen common cards for 1 Steem right now. However, if you hold 1000 BATTLE tokens in your account you will be eligible for additional rewards including a chance to win cards, booster packs and additional BATTLE tokens in a monthly raffle. I will have to weigh my options and decide which will provide a greater benefit. I'll probably keep the tokens for now.
6 - Write Articles On Steemit
When you sign up to Splinterlands/Steem Monsters you will automatically get a Steemit account. You can log into Steemit (or one of the alternate interfaces) and post blogs that will earn Steem cryptocurrency. This is how it works. First you make a post on Steemit, like the one you are currently reading. You will start to get upvotes on your post by people who enjoyed it. If you can promote your post on your Twitter, Facebook, etc... you will get more traffic to your post and potentially more upvotes. Seven days after you posted the article you will get paid out in cryptocurrency based on how many upvotes you got during that first week. You can then use that cryptocurrency to buy new cards.
One cool thing that Splinterlands/Steem Monsters will do for players is to give an upvote to posts made by registered users who post about the game. Right now that Splinterlands upvote will get you an extra 35 cents or so added to your reward. In order to claim this benefit you will need to make sure your post is actually about the game. Low quality or spam posts such as a simple screenshot with a one sentence caption or making the same identical post every time will get you blocked from using the benefit. You don't have to post something as elaborate as this guide but don't try to scam the system. Make sure to use steemmonsters as your first tag. Wait about 20 minutes after posting and then go into the official Steem Monsters Discord server: https://discord.gg/CAFJRjY [If you haven't visited this server before, make sure to go through the registration procedure. Someone there can help you with that.] Assuming you've successfully registered your account on the Discord server, go over to the #upvote channel and leave a comment using the following format:
$upvote https://steemit.com/steemmonsters/@username/title-of-article
You will replace the example link with the actual link of your new post. You can claim one upvote from Splinterlands/Steem Monsters every day and a half.
Bonus Tip - Dark Energy Crystals
Dark Energy Crystals (DEC) is the name of the upcoming in-game currency for Splinterlands. Once this is implemented you will earn DEC when you win battles in the game. You will be able to spend your accumulated DEC on all kinds of fun things in the Splinterlands shop. It hasn't been confirmed yet, but you will probably be able to buy booster packs with your DEC. Each booster pack contains 5 random cards. At least one of these cards is guaranteed to be Rare or better. You might be able to buy individual cards in the market with DEC as well, but again this isn't confirmed.
Ready to play Splinterlands? Click Here to Sign Up!
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Thanks for pointing that out! I've made the edit. Cheers!
I hope DEC will become a thing :D
Me too! I'm excited about it because then when I grind I'll actually be accumulating points to use on other stuff rather than just trying to climb the leaderboard.
Great stuff! Though the affiliate system has been laggy. My son bought his account through my ref-link and is not in my list. Maybe @clove71 has an idea on this.
Hi there! If you have an issue with any referrals you can go into the Discord channel there is a place here and tag yabapmatt in there too, he will help you. :-) #affiliate-support channel https://discord.gg/z2Ua6rA
That sucks. I currently have three referrals. I only knew two of them. I might have referrals that didn't register as well but there's no way that I could know.
Congratulations! This post has been upvoted from the communal account, @minnowsupport, by JeremyCrow from the Minnow Support Project. It's a witness project run by aggroed, ausbitbank, teamsteem, someguy123, neoxian, followbtcnews, and netuoso. The goal is to help Steemit grow by supporting Minnows. Please find us at the Peace, Abundance, and Liberty Network (PALnet) Discord Channel. It's a completely public and open space to all members of the Steemit community who voluntarily choose to be there.
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Hi @jeremycrow
As a follower of @haccolong this post has been upvoted by @hoaithu's Curation Trail with 20user.
This is free upvote first when you follow @haccolong
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I am a new player, I was satisfied and much clearer with your article, thank you for sharing it.
Awesome! I'm glad to hear that someone actually benefited from this. I put a lot of work into putting it together. I've done a couple of these longer guides to help beginners get a handle on the game. You might want to check out these too:
I did your referral link. Would it be possible to get those 5 free cards still. If not its okay i understand. Please and thank you