Hey everyone I hope you're having a great start of the year and welcome back to my Splinterlands blog, it's time to make another Splinterlands post to hopefully get some upvotes so I can invest this in to my deck,or maybe buy more SPS with! 🤑

This weeks Community Engagement Challenge is about making another support article, I made a lot of them in the past and I like making them, I keep an overview of all my explainer posts here for new players to dive in to and help the players in my guild, this way I don't have to explain the same thing to every new player who joins but I can just reference to the article explaining everything in detail. 😃

This weeks challenge:

Challenge Theme: A Guide to Increasing Card Levels by Combining Cards
Combining cards to increase their levels is a key strategy for maximizing their effectiveness in battle. This week, we invite the community to share their knowledge by creating comprehensive guides on this essential feature.

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

It's a great topic for making another guide so let's go!

Card rarities

Before I can get to the most important part of building your deck, I need to explain the different card rarities, in splinterlands we have four different rarities:

• common, displayed in grey
• rare, displayed in blue
• epic, displayed in purple
• legendary, displayed in yellow

I don't want to over complicate things so for this post I will just focus on the modern cards, at this moment it's Chaos Legion and Rebellion cards, every set looks a bit different, the left card on the image below is a Chaos Legion card, the right one is a Rebellion card.
I encircled the location where the rarity is displayed in the color I mentioned above, it's grey so now you know, you can see these are both common cards.

It's the same for other rarities, this icons in the image below are purple, so now we know these cards are epic.

In general, common cards are less expensive and less powerful than the higher rarity cards, but for a strong deck, you're going to need everything, the common and rare cards make the basis of your deck.

Now you know how you can SEE which rarity a card is, we're going to look at the differences, let's look at all the cards you have, you can go to your card collection by selecting 'items - cards' in the splinterlands menu on the top left part of your screen (this is on PC but it looks similar on a phone).

A new screen displays all cards you have, you can use filters to select what you're looking for, but again I'm trying to keep things simple so I'm just selecting one of the common cards, it doesn't matter which one for this purpose.

I picked the Venari Heatsmith for this example.

To go in to the card details, select the 'stats' tab.

Cards get stronger by combining them to level them up, every copy of a single card is called 1 BCX (Base Card eXperience) but I think the experience part is a bit misleading here, because it implies cards get experience by playing them and they level up this way, it's what I thought when I started playing - THEY DO NOT!

Every rarity has the same amount of cards needed to level it up, so for the common cards, it takes five single cards, or five BCX to combine them to a level two card, combining can't be reversed so think before doing this!

The list clearly shows how many cards you need for every level, for example when you want the Heatsmith to get the amplify ability, you're going to level it up to level six, combining 100 single copies from this card in to one level six.

Every rarity has the same amount of cards needed to level them up, so when we look at epic cards the same way you can see epics require a lot less cards to level them up, so you can see, low rarity means you're going to need a lot of cards to level them up, but at the same time, in general they are less expensive.

Higher rarity cards require less cards to combine but they are more expensive.

OK, now we understand this part, let's move on to the bottleneck of deck building, the most important cards in the game...

Summoners

In splinterlands, we have two card types, summoners and monsters, all with the rarities I explained above, in every battle you have to select ONE summoner and up to six monsters.

The summoners are the most important, I'll explain why:

Look at a summoner as the person who bring the cards to life on the battlefield, he or she summons your monsters, but a low level summoner can only summon low level cards!

Remember how we got in to the card menu? Select items - cards in the drop down menu, now scroll a bit down in the left screen until you see the 'summoners' tab and click on it, this will display any summoners you can use in battle.

Exactly like with the monsters, summoners come in all rarities, different rarity summoners require different amounts of cards for them to level up, and can summon different card levels on their level, so again, just select the summoner you like to use, and go to the 'stats' screen again.

Can you tell by looking at the card what rarity it is from what you learned so far?
The icon at the top is blue, meaning it's a rare summoner.

A level 1 summoner can only summon (or use) level 1 cards. So, even when you own a max level monster for this splinter, when you don't own a high enough leveled up summoner, you won't be able to use it at the highest level and it will just be lowered to the level your summoner is able to summon it at.

For example, if you mistakenly own a level six common card, but only have this summoner at level three, we can see in the list in the row behind the level 3, it's only able to summon a level 4 common, a level 3 rare, a level 2 epic and a level 2 legendary card.

Understand? 😁

So, when you start building your deck, it's important to start with the summoners, THEY decide what card levels you can use.

For starting players, it's best to start in the low levels, I recommend focusing on becoming a Bronze or Silver level player and see how it goes from there, also depending on your budget because they new sets are not cheap.

In the example above, Bronze means a level 3 summoner, Silver means a level 4 summoner, so, again... start with renting or buying summoners, and build from there, there's no point in renting or buying higher level cards if you only have a level 3 summoner.

Combining cards

So when we look at another card, in this case it's a summoner again, Dolfar Darflak we can see, to make a level 2 summoner, we're going to need five separate copies.

So, select the 'cards' tab again, in this list we can see I own seven copies for this card, I've selected five to combine it to a level 2.

This opens a new window, clearly telling you what's about to happen.

When I now select the 'combine', my five cards will be merged in to one level 2.

Keep in mind, this summoner is of a different rarity than my first example, Dolfar has a grey icon so it's a common summoner, when we look at 'stats' again, I can now see which card levels I can use in battle when I select this summoner.

Deck building

I think most players in the new Modern League, once Chaos Legion rotates out to Wild League will be active in Bronze and Silver league because it's not cheap to get past this point, and I think this is great, I've been a Silver player most of my Splinterlands carreer and had tons of fun before I upgraded to Gold and Eventually Diamond.
Because of these prices, I will become a Silver player again as well.

When you start building your deck, I think it is important to own 1 copy of at least every common and rare modern card out there, because more cards means more options in the battles we have, and having more options than our opponent does generally means we have a better chance in securing the win and with it, some juicy rewards!

after this, start looking at what epics and legendary cards will be key to strengthen your deck with, you can also do this by watching the battles and see which cards your opponents kick your ass with. 😅

When you have a nice deck at level 1, you can think about getting it to the next level, which brings us to the last topic for this post.

Prioritizing which cards to level to certain 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 40 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 $1.60 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 37 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!

Well that's it for this explainer, I hope this helps to get you started!

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!