First of all congratulations if you are a brand new player to The Splinterlands. You have found perhaps the best kept secret in value for crypto gaming.
The community you are becoming a part of will shock you at how helpful and useful many people have become over the course of almost three years now.
Second, if you are brand new there is definitely a lot of strategy and plotting that goes into building your deck of cards that you wish to compete and hopefully start winning with fairly quickly. I think that a brand new, never played the game newbie that is not completely sure you are a "full blown Splinterlands junkie..." (at least yet) there is a strategy that I would employ to get the best bang for my buck earlier on.
*Ideally starting off with an account you will want to stock it with at least one Level 3 rare summoner, likely from the Beta edition (unless Alpha is the same price then get Alphas they net more rewards over time, but that not very common).
*A level 3 rare summoner of a given splinter allows you to play that splinter (or color) in a match that has that open for an eligible summoner in the match rules that pop up every time for every given match. You also are allowed to play Neutral (gray) cards with that summoner if they are eligible in the given rule set.
Your Level 3 Rare Summoner will allow card classes at the following levels to be played within that splinter and (perhaps) Neutrals as well..
-Up to level 4 commons
-Up to level 3 rares
-Up to level 2 epics
-Up to level 2 legendary cards
When putting together this deck it would be wise to scan through the gold foil commons and rares because quite often these cards can be rented for $0.001/per day, which is the minimum price for any rental per day, which would net you more rewards if they are the same price as a regular or non-gold foil level 4 common you are looking at renting, for example. Some commons are more expensive than that so if you want to pinch pennies it may be wise to get the regular card for 0.001/per day rather than say 0.004, which of course adds up over time.
Each splinter group you chose to play and rent you should consider that you will likely want at least 10 or more different cards from this splinter to be at all competitive. If you really want to gain a competitive advantage obtaining more of the cards that are rare, epic and especially legendary can help you advance more fast from the bottom Novice Level, through the Bronze Levels, and perhaps eventually to the Silver Levels (1-3) and maybe even higher.
If playing your first deck, for the very first time, I would consider playing three different splinters, as well as the Dragon Splinter (purple) splinters. To make this size of deck competitive you will likely be spending 3-5 cents per day, per splinter at these levels mentioned above. So with the three traditional splinters, plus the Dragon, and plus some helpful Neutral cards you will be looking at between 12 cents/day to 25 cents if you went for a higher percentage of the eligible cards you can play, and of course that number can keep going up if you choose to play with a large percentage of all eligible cards that have ever been printed.
To start I would take it easy, renting less of a dollar amount, more of the commons, then work your way up to using more rares, epics, and perhaps even legendary cards as you get better and understand the game. This should not take too terribly long, especially if you are watching the matches and seeing what all of your and your opponent's cards are doing.
An important factor to remember when renting is that at the moment to pay for your rental cards you need hive tokens, hive based dollars (HBD), steem tokens, or steem based dollars (SBD) to pay the person you are renting from. When you pull up your profile you will see a profile breakdown when click on "Profile" in the upper right corner where your screen name drag down menu is. Also, there is an escrow function within the current rental system. All this means to you as a renter is that you will want to keep enough credit value in the tokens mentioned above (based in dollar values). As we all know crypto can be volatile so it would be wise to check this often, at least daily and keep up to the amount of all rental amounts that are due over your rental time, otherwise you will lose the rental of the card, have to pay the person you rented from the escrow amount, then have to start over with that card again if you want to rent it.
This is quite infuriating and labor intensive as current rental options go for players (but this system is being tweaked and being even further improved at some point from peakmonsters.com-which is stellar and quite exciting for all of us!).
For example, if you have $3.50 in rental costs due when all of your rental cards and periods are up, then as long as you have the current amount that is showing then you will have enough to cover the costs as your current pace is going assuming no rentals are added, removed, or the crypto you are renting in does not lose any dollar value of your balance.
So if you have $1 in value deposited to your rental account, then you will surely default at some point if you don't add to your balance. If your daily rental costs are at say $0.25, then you would have up to four days to add to your balance or you will lose all of the cards you rented and have to pay the escrow amounts (if there is any escrow amount to rent the cards).
As a rule to be safe, if you must fund the rental account with less than what is eventually due on all of your rentals, then keep at least ten times your daily rental fee at the moment. That will give you some room if the crypto drops in value and will help immensely in AVOIDANCE OF ALL your rentals default and your losing your cards you rented, having to do it all over again.
The current time at the time of this post anyways, is a "sweet spot" to get started within the game due to a few new factors that are becoming apparent and what is coming down the road.
First, the game's cards are at max exposure in being utilized as opposed to what they will be when much, much, much more cards and summoners will be needed for working the land expansion that is planned to be released in the latter part of 2021. Card rentals will likely jump a lot as the need for cards will necessarily double to mine/craft on land that is available for purchase.
Second, there are many new players coming to the game as entry level players similar to what you may feel the position you are in. The card prints allow for more players to play, but eventually card print populations will get much tighter for those that are holding excessive amounts of cards, say to play one deck at a time. In fact, many seasoned players and those that have been long to the game play more than one deck due to their ability to acquire cards over time and catching them as they have dropped in price to purchase. So always pay attention for when a card may seem "cheap" at the time, because it doesn't last forever, at least it hasn't up until this point.
Thanks for giving this post a read and feel free to comment and ask questions I will work as hard as I can to better explain anything within this content that will be of help to any player at any level.
Good post Crypt! Very well said and you cover a lot of ground! A good thing for all newbies to consider and a helpful guide to renting too!
When the new peak rentals come out, you should definitely give a tutorial on it. People will find that useful too :)