First of all I would like to say is that the quality of your deck affects not only how high you will be able to move up in Splinterlands game ranking and how much SPS and Glint rewards you will get, but also how much fun you will have playing the game.
The higher level your cards are and the more extensive your card collection becomes the more fun you will have playing Splinterlands.
Yes it would be fun to have every single card in the game, but that will cost you! Another important thing to understand is that not all cards can be used in Modern League. Modern league is for humans only and at this time the SPS rewards are higher.
So if we focused on just modern league we also have to keep in mind that card editions rotate out of Modern into Wild league. Right now the best value could be found in Chaos Legion card edition:
The entire maxed out core set will cost you about $616, but you don't need the entire set there are weak cards in this set that you can do without and you can spend less than $600 on the Core Chaos Legion Set:
In addition to the Core Chaos Set there is also Rewards Chaos Legion Set. These are powerful cards, but once again you don't need all of them so you might be able to get this set at a maximum level for under $100:
So the Entire Chaos Legion Set could be acquired for about $700. This would give you a very strong card collection that in my opinion is the best value in the game. There is one word of caution though: This set is scheduled to rotate out of Modern League into the Wild League in April of 2025 or so. So if you were to rely on this set you would not be able to play in the highest SPS rewards league in about half a year. Also, some people believe that the set value might drop even further due to diminished utility of the set since it can no longer be used to earn SPS in Modern League.
BTW, you can see these set values at: Splinter Cards Website
Another set like that that is a decent value and will rotate out of Modern into Wild is Riftwatchers mini-set:
As you can see the Riftwatchers mini-set contains less cards but is more expensive. That is because Chaos Legion set was severely overprinted during the last crypto bull run, but the mini-set is a much more rare set. Unless you have extra cash to spend I wouldn't buy this set at all or pick just a few key cards from it. In my opinion the best cards from this set are:
There are more key cards, but those are a bit too expensive for the set that might get rotated out of Modern League in about half a year...
If I were to get into Splinterlands as a new player I would buy Chaos Legion Core and Rewards sets for $700 and would have fun for half a year and decide if I want to stay in Modern and buy Rebellion and the coming new set or switch over to the Wild League.
Going for a Modern League set would cost you though almost $7,000 or ten times more than Chaos Legion Core and Reward sets combined. Granted you will be able to play in Modern League for two to three years if you buy a Rebellion set, but that is still a steep price to pay:
You could also buy Rebellion packs from the store as there are 812,074 packs remaining at this time, but that would cost you $16,000 for 4000 packs which would probably get you a maxed out Rebellion set:
You could also save some money by paying in DEC which is currently bellow it's peg of 1000 to a $1 and is at about 17% discount:
This would result in about $13,280 for four thousand packs. You could also buy these packs on a secondary market ( Hive Engine ) and might be able to get a deal. Here is the latest Ask and Bid prices for them:
But regardless of where you buy these packs I believe buying individual maxed out cards on a secondary market is a better value than gambling on packs. With packs you might get lucky with lots of golden legendary cards or you might get really unlucky.
When buying individual cards here are some of my tips:
Maxed out Cards tend to be a better value as they offer lower BCX value. For example if you were to buy a great Possibilus the Wise summoner you would pay $2.41 per BCX and 11 BCX are required for the max level card and the cheapest 1 BCX card is at $5 which is more than double the cost and would cost you $55 instead of $26.50 to max out:
If you are not in a hurry place bids to buy cards on Peak Monsters
The maxed out card bid is $2.101 per BCX:
You don't have to buy maxed out cards, you can also decide on a level of cards you want to level up to based on abilities of each of the individual cards, but it might put you at a disadvantage as most a lot of people own maxed out Chaos Legion set.
But you can decide to level your cards up to Silver or Gold level which would make the prices for the cards much lower. The downside is that when you want to upgrade to the max level the combined price might not be the best deal.
If you wonder what is the best way to get involved you can use my link to begin your Splinterlands and HIVE journey.
