Good morning everyone! It's a Saturday early morning for me and it's still dark outside, a perfect time to start another Splinterlands Challenge to hopefully earn some rewards so I can expand my deck, and - also important, inform new players on the how and why!
Over the years I made a ton of tutorial posts like this one about the very basics of this awesome game, it can be a bit out dated but in general it's still the same, if you're a new player reading this and would like some personal help, leave me a comment and I'll guide you and help where I can.

My guild 'Non Fungible Gaming' (well, it's not MY guild but I'm leading the Splinterlands part of a broader web3 guild) even has a secondary splinterlands guild to help new players get started in a guild as well because the community aspect is what gives it that extra dimension, being able to help each other out and share your awesome rewards and wins with!

This weeks Community Engagement Challenge once again asks us to make a support article, so that's right up my alley!
To find out how you can participate in the challenge yourself,check out the splinterlands post here. I really recommend doing so to help fund your deck, and while it might not be easy at the start, you'll get better at it and start snowballing your account this way.

So, this week the topic is 'Tournaments', so let's start with the basics.

The 'what'?

What is a tournament and what does it looks like in Splinterlands you might wonder, as a starting player, you might have battled a few matches in ranked play, it's where you land when you click this nice button of course!

Tournaments are battles you play the same way as you will get in ranked play, it's a cool way once you used up all your battle energy to play some more if you want and, when you have some skills it can also earn you some extra SPS, more SPS means more earnings, again - starting the snowball to roll and get bigger and bigger.

When you are starting in the lower levels like Bronze and Silver, you should know in tournaments you will get combined rulesets more than in lower leagues, but in my opinion that just means more fun, you can consider every battle, with the combined rulesets, available splinterlands and mana cap as a puzzle, the player who comes up with the best solution wins.

The 'why'?

Well, the why I already answered in the section above already, but let's expand on this. In short, the answer is 'to have more fun and earn a little extra SPS when you perform well'.

Most tournaments will require a small entry fee, for example, the last tournament I completed I paid 50 DEC entry fee, at today's price that's 4 cents, a tournament is made up of 2 rounds, the top half promotes to the second round, the bottom half doesn't and the tournament stops for them.

I made it to the second round and ended up on place 46, earning 53.3 SPS for this tournament, at current price that's 44 cents, multiplying my entry fee 11 times 🙂.
And this was a Novice tournament, meaning we all play with level 1 cards so it's perfect for starting players as well!

The 'how'?

Ok, this one will be a bigger part! 😄

First, let's get to the tournament page, you can find it in the 'play' drop down menu on the top left of your screen.

The next page gives you an overview of the upcoming tournaments.

The 'rules' part is very important, this tells you the league (the maximum level cards are allowed) of the tournament as well as what card sets are allowed, you can read more about the different sets in this tutorial for new players.
So, the three icons in the 'rules' section always tells you: league / cards / sets.

When you hover over any icon, it tells you what the icon means:

So, for this tournament, the league cap is Diamond, meaning you will face max level players here so this isn't a tournament for starting players!

The second icon tells you what cards can be used, in this case only gold foil cards can be used, again this is not for starting players because you will need a lot of gold foil cards including the summoners.

Last, the third icon tells you what set may be used, in this case it's ONLY the Rebellion set, meaning if you don't own or rent Rebellion cards and you join the tournament, you can't do the battles and you will lose which would be a waste of time and money.

So, let's search in the list if there's a tournament that matches my deck, I don't want anything higher than gold level and I primarily have a Chaos Legion deck... But I'm also ok to join bronze or silver tournaments, every league is fun in it's own way.

Since I already joined all upcoming tournaments I'm interested in, I had to scroll down a bit 😁 but this is a good one for me!

So, as we can see this tournament will be held on October 30, and it's a ANYTIME tournament, meaning once the tournament starts, you will have 24 hours to submit your battles, I only join anytime tournaments, the other format is sit & go, meaning it will start as soon as enough participants have joined.
So, let's click the 'view' icon to get more details...

So this is a MODERN event, meaning at this time the two modern sets Chaos Legion and Rebellion can be used, under the 'modern event' tab, there's a list, I made a picture to better explain everything in the list 🙂

I meet all the requirements to join this tournament (if not, the SPS stake or Battle Power amount will be red) so let's join by clicking the green ENTER icon in the top right.

Hive Keychain will pop-up because you will need to authorize the payment of the 100 DEC entry fee, click CONFIRM.

And I'm in!

I'm having a tournament starting later today so I'll complete this post with active tournament screenshots later 😃

Ok.... a couple of hours later and I'm back, the tournament has started! When you login into your splinterlands account, you will get notified when it has in the top right corner:

Swiss Tournament !?

A Swiss tournament is similar to a Round-Robin tournament in that no players are eliminated. Every player will play every round, and the player with the highest number of points at the end of the tournament is the winner.

When you click it, then tournament window opens again and your active tournaments will be on top, displayed in RED means you still have to submit battles, displayed in GREEN means you're done and need to wait until the tournament is over or until the next round starts.

Click on the red tournament ENTER icon to get in the battle screen.

I can now see in the top right I still have 11 battles to submit and I have 21 hours left to do so, when I don't submit before the timer reaches 0, I will forfeit and all of my battles will be considered a loss.

When you click NEXT BATTLE a new battle screen appears just like you're used to when playing ranked matches

Like I said, the battles will often have multiple combined rulesets, like this battle has Weak Magic / Odd Ones Out / Silent Summoners.
Since this is not a battle explainer post I'll keep this part brief, magic is less effective because we have to go trough armor first, nevertheless magic can still be dangerous so I choose to use Iziar as a taunt combined with 2 armor repair monsters for when Iziar dies, War Pegasus will shatter the enemy tank armor to be able to quickly kill it hopefully.
When I'm done I click BATTLE, but because this tournament only just has started, my opponent didn't submit a team yet, so now I have to wait until my opponent does or until the tournament timer reaches 0.

Now I have to submit 10 more battles and then I'm done! 🙂 Wish me luck!

I hope you learned a thing or two, if you have any questions, let me know and also, when you need a guild we can use active members!

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.

Have a great day!