Tournaments - Why?

Good morning everyone!

The theme of this week’s community challenge is tournaments. There isn’t much new to say about how they work, and I already read quite a few interesting articles that explain most of the mechanics.
Tournaments Reloaded This is a random article I personally liked, there are many others that you can find here in the comments section: Community Challenge - Tournaments

Right now, most Tournaments are 24h (meaning you can send in your teams anytime within 24h), and sponsored by the DAO/sps.tournaments. You can get decent returns on your investment, and so on. For example this one by @vaynard86 : - and make sure to follow the @splinterlands account, many useful information there.

But besides the ROI, why play tournaments? To get better. Both tournaments and brawls are the places where you can actually measure yourself against players that have the same restrictions. In Modern you frequently battle against higher levels, and in Wild against Bots. If you get into a tournament or a brawl, you have level restrictions (at it was before in Modern and Wild, but that’s long gone, unfortunately in my opinion) – if you join a Novice tournament, everyone will have novice cards, even the first ranking player. There will be no level 2 card.

Every bruise is a learning experience

That means, you can learn a lot, and in a more competitive environment than challenges. (Still, I always recommend joining the SBT channel on Discord and trying out ideas and strategies in challenges.) If you lose all your battles, you might not get your investment back – sure, but given the average amount of players, that is not likely. Usually, enough of them forget to send their teams for us to get a rewarding position. Or we just get lucky at least once – my worst performance was a 3 wins/8 lost battles, and I still got my investment back – not more, though. And a lot of new strategies and card combinations.

Learn about cards

Playing tournaments means you will meet a lot of combinations of cards and strategies – take your time and analyze your battles, especially the lost ones, in order to get better. I found out so many things about different cards just playing tournaments, it still amazes me. After getting beaten up my Kron the Undying many, many times in wild novice, I studied the card and finally bought it myself – and started using it to win. There are some OP cards that I still don’t own, but I will eventually, and get better.

Don’t join tournaments that you don’t have the cards for

It’s devastating to get beaten up, and is no fun. Don’t get distracted by the higher prices, even if you have the power to play – make sure that you actually have a set for it. Just having enough power doesn’t mean you will able to compete. For example, I joined a silver league tournament for Rebellion only, since I have a few really good cards on silver level – but I forgot that I didn’t have the summoners in Rebellion set. Don’t repeat my mistake! :-D

So far for now! I'm probably goint to post a few more reasons "Why?" in a couple of days, since there are more :-)

Have a wonderful day!