Hey there fellow Steemians and Splinterlands Players!

As this is my first post, let me just quickly introduce myself:

My name is Hendrik, my close friends usually call me Hedwig. You might get to know the full story of how that came about at a later point ;D

I'm 26 years young or old, however you want to see it. I'm working in the fields of IT-Security and focus on project management. Due to my father being computer affine, I've been tought and raised around computers since I was a little kid. I truly love my dad for showing me the realms of logic, information, creativity and fun that I call computers and the internet. There surely are also negative sides, but you'll learn to navigate around them in a caring and loving environment.

20 years later this evolved into a deep passion for crypto projects and the steem blockchain being only one of them, but definitely growing in interest with the addition of Splinterlands in 2018. I heard about it before but only decided to fund the Seedgerminator campaign after my friend @Nanadar @azaanwrites told me about it.

Initially, I planned to hold onto my BETA packs and trade them when they are depleted. But my curiousity was bigger..
So exactly one week ago I decided to send the packs over to my account. At first I only wanted to open 68 of the promo and beta packs. But after doing that and reading an article about the statistical advantage of opening packs with the Gold Potion, I decided to open the rest of them doing just that. My luck wasn't extra-ordinary but it wasn't too bad either.

If I remember correctly, this was a day before the season would end. So I decided to just test out my newly obtained cards and quickly fell in love with the game. After joining the discord I got to know members of this helpful community and decided to pursue a little progress and fun with this game.

On the last day and my second day of playing, I managed to get into Gold I, saving myself 30 cards + 5 bonus cards from a potion.

This literally was a last second gift and pretty dramatic fight beforehand. I was on a 3 fight winstreak that I managd to get in the last 4 minutes before the season ended. This fight started just 20 seconds before the season ended and was when @xbtj surrendered. I don't know him, but thank you anyways <3

I have recorded the pack openings and will share the videos at a later point, when I have time to finally edit them. But here is the winning screen. I was very proud :)

That gave me a lot of confidence and I wanted to try out the tournaments that are happening so frequently. So I joined everyone of them and practiced with my different decks until I thought I kind of figured out, what works for me. After some brutal knockouts from Champion players in Diamon Tourneys, I decided I stick to gold and below, with even gold being a tough challenge. But over the last few days I managed to place several times and earn atleast something worth-while for the time spent with the game (while my cards seemed to become more valuable with every day).

First, I managed to get a 3rd place in a Tournament:

Aaaaand just a day later this happened:

Celebrating my FIRST Tournament win!

The tournament was the "Win BATTLE Tokens!" that is hosted multiple times per week by @battlegames.

@byzantinist and me talked about it earlier. These are the best tourneys for people that want to start out. They usually have a novice-silver level cap, low entry fees and like in this case:

Every participant received atleast 25 BATTLE (~0.35$)

In my first round of playing (BO1) I met @foxm but managed to defeat him. The following rounds got tougher facing @rentmoney for three really close fights, followed by two amazing fights against @philippekiene

The final two fights were against @byzantinist, which I managed to decide for myself. And thus I managed to score my first tournament win exactly one week after starting to play.

I want to thank all the people that have helped me in the discord and especially my man @bittrio who helped me tons with his youtube channel. I loved to listen to your advice during the grind and it was an awesome experience that I want to repeat :)

Currently planning to regulary post and upload conent (also on youtube)

Until next time,
Hendrik ;)

P.S.: To all the US Steemians, Happy Independence Day!