It has been only 4 days since @steemmonsters opened the gates of the arena, starting the madness that took over 2000 Steemians and counting. I only found out about it a day later so I had to catch up. The first day I played 15 hours straight. Woke up the other day, can you guess what I did for the rest of the day? Yes, another 15 hours of SteemMonsters 500+ matches in total now! I think that I need help.
_{Please, save me.}

What's all the fuss about? Some might ask themselves. Well, we are fighting for honor, for reputation. Battlin' away to get to the top so that when we finally get there, a Silvershield Paladin will forever engrave our nicnkames, deep into the fabric of the STEEM blockchain with his six foot long sword. And win some booster packs, of course. This is the key part of why we battle.

We've already spent all of our STEEM/SBD on cards.

Now poor, (thanks @steemmonsters), we have to grind our way up the ladder to get some free booster packs :D and the eternal honor of course.

At press time, I'm @ the 70th place with 1700 rating. I've hit a plateau that I can't get over at this point of time with the level of cards I have. I can barely move forward a couple of places now but the goal is to get to 1900 rating for 5 free booster packs. Thanks to people like @therealwolf and @abh12345 who have traditionally been kicking my ass, this will be a bit harder than necessary. They have been owning me to the point where I'm at now. Which is that whenever I see that I got matched with one of them, I just skip over the gameplay as I don't want to have to go through the pain of watching them destroy me, again. They are obviously not the only ones who I skip. There are many more.
_{Thanks guys!}

The reason its hard to move up the laddet and why some players keep beating me is that, they either play a set of monsters that counteract mine, or they just have higher level monsters. Which gives them extra abilities that are very hard to play against with lower level monsters.

There are a couple of players, @rondras, @hersnz and @holger80 for example, which mostly play the exact same set as I do but are much higher in rating. All of their cards are of course, a level, or two higher than mine which means that I can't beat them. Because of that, they are firmly standing at around 2000 rating while I'm strugglin' at 1.7k. That's a big difference for just a couple of leveled up cards.

Why dont you just level up your cards then?

I've already spent more than 100 STEEM

To level up my monsters to this point. I can't afford to buy any more cards. I hold multiple contests giving out more than 80 STEEM a month. Spending any more on @steemmonsters I wouldn't have the funds to pay out rewards for the contests.... I can't make new STEEM as fast as I can spend it on new cards. It's frustrating, as I'm stuck at 1.6k and I could easily be at least 2k if I leveled up a couple of cards. But, that would cost me around 50 STEEM which I dont have QQ.

Peak into the gameplay

Although everything is on auto-pilot at this point (this will change in the future), it's very interesting to see the game mechanics in action and learn the capabilities the monsters you own. I'll go in great detail about this in my future posts and videos on SteemMonsters.

I'm currently playing with the Death class

Lead by the great warlock, Zintar Mortalis. This has its advantages and drawbacks but generally, I feel like I'm going to play only Zintar this season. Mostly because of my other summoners and cards beeing of lower level. Meaning that I probably wouldn't be able to get past 1.5k in rating. Thus, I'll concentrate solely on leveling up the Death class this season and move to another class when the next season begins.

The Goal

Is to get to Gold, or 1.9k+ rating for 5 booster packs reward at the end of the season. As soon as I get there, I'll stop playing because there is no point in trying to reach a higher rank, when it's not possible. I can't go any further than that with the lvl of cards I play with. It's just not possible vs people who have higher lvl cards.

I won't go into further detail about the game to preserve the length of this post, which is already longer than I would like it to be. I'll write up a dedicated article tomorrow, or the day after where I'll explain how the game works, the mechanics, cards, summoners and all the other good stuff. If that's something you might find useful, keep an eye on my blog in the next couple of days.

Can't stop playing

What's most addictive about this game is the eternal glory, the chance of your name being forever engraved in the blockcain. Ever since I played the first match, I just couldn't stop. With 500+ matches under my belt in just two days of playing the game, 20h+ game time, one could say that I'm a Monster Addict. I wouldn't disagree. I'm afraid of how it will develop in the future. I have a tendency of allowing games to take over my life. For example, when I first started playing WoW I liked it so much that I didn't stop playing it for 3 years. In that time I managed to gather 550+ days of GameTime accross all of the characters I played. Do the math and see how much that equals to per day. INSANE!

I'm afraid the same will happen with SteemMonsters.

I'm even playing now, as I'm writing this post. Can't stop and I know that I'm not the only one. I've seen players with 700+ games already. That's one of the reasons I know that SteemMonsters will be extremely successful in the near future. The game has just started and the whole Steem community is already crazy about it. I can only try to imagine how many new people will start palying it in the next couple of years.

AMA or lose your mind

Anonymus Monster Addicts is something that we need right now. Before our addiction spirals out of control. We need a support group of equally insane people who can't stop playing the game and a couple of psychotherapists that would run a discord server and offers 24/7 support to grown ups who can't stop palying this, extremely addictive card game. Someone to reasons us back to reality because, where we are at right now, is not a good place to be. No one of us has stopped playing for the last 4 days. My eyes are bleeding from being stuck to the monitor and my head is about to explode because I didn't sleep in days.

Players will soon start selling stuff to buy cards. Take loans and whatnot. It will be worse than a gambling addition.
_{Help us!}

You might consider my claims to be a bit over the top but, trust me when I say that they are not. You can't really understand the full extent of the issues I brought up, if you aren't a player yourself. We need help.
_Fast!

The madness has already taken over Steem and it has in such a short amount of time, managed to become one of the most popular, and definitely the most fun way of interacting with the Steem blockchain.

Find it hard to believe?

_{Check out these numbers}

Stats for the first 24 hours of the Monster Madness:

• 93,145 Transactions on the blockchain
• 17,730 Battles Have Happened
• 11,892 Market Sales
• $7,644.47 (USD) Sales Price
• 2,944 Booster Packs Sold (This includes 274 bonus packs)
• 25 Starter Packs Sold
  _Insane!

Take in consideration that this is just the first 24 hours of a game that has only been out for 4 days! It already shifted tides and shook Steem to its foundatioins. So much so, that the transactions made on SteemMonsters in the first 24h equaled to 10% of all activity on the Steem blockchain!

The future couldn't be any brighter for SteemMonsters

One can only imagine what the numbers SteemMonsters will be raking in a year, when the game develops into something much different than what we are seeing now. Don't forget that this is just the beginning of something magical. The game will change and improve by a great deal, fast. Development is here, the team is strong and willing to put in the necessary hours to pull this off. What you are seeing now is just a testing phase. A way to pull data and battletest the monsters to recognize potential weaknesses and imbalances they might have. And modify them accordingly.

Expect the game to improve a lot and the monsters to change in their power and abilities in the near future.

Don't get attatched to any of them because they might get nerfed out of usability.

Play the game, test the monsters you have, buy some on the market, build a good team, increase your rank and win some booster packs!

PRO TIP: Don't buy too many booster packs but find out who want to play with and buy only those cards in the market. It will end up costing you much less and your monsters will end up higher level. I bought 160 booster packs in total which got most of my monsters to level 2-4. If you want to play in the 1600+ rank and actually win, your monsters must be lvl 6 or higher. Better find the best team and buy them up on the market instead of counting on getting them from booster packs.

You will end up saving a ton of money on building your dream team!
_{Thank me later.}

Cya in the Arena!