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Ladies and gentlemen, the time has come. The long awaited follow-up to Splinterlands launched yesterday and we're able to get our hands on it. So, what is Soulkeep? Is it worth investing in? Will it be as successful as Splinterlands? Let's dive right in and tackle those questions together.

First off, Soulkeep describes itself thusly:

Welcome to Soulkeep! This Tower Defense auto-battler allows you to strategically place towers, spells, and heroes in order to defeat the incoming hordes of fiends. This article can be used as a basic introduction to the story, concepts, and interface of Soulkeep.

To me, this is a very exciting prospect. Though I sold my account a few years ago I really enjoyed my time with Splinterlands. I've been watching and waiting to see what the next steps of this project would be and Soulkeep appears to me to have a variety of green flags.

• Experienced design team and developers behind the project with a proven winner under their belt.
• Tower-defense and auto-battlers are both two very popular genres. Much more popular then TCG games like Splinterlands.
• Soulkeep released with game play live. We already have leagues, a base set, tournaments to enter, and lots to explore.
• This is a game using established tokens like DEC and SPS. This is huge for me. I trust these tokens.
• Lastly, I always love joining a project on launch!

Upon logging into Soulkeep I was greeted with the following screen:

I was happy to see something to play right away and immediately jumped into the leagues!

When it comes to game play, Soulkeep already feel very dialed in. No reinventing the wheel here, it's a standard tower defender with unlockable towers, spells, and heroes. While this is not my favorite genre of all time I recognize it's one of the most popular game types on mobile and should have a much lower barrier to entry than a Trading Card Game like Splinterlands.

Within an hour of playing I knew that this was a game I was going to love and moved some BTC over to Hive Engine so I could start the process of purchasing in-game assets. Now, a few hundred dollars later I now own pretty much every card in the game and have a variety of them as GOLDs!

When you get into a game this early you get in before the market is able to understand how good the individual game items are. This makes giving them an accurate price impossible and, at this point, all the prices might as well be picked out of a hat. Seeing a brand new cryptogame by a proven developer launch with all of it's (non-gold) assets less than $175 is fairly unheard of.

This meant I could get all set up on the cheap and I didn't miss the opportunity.

Cards are mostly less than $5 so I bought damn near all of them. The only hero in the game is Celene, who you can only get from the airdrop. There are about 10 of these on the market right now and, as she is the only hero, this has every indicator of a major item. With <10 on the market and a <$200 price tag she was a no brainier.

One of the things that a lot of players missed about the Gold cards in Splinterlands is how incredible of a deal they can be. Most people just hear that they are slightly shiner cards that provide you with a small fraction more income when you use them and decide to pass them up. I get that, the bonus is very small and they come with additional cost. Sometimes the math just ain't mathin'.

However, all gold cards come into the game at a higher level than their normal counterparts. This means that you'll never see level 1 gold cards unless they are very rare indeed. Very often players are checking the prices of level 3-4 gold cards against level 1-2 normal cards and not realizing that the shiner cards are a much better deal even before they pay extra income.

I used this to get started with a TON of gold cards in my Splinterlands account and that was a large part of the reason why I was able to sell it for 10x what I paid for it. Now as I get established in Soulkeep I'm using that very same opportunity! Will I be able to turn a few hundred dollars in NFTs into a few thousands dollars in BTC again? Well, I am betting on myself and have put my money where my mouth is.

You should join me on this adventure! And if you enjoy cryptogaming like I do what not join the CryptoVillains, a group devoted the the subject I run. We are a lean group at the moment but are chatting and writing articles daily about our ascent to the top of the Play2Earn gaming scene.

Join our PeakD community here: C-Vil - PeakD

Join our Discord community here: C-'Ville' - Discord)