After about a month, I'm back with another article where I write about my journey playing Splinterlands! I had gone on a three week trip, where I thought I'd be bringing my computer. But, after some last minute packing panic from my wife, we ended up leaving it home. Which really worked out in the end, as she ended up crashing my car on the drive back, but at least my computer is fine. We are fine too; though the car, not so much.
As it's been a while, quite a few changes have happened since last time I wrote. The random draws were removed and replaced with jackpot chests, which are similar to the old quest reward chests in that you can find merits, potions, or cards. New to these chests are energy and a small chance of getting a pack, title, or plot as a jackpot prize.
They are technically called Loot chests, but people do often call them jackpot chests.
The land liquidity pool was also released, though they're referring to it as the Trade Hub. After about a month, there's about 1.5 billion grain and 23 million Dark Energy Crystals (DEC) in the pool. Until there's a larger use for grain, it's heavily going to be a dumping ground for it. The Lorkus conflict ended, and as usual I didn't get lucky enough to get a copy. But, the new conflict has begun for a new Water & Death summoner, Cryptic.
Cryptic is going to add a new ability, Expose, which removes Immunity or other abilities on hit. It's meant to be a counter to Immunity, but to not make it so narrow it will also remove other things as well. I don't expect I will get an airdrop copy from the conflicts, but maybe I'll open some packs to try to get one later on.
The other major update to the game was the land Prefix titles being added. These give a bonus to ranked rewards and are mostly tied to land ownership or land leaderboard positions. I own enough plots to get the 5% bonus on my main account, not that plots are all that expensive right now.
There have also been a host of smaller changes such as new animated backgrounds on the main battle history page, the settings page getting redesigned, an overhaul of the tactics display for Lorkus to fit properly, Coinbase now being accepted for spellbook purchases, potion use being moved to a checkbox when opening draws, and a ton of minor corrections and tweaks to the site. I'm not sure where the people in Discord who complain nothing is happening are looking, but I guess they're just not happy about what is getting done and what hasn't gotten done yet. Anyhow, it's been a few weeks, so lots of updates!
The Rest
I'm skipping Brawls, because I didn't copy down that happened over quite a few of them now. It has been a couple of seasons since last time I wrote, and in general I've finished in Champion III in Wild format with both of my accounts. I usually played into Silver II in Modern format just for kicks.
The first season, I opened up 20 of the new Ultimate chests, hoping for a jackpot:
A lot more energy than I wanted, and potions. The merits were nice though.
I then opened up 2 groups of 10 later in the season/next season:
Still more energy and potions than I would like.
I would have preferred more cards.
I'm thinking I should buy more of the cheaper chests, since they have a lower chance of energy. I actually would like more cards to try to finish out this set, especially since they removed the random draws. I'm also debating if I should try to save up for buying a title out of the Glint shop, but I've been bad about holding onto Glint.
That's about all I wanted to touch on for now. It's been a while, so I probably forgot a lot over the past month that I had meant to write about at one point or another. Hopefully I can get back into posting these weekly again! Thanks for reading, and I'll be back next week with another article!