Welcome to another article where I write about my journey playing Splinterlands! The biggest news is that the tower defense game, Soulkeep, finally released. It's about a year past when it was originally supposed to come out, and it has been unclear what the reason for the delay was. It is also no longer owned by the Splinterlands company, but the game's functionality still seems to heavily rely on the Splinterlands site.
The gameplay seems fairly similar to what was shown a year ago, with the main difference being that there is now primarily a single tournament each day where you try to get the most points for a spot on the game's leaderboard, which rewards Splintershards (SPS) as prizes. There's a campaign of sorts as well, that you need to progress in to move to higher tournament leagues. To advance the campaign you need to spend "souls" earned from playing the game to unlock each segment.
The release has been a little rocky. I was going to post a screenshot of the game, but it's down at the time of this writing.
You can play the first section of the campaign without owning cards, but then you are stuck as you need to own cards to play in the tournaments in order to unlock later sections of the campaign. I bought a handful of packs, which means I can play the game. Though, it seems like a couple of specific, now very expensive, cards are overpowered and necessary to get to the top of the leaderboard.
The cards were initially fairly expensive across the board, but most of the more balanced cards have been plummeting in price as people continually try to undercut one another. This has typically been the story for most things in the game, as trading bots will work to undercut one another until prices are near the burn value for cards. On the plus side, the game release has seems to have generated some interest from the community, as the Soulkeep channel has been one of the most active ones in Discord.
For Splinterlands news, the Tournament section was moved to the new client, although it came with a lot of issues that they have been patching since the move over of that page. There were a lot of other little fixes and quality of life changes. One change that I particularly like was making it very clear what you are doing when trying to combine or burn cards.
As always, you can read the full release notes on the site.
The season did also end recently. I finished in Champion III in Wild on my main account, and Silver III in Modern on my alternate account. I haven't spent any Glint on my main account, as I am still debating trying to save up for a title. I did buy 10 Major chests on my alternate account.
Hitting a legendary card was pretty lucky with this few chests.
I did open a couple of Chaos Legion packs that I had picked up since they are so cheap now:
Though, nothing that exciting out of the packs. Deeplurker might be the best card out of the whole group.
Playing in Modern with my alternate account's Silver-level cards is not that much fun. Rarely do matches feel competitive. I am usually rolling over opponents with Bronze-level cards, or getting thrashed by people with max level cards at the high end of Bronze league, or the low end of Silver league. Playing in Wild on my main is more enjoyable, granted I do actually have a lot of higher level cards there and feel like my hovering around the high end of Diamond to the low end of Champion 'feels' about right.
There isn't a lot of feeling of advancement. Part of that is because I'm saving Glint on my main account, but the amount I'm earning on my alternate account is only enough for a handful of chests per season. I'm generally disappointed when I hit energy, rather than anything else.
That is about it for this week. For any U.S. readers, Happy 4th of July! And, to everyone, thank you for reading!