Welcome to another article where I write about my journey playing Splinterlands! Once again, I missed out on doing a mid-season update due to my busy work schedule. A lot has happened since the past end of season, as the big update with the new reward cards and unlocking of Chaos Legion soulbound reward cards has arrived!
Rather than copy the entire new set here, I'll just link to another player-written article that listed then as they were released by various streamers. There's a lot to cover from the update and Town Hall that happened, but I will note that the general consensus seems to be that the epic Olivia Of The Brook is likely to be the strongest of the new reward cards. She gets the new Mimic ability, which copies abilities from the enemy team and can lead to her being incredibly powerful.
While it definitely got overshadowed by larger changes, a new player quest was added that rewards Glint, hopefully making a better new player introduction to the game. Eternal Tofu, the 7th Rebellion airdrop summoner, got buffer prior to release with getting Thorns added as an ability, which may make him one of the stronger summoners from that set. Also, the 8th Rebellion airdrop summoner was added to the game:
He seems decent, but not as strong as some of the other new summoners.
The first portion of the Voucher rework was also added during this last update, making them no longer able to be transferred out of the game. During the town hall, it was stated that the rest of the changes: removing Vouchers from being used for discounts, adding a Voucher shop with a card only purchasable with Vouchers, and the addition of a Dark Energy Crystal (DEC)-Voucher liquidity pool to the game that should be out in the next update. They have also said that the first of the promo sales, per the passed proposal should be coming in the next update, at the start of September.
The big news from the Town Hall is that the company has changed course on releasing a mini-set for Rebellion. They had previously said that there would not be one, but there will now be one before the end of the year - going back to the regular cycle for card sets. If they were to release the next main set early, it would have triggered Modern format cycling to Rebellion + that new set only. I feel pretty safe in saying that the majority of current Modern players are using Chaos Legion, which is due to rotate out at the next main set release.
The team also confirmed that they would honor the passed proposal to make the Rebellion reward set unlockable while still in print, but didn't have time to code that before the set released. It will be double the (already hefty) unlock fee for Chaos Legion reward cards. While there was a lot of complaint about the 10X collection power unlock cost, with it only being a day out from the update at the time of this writing about 40 Million DEC have been burned to unlock cards.
Speaking of the end of season, right before I decided to try to fill out my Chaos Legion reward set a bit more and opened a large number of chests. I'm not going to put screenshots of the hundreds of chests I opened, but I was able to max out a few more rare and common cards. I had poor luck with legendary and epic cards, but I can now buy them at a fairly hefty price, if I so desire.
Part of my decision was influenced by a last minute notice that the prices of chests would be increasing. On the bright side, they massively increased the amount of Glint earned in lower leagues. This doesn't really impact my main account, unless I go back to Modern, but has been a big jump on the Glint earned per match on my alternate account.
The new Glint costs for reward chests.
While I am skipping the reward results, I'll share a couple of Chaos Legion pack chests - since I still have plenty that I picked up fairly inexpensively.
The first pack was decent with an epic card in addition to the minimum rare.
The second pack was pretty poor all around, with just the minimum single rare and none of the better common cards that I would like to see.
My plan for the upcoming season is to buy Major chests and epic draws for the new reward cards. If I get close to being leveled up on the epic cards, which is likely going to take quite a long time, I'll probably switch to legendary draws. Gambling on the Ultimate chests hasn't really ever paid off for me, and at the new pricing it seems like a really bad option.
Anyhow, that's a lot of what I wanted to touch on with this update. Thank you for reading! I'll try to be back next week with an actual mid-season update, but I've been hard pressed to get more than one article written per season of late.