I started playing and being engaged with the game in late 2021, a time of great excitement for many.

I've been away for several months and only recently I've come back and resumed playing on the daily.
Each new year is an important milestone so it's only natural for me to take stock of the current situation and evaluate things at this moment in time.

This is the gut-wrenching image that comes up when browsing the market.
As good a definition of impermanent loss as it gets, the chaos legion expansion did not do well at all.

Now, I did my fair share of mistakes managing my budget when I first got into the game and if I had to do it all over again I'd take a much longer time to understand the game I was engaging with as well as the broader ecosystem.

Given that premise, I still like to think I exercised caution in some way and took my time to increase my stake in the game slowly building up each splinter month by month and yet in spite of the slow approach most of my assets have decreased in price almost tenfold.

I remember most legendary summoners going for no less than 20$ per copy and even strong cards like Kelya being in the 2-3$ range for months.

This is, indeed, very tough.
Chaos legion was a huge misstep, the cards were printed in abundance with disregard to the true number of players.
The same mistake will likely not be made again to a similar extent going forward.

I still think there's value in the game and I hope the future expansions will do a much better job of retaining their price over time.

Now, I have at least a couple of choices in front of me.
I could either double down on chaos legion since it's so cheap and aim to fight in the Wild format in the future.
The other choice would be to focus on the new expansion and remain in modern, which is more likely to be my choice.

The rebellion

Most players have been familiar with the new cards for some time already but since I didn't open Splinterlands at all for months I've only recently gotten more familiar with the new rebellion set.

It's always an exciting time when such content is added and one can admire the artworks of the cards and explore the strategies.

Each splinter has brand new identities thanks to these summoners and many of them are quite exciting to play with.
Of course some are way more likely to do well in battle than others and that is reflected in their price with Eternal Tofu being by a large margin the more dominant.

There's many strategies I'd like to try. For now I've been focusing mostly on the death and fire splinters, supported by the Lorkus summoner as it seems a straightforward choice powerful in a wide range of settings.

In the past I enjoyed entirely owning my cards. We've seen how that did not work out so well for me with chaos legion, this time around I'd like to take an hybrid approach and own some cards while renting others.

After I round out my collection a bit I'd like to try and build decks based around either Avina, Elias Max Pruitt, Cryptic or underboss Fabino.

Notable changes to rewards

One of the most noticeable changes to the gameplay loop has been the introduction of the glint shop.

I definetely like this change. There's still a lot of randomness but you're at least able to target cards to some degree.

This change was done in conjunction with the introduction of the possibility of burning DEC to "unlock" soulbound cards and put them up for sale as well as do other activities with them.

@splinterlands/reward-cards-update

This is an old post where that is explained.

I'm not sure I wanna part with or even unlock my reward cards from the second split of chaos legion but I very much like the concept in principle.

Burning DEC is a necessity so it's nice to see a very straightforward sink for the currency in the form of "unlocking". I'm not sure how much unlocking I will do myself presently as there's a lot of assets to acquire but I'm definetely happy to buy previously unlocked rebellion reward cards and hold on to them.
I'm very curious to see if this system will be able to let reward cards retain their price, which is something chaos legion failed to do.

All in all, I'm happy about the vision for the game in this regard.
Some of the numbers could be changed and the thing could perhaps be polished in some ways but I very much value what seems to be the vision and the guiding principles behind this decisions.

Something is rotten in the state of Denmark

After what I hope was an overall positive take and endorsement of the direction that's been chose for the game lately.. let's now talk about the negatives.

There's only one thing that really bothers me about the current state of the game but it's quite major. It was in fact the only reason for me stopping playing altogether.

I talked about how from an economic point of view chaos legion was a massive failure for me and I'm sure many others are in the same boat however the money is only one of the components of this project.

What upset me was something that had nothing to do with the money directly but more so with the actual game.

It was the removal of all previous well established limitations around summoner levels and leagues.
It felt like an absurd change, a total slap in the face and a betrayal which ultimately made me quit.

I've made my peace with it and ultimately I've come back to the game because at a fundamental level I'm still invested and want to see it thrive and be part of it.

However giving players the ability to overpower each others in the lower leagues with cards from other leagues makes daily battles feel like a chore more than anything whereas they used to be an exciting moment where the playing field was more or less level.

One of the interesting aspects of Splinterlands I understood even early on was that unlike other crypto games the barrier to entry was quite small and there was a place for everybody.

People who only had a few dollars to spend and wanted to try the game could play in bronze.
Those who had budgets of thousands of dollars could play all the way in champion and diamond and ultimately there was quite a bit of nuance to this aspect and the game was made in such a way that it could accomodate all kinds of players.

Of course, there's a lot of moving parts and it's never been an easy task for the Splinterlands team to stir the ship, so to speak. However, for the life of me, I do not understand this change.
I would welcome anyone to reach out to me either directly or in the comments of my post and explain to me why this change regarding the lower leagues was such a necessity.

But regardless of the reasons, to me this is a dangerous precedent.
Something that alters the game experience in a massive way, totally umprompted and made without warning.
It hugely affected my confidence in the project and ultimately it makes me question in what way I should allocate my funds for the game.

I think if this change won't be reverted soon the game will be much duller and more and more people will rely exclusively on renting cards instead of owning them and I'm not sure what other ramifications there could be in the future.

My advice for newcomers to the game would be to invest in SPS and stake it while renting high level chaos legion cards.

Personally I don't think I'll ever want to put more than a few hundreds of dollars per year into this game and I don't see anything changing that.

I'm afraid the game will become more and more of a gamble where each match will be decided by who has the highest summoner for the available splinters in a given match.

An incredibly sad regression from what the game once was.

I know I'm not the only one frustrated by this sudden change and yet I feel like there should be more clamor around this issue.
Similarly I know that not many people fully read these posts and only care about the rewards but I hope there was still some value, to some, for my words.

Moving on from this issue, let's look at what I've been doing now that I started playing Splinterlands again.

My first full season back in the game

This are my available summoners as of now, they're all from chaos legion and mostly around the silver level. My units are at the same level more or less, matching the respective summoners.

With such cards when I first got back I started facing some tough and unfair competition in the upper portions of the silver league. After renting some max level summoners myself I've been able to move back and forth between silver and gold, ultimately reaching Gold I and the main concern being the DEC used for the rentals.

I'm not sure wether or not i should further increase my rentals, focusing on strong key cards and try to push for diamond potentially in the next seasons or just be content with this kind of result.

This is the breakdown of my earnings for the season.
If I will make similar posts in the future I will try to also keep good track of my DEC expenditures for rentals. By my estimate, however, I earned comfortably more than what I spent so I can't be unhappy with the results.

Now, on the one hand I'm tempted to use the net profit of SPS to get more cards and keep getting stronger. At the same time I'm tempted to come in and buy more SPS in the future to extend how far I can go up the ladder.

My glint and SPS multipliers were, of course, quite pitiful up in the gold league as I never anticipated that I would play in it when I first planned how much I wanted to stake into the game.

I don't know how much the removal of the league "caps" affects this system as it wasn't too difficult even for me, a player with silver level summoners to eventually reach gold and advance there if I felt like it back in the day.
Which is to say I don't see this new system as the driver for this potential allure to buy SPS in order to progress up the leagues more easily. I'd much rather say that it's an effect of rentals for chaos legion being so cheap.

I don't see any justification for such a compromising change but I'd still love for people to weigh in if there's something I'm missing.

On the matter of SPS, expanding my thoughts further, it's very clear that there's still a lot of extraction and sell pressure going on as it is now the only asset that people have to show for their efforts in the game. Unlocked reward cards are a bit different in that sense.
Once the virtuos cycle of burning starts things might be different but it's clear that we're not there quite yet.

Who knows how long the days of 0,01$ SPS will last and how we'll look back on them.

Anyway, I'd like to lastly share my progress in collecting the cards of the rebellion set.

After one full season this was my progress with the commons, almost all of them at level 3.
There's a few such as the broken earth thug and the halaran huntress that I've used from time to time. On the whole, however my cards are still quite weak and overshadowed by the easily available cards from chaos legion in their max level forms.

Similarly this was my progress with the rare reward cards. With the exception of chaos adjutant they're all quite interesting and even though they're only level 2 for now I hope that within two or three seasons of playing I will be able to bring them all up at level 4 and use them in guild brawls, the only part of the game that is not affected by this max level summoners sheananigans where the game can be still enjoyed in its purest form.

My main focus in the glint shop has been the common and the rares as they're all quite strong and needed in many battles.

Short on glint, I've come with some additional outside money to get at least a couple of the epics.
I focused on the ones that seemed cooler first but they all have their merits, boosting entirely unique abilities not showcased in other cards from the set.

I'm not sure if I will focus a lot on the legendaries as they seem quite pricy but they vary hugely in how impactful they can be.

Finally, these are the cards I bought from the core rebellion set. They're all quite impactful and even though I don't need them now for daily battles I will surely use them once chaos legion won't be available in modern.

Lots of things to look forward to!