Splinterlands Adding Soulbound Reward Cards

Splinterlands announced that at the end of this month (January), they will be introducing soulbound reward cards. This new reward set edition is associated with Chaos Legion (and thus usable in any ruleset that allows Chaos Legion cards), and consists of 43 cards.

Scheduled to launch on January 31st, this new reward set contains 37 monster cards, and six Summoners. One Summoner for each element except Neutral. Each element will have two new legendary cards, 1 epic, 2 rares, and 2 commons. These will replace the current reward cards when launched. Meaning that the current set of reward cards will no longer be printed, even if they haven’t completed their initially planned run!

Cards from this new set will be soulbound. They cannot be bought, sold, or traded, though players can still combine them to create higher level versions. However, once the sets stops their print run, Splinterlands will provide an option to stake DEC into the out of print rewards cards and make them into regular, tradeable cards.

This is a pretty huge change. And though it’s meant to encourage players to participate more in the game and work on building their collection instead of cashing out whenever they can, there is some concern that this may be another turn off for new players.

Loot Chest Changes

This advent of new reward cards also brings a couple of changes to loot chests. First off, Splinterlands will re-enable the ability to use potions to increase the chances of receiving better rewards from loot chests. Potions will only be consumed when a loot chest is opened that contains a reward card. So players won’t waste potions on chests with tokens or other items. Also, legendary potions will additionally increase the chance of receiving epic rarity cards, though only for reward loot chests (not for pack opening). And finally, there will also be a chance for reward chests to contain more than one copy of a card. This roll happens after the loot system generates the card. So there is a chance to receive multiple, gold foil legendaries in one chest!

Here are the new, planned distribution percentages (subject to change).

New Abilities

With this new set of Reward cards come a new Summoner ability and two new unit abilities.

The new Summoner ability is called Conscript. Conscript allows the player to use one additional Gladiator card in battle. Even in regular battles where Gladiator cards normally aren’t allowed! This is huge, as every Gladiator card comes with an ability called Bloodlust. Units with Bloodlust gain stats whenever they get a kill. Which can quickly result in that unit becoming an unstoppable Juggernaut. And since Conscript offers one extra Gladiator card slot in the battle, that means that Summoners with Conscript can use two Gladiator cards during Guild Brawls! This ability seems insanely powerful, but the Splinterlands team promises that the Summoner cost will reflect its power. But when you have battles with 50+ mana available, the Summoner cost often doesnt play a huge factor. We’ll see how it goes!

As for the unit abilities, they are Martyr and Weapons Training. Martyr units provide a +1 bonus to all stats for all adjacent ally units when they die. And yes, this can trigger twice if the Martyr unit comes back to life!

Weapons Training provides an attack any adjacent unit that doesn’t have an attack. The type of attack will be the same as the unit with Weapons Training. Two adjacent units with Weapon Training can provide two different attack types to the same unit. The amount of attack given is still in testing. Also, any unit without attack affected by Weapons Training still suffers extra damage from the Oppress ability.

As an additional change, the Dispel ability will now remove the Bloodlust effect, as well as the new bonuses from Martyr and Weapons Training.

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