I believe I am fairly well-informed on all things Splinterlands, even though I am not involved in everything in the Splinterlands ecosystem. However, given a sizeable investment in the game, I need to pay attention to the changes and how they might affect my investment and my existing or future plans.
Despite my intention to stay up to date, I sometimes miss out on things. For example, I've just noticed in a post of 
I don't know what the reason is for that, I assume it's one of the newest farming methods for bot farms, to buy lots of gladius cases with merits earned as rewards in loot chests, and burn gladiator cards for DEC. If that's the reasoning, it makes sense to me, as it's a way to print DEC that can get out of hand when we deal with bot farms, instead of regular people managing one or even multiple accounts, but not hundreds and maybe even thousands of accounts.
Most of us don't have a good use case for GF gladiators unless we play GF frays in our Guilds' brawls.
I burned my GF gladiators a long time ago and used DEC on land. But still, whatever GF gladiators I found in the gladius cases since then, I have no use case for them, and I've just burned them. I don't know when they'll stop being burnable for DEC, but I don't see a reason for waiting, especially since I had already taken this road of burning them a long time ago.
Anyway, I thought I should just mention it. It's likely many players haven't heard or forgotten this information already, and it could mean wasting maybe even dozens of thousands of DEC if you don't need GF gladIators in particular. It certainly passed by me and I'm glad I've caught it by chance.
What will you choose?
- keep GF gladiators
- burn for merits later
- burn for DEC while still available
For me the decision was clear. But there are other cases where it isn't as clear. If you play GF frays, you probably want the GF gladiators. If you look in perspective at what guilds might become, maybe GF gladiators are good in your collection. But for me the immediate goal represented by land took precedence.
As you can see, I no longer have any GF gladiators:
I don't remember how much DEC I got for them because I burned most of them a long time ago, but I know it was into the hundreds of thousands (something like 200k-400k). I think it was worth it.