General Review on New Reward Abilities and Thoughts on Reward Unbinding Fee

Hello there! Hive account@saydie here, playing Splinterlands everyday!

Just a few days from now, The Chaos Legion Soulbound reward cards will no longer pulled either on rarity draws or on loot chest in Gwen's Glint shop as it will now be replaced by a new set of Soulbound reward cards from Rebellion. This means that for those that are still not have completed their Chaos Legion Soulbound set, this season will be your last chance to collect them or you might consider saving your Glint in preparation for the next reward set to get ahead of the others and just buy your missing cards when they get unlocked and sold in the market. Either way, the new Soulbound rewards set is close and it comes with new abilities as well as it will introduce Debilitations which damage or inflict negative status effects on allies instead of enemies. On this post I will be taking a look on this new abilities and share my thoughts on the Soulbound unbinding situation.

New Rebellion Abilities

With the introduction of Rebellion, we are already been introduced to 8 new abilities to the game, some of which are abilities currently only given by the Rebellion summoners and this abilities brings a new way to make the game more competitive and fun. And with the new Rebellion Soulbound reward cards, there will be another 4 abilities that will be introduced which will add new twist to the game and might be even meta changing, depending on how well they this new abilities will synchronize with previous cards.

• Mimic -

By what I can read from the first ability, Mimic has the ability to copy a random ability from an attacker when they were hit but this will only take effect after the 2nd round and only has 25% chance to succeed which add another RNG factor to the game. However, the amount of abilities it can copy seems to not have any limit and will allow the unit with the mimic ability to become stronger as long as it stays alive. That said, Mimic cannot copy Debilitations, Targeting abilities, Ambush, Weapons Training, Flank, Reach, Charge, and Taunt and it the abilities that it copied can be removed with the use of Dispel. While it is interesting to see how, Mimic can give fun results depending to the abilities that it can copy, I think that adding another RNG factor to the game makes it farther to a strategy game cause it has the potential to turn the results of the battle.

• Corrupted Healing (Heal + Cripple)

This ability helps to heal an allied unit with 1/3 of their max health for each turn but its got the downside that the unit that was healed will lose 1 max health for each round that it was healed. It was like that the unit that will be healed with Corrupted Healing will also be applied with Cripple but one thing that I wonder is if the ability will function similar to Tank Heal that only restore the health of the first position monster or with Triage which restores the health of backline monsters? Cause if that was the case, then way inferior to both healing abilities due to its downside unless, it can heal the monster that received the most damage regardless of their position.

• Execute (Double Strike if opponent has 2 or less health)

Execute is an ability that allows to initiate another attack if the target only has left with 2 or less health after a successful attack. This will be similar to Double Strike in that manner or maybe even Trample and if that was the case, I think that the attack that triggered by the Execute ability can miss as well as have the risk of being Retaliated.

• Wingbreak (Opportunity but on Flying Units)

Wingbreak is an ability that targets units with Flying ability regardless of their position and the active ruleset and in that regard, this ability was much similar to Opportunity but instead of targeting units with the least health, it targets unit with Flying. At the same time, this ability will also inflict +2 damage for a successful attack on Flying monsters. Monsters with Wingbreak can be a good counter on Earthquake ruleset where opponent were likely to use Flying units although my question is if Wingbreak would still target a Flying unit that was Ensnared and will apply the +2 damage on it.

New Rebellion Debilitations

On the other hand, Debilitations are abilities that instead of boosting the capabilities of the card or debuffing the opponent, this will instead damage or inflict debuffs towards your own units. The upside is that units with Debilitations will have much bigger stats for their mana cost so you will need to weigh if the drawback will be is worth risking for the extra stats it will have and for the Rebellion Soulbound set, there will be 3 Debilitations that will be introduced to the game.

• Incendiary (Similar to Poison but on adjacent ally units)

With Incendiary, adjacent units have 33& chance to have the Burning debuff which will inflict -2 health on ally units for each round. However, the effects of Incendiary can be removed by Cleanse though for that to happen, the monster needs to be in the first position. For now, I could see Incendiary units to be a good combination for Martyr units cause it will allow them to die more quickly or even for those units with Redemption. My question for this ability is if it will also apply Burning on units with Reflection shield?

• Electrified (Similar to Redemption but on ally units)

Similar to Incendiary, Electrified also inflict damage on ally units but this time, it only inflicts 1 damage for each turn although it now damage all ally units. Since it was similar to Incendiary, the way that I could see it being used was when you have Martyr or Redemption units on your lineup.

• Weary (Self Stun)

For units with the Weary Debilitation, they will have the Exhausted debuff which functions similar to Stun where they will skip an attack and was not able to Retaliate. Weary units start with 10% chance to become Exhausted but it will increase for every round until it reached 80%. So far, I cannot think of any strategy for this Debilitation and it might be entirely depend on the stats of the card if I should use them.

Thoughts on Reward Unbinding Fee

With the new set of Rebellion soulbound rewards to be released, the old Chaos Legion soulbound set will not be available anymore on the Glint shop but at the same time, it can now be unbind which makes it an NFT that can be transferred, delegated, rented, Sold and even burn for DEC. The offside is it can only be unbind within 180 days with 10 times of the collection power of the card for the first month and up to 15 times of the card's collection power for the last month. So if you have a level 4 gold foil legendary card, it would require you to burn 500,000 DEC in order to unbind them.

In my opinion, the current unlocking fee was too much for this cards and should be reduced and 2x of the collection power is what I think is the more appropriate price range for unlocking the Soulbound cards. This is because at its current unbinding price, the overall cost of a max Chaos Legion Soulbound set will be on par with the Rebellion core set while higher to the current market value of having a maxed Chaos Legion Core Set. At the same time, unbinding cards on its current price range involves a lot of risk if there is no demand for the card. Because of this, I can only see people to unbind their cards if they have secured a buyer that would cover the cost for them but that would make the transaction P2P rather than using the market. Also, because of the high Dec fee for unbinding, only few people might have the capability to burn enough Dec to unbind their cards and if the goal was to reduce the Dec supply in circulation, this might not achieved this due to the high Dec fee. Finally and my most major concern is how it will affect the onboarding of the new players if the amount of unbinded rewards are too few and very expensive as sellers would add the unbinding fee of the card to its price. I'm afraid that this would push away potential new players to the game at this rate. For now, I can only hope that the team would change their mind before the new set of rewards card will be released.

Thank you and see you at the next post.