Survival Mode is a new game mode for Splinterlands that is about to come out in Q1. It is a game mode meant for older players with larger collections, and will be mostly a collection management type of game play rather than a competitive play at every match, like the Ranked Play is.
In survival mode there is no energy to limit the number of games one could play, but once a card gets killed, it goes into a cooldown period (can't be used in ANY game mode). The cooldown is shorter for rarer and higher level cards.
There are also no restrictions for bots or battle helpers, same as in Wild.
On the tablet, that isn't a real preview of Survival Mode. That's how the AI sees it.
At some point, when Survival Mode was initially presented, Matt said they will add to Splinterlands a way to create sets of cards or something similar, and make collection management possible. For example, to be able to lock in a separate set the cards you want to use in Modern (or Wild), so that they can't be used in Survival Mode, otherwise very good cards you have for Ranked Play will end up in cooldown as they die in Survival Mode, and hurt your performances in Ranked Play.
I'm not sure if they still intend to implement this separation in customizable sets or something else, or if it will be added from the start of Survival Mode or later. But it's clear to me this is very important. Since one of the rewards of the Survival Mode is Glint (not for the first few seasons), it doesn't make any sense to have these cards in a separate account and play Survival Mode from there, unless there is no plan of centralizing soulbound assets purchased with Glint, but we know that may be the case of a relatively small number of players. Most players don't have enough Glint to max out one set of soulbound reward cards.
I've been thinking for the past few days if I should add a Splinterlands goal focused on Survival Mode, something that would push toward adding more cards to my collection until the new game mode is launched and while the prices are cheap. I decided against it, not because it wouldn't be a good idea for others, but I started to be quite reluctant toward adding less liquid or difficult to manage assets to my crypto portfolio.
But I did centralize cards to my playing account waiting for Survival Mode to be launched. I stopped renting them out a while ago because the rental market was very thin, and for the cards I still had offered to rent, it wasn't worth it. Many of them are still 1 BCX or low levels, and I'll have to decide in each case how much I level them up. Mostly, it depends on the levels of the summoners I'll have available for Survival Mode. The bottlenecks will be summoners, which will go into cooldown at every lost battle.
I don't have a big enough collection to compete at the highest levels in Survival Mode, but I do imagine I will win some matches too, and put the extra cards to work, which is better than holding my cards doing nothing. And if I won't be competitive enough to be worth it, I believe the rental market could be revived thanks to this new game mode.