Hello everyone and welcome back to my Splinterlands blog, the schedule is a bit changed this week! On most weeks, the new challenges start on Thursdays or Fridays, but now it's a Tuesday and took me kind of by surprise, thanks to my guild mate Hive account@estebam for letting me know!

So, this weeks Social Media Challenge is the same as last weeks:

🔥 Share Your Most Remarkable Splinterlands Moments: Do you possess a battle of epic proportions that deserves to be seen by all? Have you crafted something extraordinary within the Splinterlands realm? Maybe you've got profound thoughts, insights, or strategies related to stats, cards, abilities, or gameplay that are waiting to be shared? We want it all, and we want it to be nothing short of AMAZING!

And did we have amazing stuff this week?? Damn right we did, and a lot too! So that's what's my post for today will be about, hopefully it picks up some traction outside of the hive community as well, and new players, or old players who left will return after reading this because it's a ton of fun, not only last week but this has been the case for the last months really!

To find out how you can participate in the challenges yourself, check out the splinterlands post here.

I'm sure the splinterlands team never stopped working their asses off for the game and community, but last months it's been really showing and most of the FUD has disappeared, not only this, but it has been replaced with enthusiasm from most of the core community!

So, what's new you ask? Hmmm to be honest, I'm not even sure where to start and it's probably too much anyway to cover in one post, but I'll talk about the most awesome things here, but this isn't even everything!

Mobile / Phone play has been fixed

I'm not much of a mobile gamer myself, but this is really important for the game as most players in the world are using a phone instead of a pc, I've heard from multiple players the experience on smartphones is good now without any big problems, this is part of the much mentioned New Player Experience and the team has done a great job on this. In the future there will be a splinterlands app again.

We can earn chests again on leagues promotions!

We lost the ability to earn chests like this in ranked play for a long time now, and it's great to have it back! Now, when you promote from Bronze 2 to Bronze 1 for example, you will earn 5 minor chests, with bigger rewards the higher you go.

The promotion screen looks like this, and it's so much cooler now to break the barriers between leagues, the joy of opening chests and earn cool rewards, like more battle energy or cards you can use in your battles is a lot of fun.

New Rulesets and Skins!

On Last maintenance window (yesterday) October 15 2024, we got some surprise updates I really, really love!
We got surprised with FIVE new rulesets and Halloween skins, I especially like Uraeus! 😍

Five new rulesets:

⚔️ Gameplay Updates ⚔️
Five new rule sets have been added!
🔹 Heavy Metal: You can only summon armored units..
🔹 Might Makes Right: You can only summon units with 3+ power (ranged, magic, or melee).
🔹 Need for Speed: You can only summon units with 3+ speed.
🔹 Deflection Field: All units have the Reflection Shield ability.
🔹 Beefcakes: You can only summon units with 5+ health.

The Beekcakes ruleset limits the choice in cards to monsters with five Health Points or more, I wonder what this will look like combined with little league, this ruleset is very beneficial to players with a large set of cards I think, so far, I've only fought one battle with this ruleset, but it was 60 mana so small monsters are not played often anyway, on low mana matches this will be fun I think! The Deflection Field ruleset gives the Reflection Shield ability to all monsters, so playing monsters with abilities like Thorns or Blast doesn't have any effect, as with the previous ruleset, this forces players to THINK of new strategies when this ruleset is active, which I think is great, I like the planning and puzzling! With the Heavy Metal ruleset you can only use armored monsters, again, limiting the available cards to choose from and make strategies with and - again, putting players with large decks in favor. With this ruleset, only monsters with 3 or more attack damage can be used, so for this one, players with higher leveled cards are in favor, I wonder what a battle in bronze will look like though because a lot of cards do less damage at lower level. In this ruleset, you can only play monsters with 3 or more speed, making slower splinters like earth and fire less likely to be played because many cards are slow in these teams, Water and Dragon however have very fast cards in general.

New promo cards

In the second Hall of Legends round, Delya and Night Stalker are launched, two very strong cards, but I feel they are for the top players, Delya is currenly selling for $35 per BCX, and Night Stalker is $1.90 per BCX, however, he gets really strong once he received the execute ability at level 4, so you need 25 BCX so you'll need about $50 for this card.

It IS a great initiative though, giving the top new toys to play with and changing the meta for them, it's important to keep players at all levels entertained and it will be wrong to only focus on new players as of now.

These cards are not for me, and I'll rather complete my Chaos Legion deck I'm still building to max level now.

If you once were a Battle Mage, consider returning!

If you ever played the game before, and left because of... well, all things going on, I can't blame you but really, you should consider returning, it's so much fun again and I think the light is bright at the end of the tunnel!

This is it for today guys, I hope you enjoyed, I'm sure I haven't covered all cool updates but these are definitely worth mentioning, I'm back to playing my accounts again and I hope to see you on my next post!

Thank you for reading!!!

If you haven't made an account already, please consider using my referral link to sign up, I'll happily send the amount I get for your signup back to you in DEC or SPS to help you start.

Have a great day!