Hey everyone, it's blogging day for me! I was a little behind on making my posts for this week so now I'm making two of then back to back, quite busy really!
I just made my Social Media Challenge post but because it's a Sunday already, I need to make this weeks Community Engagement Challenge post as well, sorry 
This week life just got in the way, it happens sometimes, being a Splinterlands enthusiast and a father is quite a busy life I can tell you! 🤣
My splinterlands friend and guild buddy 
So, on with the second post for this week, I am testing out new backgrounds for my thumbnails so please let me know if you like them or maybe it was just better the way it was with the usual set of background I always use and just rotate them.
This weeks Community Engagement Challenge:
The thing I like about the Community Engagement Challenge is that it's always something different for us to make a post about, and without knowing I already talked a little about the new game mode called Survival Mode in the post I have just made, but let's talk about this some more as well as the leaderboard update after that.
Challenge Theme: Survival Mode Launch & Leaderboard Updates
Write a post celebrating and sharing the news about the Survival Mode Launch & Leaderboard Updates!
To find out how you can participate in the challenge yourself, check out the Splinterlands post here.
Survival Mode
With the end of last season, Survival Mode went live and although I feel this is NOT for players like me and probably not for 80% of the people playing Splinterlands, but that doesn't mean it's not important that new game modes like these are being developed, we need to care for everyone and this is just another way to use cards that doesn't get used in other ways, already I've seen on X players are starting to buy more cards to be competitive in this new game mode, and even if you don't play Survival Mode yourself, this drives card demand, more demand means higher prices which affects us all, that's the beauty of all of this!
I love how the founder yabapmatt sees things and makes his plans for the game, in more than one occasion the team made plans and when the community heard the plan many reactions were negative, but when it's in place we can see it actually works, just let the team do what they are good at, guided by Matt's vision - it's why I'm here all this time and remained here even in the darkest of times when many walked away.
When you want more details about this new game mode, I recommend to check out the official Splinterlands post about this topic but what this new game mode really is, is your cards become unavailable for a certain period when they are killed in a battle, the lower level your card is, the longer the period it's unavailable is, up to 14 days!
For the sake of this post I tested this new mode and I was actually a little afraid to accidentally select the wrong card and I would not be able to use it for the coming days, so I was very careful to pick my team! 😅
So for me testing out this new battle mode without any plans to deep dive into this, because I don't think this is for me (which is fine, I'm too busy as it is anyways) I used the 'Card Level' filter to display only level 1 cards and focus on duplicates I have for Gladiators and Reward cards, together with some other cards I'm sure I also have at a higher level.
Because it's just wood league there was only the 'standard' ruleset which is pretty boring, but it's just to see how it works, so I made a nice little team, all splinters are available so there's no telling what my opponent is bringing to the battlefield.
Well, in a way I was hoping my opponent would only bring one or two cards but that's taking them to the butchers table really, so let's see what this battle brings, in normal battles I don't like to rely on gladiator cards because I think they interfere with normal tactics but in this case, it's life and death so everything is allowed! 😅
O well, I won my first ever battle in Survival Mode! 🤙
But still more than half of my team was killed as well, but I think the bottleneck for this game mode are the summoners, and they don't die unless you lose the battle.
So, let's take a look how one of my killed cards is doing!
Yeah, that's unusable in ANY game mode for the next 14 days! 😱 Good thing I have a whole army of them, actually, now I know about this mode I might unflag all cards I use myself for normal game play and hopefully by that time my Archmage bot is also able to be used in Survival Mode, these level 1 cards are doing nothing anyway!
Leaderboard Updates
So before this update, only the top players in Champion were able to earn rewards in DEC, longer ago this used to be for the top players in every leagues.
I listened to 
On this topic I agreed 100% with SteveR where he talked about the old days when he was able to get to the leaderboard but now out of the 50 accounts, there's probably less than 20 top players playing full time on scholar accounts dominating the leaderboard, and while it's nice they can earn a living this way, it's really damaging for the gaming experience, players should be rewarded, and only on one account so there's room for everyone.
The new leaderboard no longer rewards with DEC but with GLINT, which of course has it's pros and cons, it's yet another web3 way to earn to play taken away, but like SteveR said, normal players didn't received it anyway because of a hand full or pro's now taking this all so I think this is a good change and will also fight the DEC inflation, for everything else you have to burn something to get DEC, burn cards or SPS which are finite, leaderboard rewards are not so this will help a little to get DEC back to peg ratio for 1000 dec to 1 USD.
This is an overview of the rewards given out in the new leaderboards:
Important to know is that the league you start the new season in, is where you will be competing for the entire season, so when you have dropped to Silver 1 at the start but end in Gold 2, you will be competing for the Silver leaderboard THIS season but NEXT season you will be competing for the Gold leaderboard.
I'm not concentrating on this at all, I think it's more important to have fun and not to feel the pressure of 'I'm only just outside the top100, I need to perform!'
If it happens, it happens, fun is more important for me. 😊
Conclusion:
Wow, I've been typing for over two hours already making my two posts 😅 there's just so much exciting going on for Splinterlands right now.
The cool thing about posts like these and participating in these challenges is that I would've probably never tried out Survival Mode if it wasn't for the sake of this post, and now I will look in to this to fire up ArchMage when it's able to handle the new game mode, I just need to unflag MANY cards first! 😂
Good times are ahead for sure guys, I'm excited to be here, together with you!
VONAK!
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.
Also, when you require any help to get you started,let me know, I'm here to advice and guide new players and maybe I can help you with card delegations too!
Have a great day!