How To Survive Playing In Survival Mode

It has been a week since Survival mode was introduced in Splinterlands and so far, it was mostly receive positively by the community. Just this small tweak on the game mechanics by having defeated cards a cool down requires an incredible amount of risk whether you are on the winning or the losing side cause that will reduce the amount of cards that you can use in your next match and increases the pressure on the players. To give you a refresher, this are the default cooldown for the cards.

^Source

And the lesser the cards they can use, the more likely that their next battle to lose so playing Survival mode also makes a different type of strategy compared to what Modern and Wild format. Here are some of the strategies that I came through after playing a few battles, in survival mode.

Regardless of a player wins or lose a match, they will likely have one or two of their monsters defeated and when that happens, they cannot use the same cards or lineup in their next battles and just missing those cards could result a player to lose a winnable battle so when you dive in the survival mode, you need to make sure that you have backup copies of your cards.

While having multiple copies cards is important, you can't play a match without a summoner so it is just right to say that a player needs to have more summoner collection than the copies of your units like if all the units of your entire water deck has 3 copies, you need to have at least double that amount for your summoner.

If there is one regret that I made in the game, it is that I burn a lot of my Soulbound Cards. Indeed the glint was nice to have and I was able to use it to buy more items in the Glint shop, but losing those free cards can really hurt my play moving forward. Don't make the same mistake if you plan to delve into the survival mode.

If you think your cards will die either way, might as well throw cards at lower level version of that card in your team and save your higher level copy when facing a tougher opponent. To do this, during the team selection stage, you can choose the level of the card that you want to use through the level filter and ca even choose between regular or gold foil version of the card.

In my two battles I have above, we can see that I won both the battle with my first battle being a surrender. That said, in Survival mode, giving up a battle, also comes with a huge cost that a random summoner and 1 random unit will be out of commission. For instance, If you are saving Eternal Tofu for tougher opponents, when you surrender a battle, it could go into cooldown without even using it. So instead of surrendering a match and potentially losing your most powerful cards, it is better to throw your battle by submitting only 1 summoner and one unit. And this is where we go back to Number 4 where I say to keep cards at different level because if you know that you will lose that match, you can just throw level 1 cards and save your higher level cards just like what my next opponent did.

Once a new season has started, all cards that are in cooldown in survival mode will have their cooldown reset so if you are a player like me with little collection of cards, try to play only close to EOS.