I have been playing Splinterlands for years now, chasing cards, tweaking decks, and grinding for every bit of Glint and SPS I can get. I have seen the game evolve from its early untamed and chaos legion days into a completely different card game. But even with all those big meta or economy shifts, nothing about Splinterlands ecosystem felt quite as personal as the new Avatars and Exemplars system that just arrived on the scene. This is feature makes it feel like Splinterlands has finally grown up and is out of the Beta game mode and is a lot more like the mainstream web two games.
Avatars: More Than a Pretty Headshot
For years our identity in Splinterlands was essentially a small circular image a static badge, the most you could customize it was change it to the tiny image of the Runi card if you owned one. But Avatars change that entirely. Now, I am not just picking a picture, I am able to build a character that I like to represent me. I can choose race, physical traits, clothing, and all kinds of cosmetic details. It means every player’s presence across leaderboards, battle screens, and social profiles becomes more interesting.
I have actually liked my default Avatar, I think it represents my vision of myself in the game pretty good:
I like that this goes beyond static icons, it is like a living digital badge of honor that grows with you. And sure, there’s already talk about premium cosmetics and customization options behind events or the Avatar Shop. That could be controversial for some, especially if everything starts leaning heavy toward Glint purchases, but the fact that these customizations are tied to gameplay achievement as well as craftable and tradeable items gives me confidence it won’t just become a paywall for identity.
Badges: Wear Your Achievements
The badge system built into Avatars is a small but very meaningful detail. These are not just meaningless decorations, they show your game history. Top leaderboard finishes, land titles, long-term guild achievements, or even that you have held certain SPS or HP levels. These badges become a visual résumé.
Here are the badges I decided to place on my Avatar:
It is also interesting to look at my guild mates avatars and see how they customized their avatars and what badges they decided to place on their avatar. Here is an example of the pretty cool avatar that our guild owner has:
Exemplars: Potentially the Most Interesting Part
Here is where it gets really interesting, players have been imagining this for ages: “What would my own card look like?” Before this update, that was just daydreaming unless you were one of the lucky ones and got to design your own summoner but for that you had to spend a wild amount of money. Now Exemplars give everyone an opportunity to design your own card and upgrade it over time.
I think this is a big deal. Instead of building decks from cards someone else designed, I now allocate stats, pick abilities, and create a card that reflects how I play. That is a real personalization not just cosmetic, but strategic and meaningful. For now I am kind of low on glint and have not fully figured out where I want to take this so I did the first pass and came up with this card:
I will not pretend that this is a casual system, leveling up Exemplars requires a lot of Glint investment and clever planning. But that’s part of the fun: having a long-term project that grows with you. “What build should I try next? Do I go high health and tanky? Or fast and glass-cannon?”.
Exemplars will not be usable in ranked, but they can be enabled in the tournaments and will be used in the next version of Guild Bralws! Exemplars can be upgraded using Glint. It looks to me like it will take a lot of Glint to upgrade your card, it starts at low Glint amounts but goes up pretty quickly. I got my Examplar to level twelve so far, but it looks I have a VERY long way to go:
As you can see I have barely started leveling up my Exemplar, but this shows potential and when I have excess Glint tokens I think I found something worthy to spend them on :)
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