The Splinterlands team is excited to announce a set of 43 new Chaos Legion reward cards that are expected to be coming to loot chests near you before the month is out! As you probably already know from discussions on the town hall events, these new reward cards will be soulbound - meaning they will not be able to be transferred, rented/delegated, burned, or sold until the cards go out of print (more on that later).
The shift to soulbound reward cards is a key piece of the overall goal of making the game more engaging for players and encouraging players to focus on growing their accounts over the long term rather than just farming rewards in the short term. We believe that it is extremely important to have certain things that are ONLY able to be obtained through gameplay, and not just purchased off of the market, which increases the value of playing ranked battles, moving up to higher leagues, and most importantly - combining cards.
The fact that these reward cards will eventually become transferrable means that players will still be able to realize their value in the future, so this can also be viewed as a kind of long-term NFT staking.
Loot Chests
The new soulbound reward cards are currently planned to be release on Tuesday, January 31st, 2023, in the normal maintenance window which will be shortly after the end of the current ranked play season.
As soon as the new reward cards are released they will replace the old reward cards in new loot chests. This means that the old reward cards will stop being minted, even though many of them are still well under their initially planned print limit.
Please note that season reward chests earned from the current season and earlier will still contain the old reward cards, and only chests earned after the new reward cards are added will contain the new ones, so players don't need to wait to open their season chests on the 31st as they will all still contain the old reward cards no matter when they are opened.
The new reward cards will also have some additional changes to how they are distributed via the loot chests. First and foremost, the option for players to use Legendary and Alchemy potions to increase their chances of getting better rarity and gold foil reward cards when opening loot chests will be re-enabled. Additionally, Legendary potions used for opening loot chests will now also double the chances of receiving Epic rarity cards as well as Legendary rarity cards! Note that this change to Legendary potions will only apply to opening loot chests. No changes will be made for pack opening.
This option will be enabled by default for all users once the new reward cards are released, and can be disabled via the settings page under each player's account profile on the Splinterlands website. We look forward to this change making potions much more valuable and exciting to get in loot chests, especially for players who don't typically open packs.
The second change to how the new reward cards will be distributed in loot chests is that a single loot chest may now contain multiple of the same reward card! Higher tier loot chests will not only have higher chances of getting higher rarity and gold foil cards, but they will now also have higher chances of getting more copies of each card in each chest. At the highest chest tiers, it is possible to get multiple Legendary or even gold foil cards in a single chest.
The percent chances of getting a card of each rarity or a gold foil card (without potions) in each chest tier is shown in the table below. Please note that the use of Legendary potions will double the chances shown in the table below for each chest tier of getting both Legendary and Epic rarity cards while reducing the chance of getting a Common rarity card by the same amount. Alchemy potions will similarly double the chances shown in the table below for each chest tier of receiving a Gold Foil version of the card.
Please also note that Legendary and/or Alchemy potion charges will only be used when opening a loot chest that is randomly determined to contain reward cards, and only one charge will be used per chest. Additionally, the determination of rarity and foil for reward cards received from loot chests will happen before the quantity of the card in the chest is determined. This means that in the higher chest tiers, a single Legendary or Alchemy potion charge may lead to multiple of the same Epic, Legendary, and/or Gold Foil card in a single chest - giving even a bit more value to the potions than they had in the past.
| Chest Tier | Legendary | Epic | Rare | Common | Gold Foil |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bronze | 0.20% | 0.50% | 20.00% | 79.30% | 0.50% |
| Silver | 0.80% | 2.00% | 20.00% | 77.20% | 2.00% |
| Gold | 1.20% | 3.00% | 20.00% | 75.80% | 3.00% |
| Diamond | 1.60% | 4.00% | 20.00% | 74.40% | 4.00% |
| Champion | 3.20% | 8.00% | 20.00% | 68.80% | 6.00% |
Additionally, the chances of receiving a specific type of item in each tier of loot chest will be changing a bit with this update, and the new numbers are shown below:
| League | Reward Card | Merits | SPS | Pack | Potion |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bronze | 33.00% | 10.00% | 33.00% | 0.005% | 23.995% |
| Silver | 33.00% | 10.00% | 33.00% | 0.05% | 23.95% |
| Gold | 33.00% | 10.00% | 33.00% | 2.00% | 22.00% |
| Diamond | 33.00% | 10.00% | 33.00% | 2.50% | 21.50% |
| Champion | 33.00% | 10.00% | 33.00% | 3.50% | 20.50% |
Soulbound Cards
As mentioned at the start of the post, all of the cards in the new reward card edition will be soulbound, meaning they are tied to the account in which they are received and cannot be transferred, rented/delegated, burned, or sold.
We also intend for the cards to be able to become unbound - meaning they will be able to be transferred, rented, burned, or sold - once they stop being available in loot chests, by infusing them with DEC. We estimate that roughly 1 - 2 years out from this initial release of soulbound reward cards that are associated with the Chaos Legion set we will release a new set of soulbound reward cards that will be associated with the Rebellion set.
At that point, the current set of soulbound reward cards will no longer be available in loot chests, having been replaced by the new set, and the old set will then be able to become unbound by staking DEC into the cards, a portion of which can then be reclaimed later by burning them.
Card Stats & New Abilities
Please note that the exact details of each card will be available on a QA server for playtesting roughly one week ahead of the planned release, and that all stats and other details of the cards in the set and the new abilities are subject to change at any time before the release date.
The new set of soulbound reward cards is planned to contain a total of 43 cards with the following breakdown of type, element, and rarity:
- 37 Monster cards
- 6 Summoner cards (one from each element except Neutral)
- 12 Legendary cards (two from each basic element, one Dragon, and one Neutral)
- 7 Epic cards (one from each element)
- 12 Rare cards (two from each basic element, one Dragon, and one Neutral)
- 12 Common cards (two from each basic element and two Neutral)
Conscript
Conscript is a new ability which will be available on Summoners only, and when a Summoner with the Conscript ability is chosen, it will allow the player to use one more Gladiator card in the battle than normal. This means that Gladiator cards will now be able to be played outside of brawls, including in ranked and tournament battles! The way that the ability is worded also indicates that in Guild Brawl battles, using a Summoner with the Conscript ability will allow two Gladiator cards to be used instead of one.
We additionally plan to add a Conscript ruleset in the future which allows both players to play an additional Gladiator card in the battle. That means that in a Guild Brawl battle with the Conscript ruleset, if a player also uses a Conscript Summoner then they will be able to use three different Gladiator cards in that battle!
Before the complaints start coming in that using Gladiator cards outside of Guild Brawl battles is too OP, please keep in mind that the mana cost of the Summoners with the Conscript ability is designed to mitigate that.
The Summoner cards in the new soulbound reward set are planned to all be Rare, 6 mana, and include one lower-value stat buff or debuff along with the new Conscript ability. A Summoner with a lower-value stat buff or debuff typically costs 3 mana, so an extra 3 mana is required to be spent to use the Conscript ability, which we feel adequately mitigates the increased value of the Gladiator cards and gives players an interesting new choice when choosing Summoners.
We feel that the Conscript ability fits nicely with the overall goal of the soulbound reward cards - namely, encouraging and rewarding players for participating in the game and building up their account over time - and we look forward to the new Summoners and future ruleset increasing the value of Gladiator cards in the game and therefore the value of Guild Brawls and Merits as well.
Martyr
When a character with the Martyr ability dies in a battle, it gives adjacent characters +1 to all stats. This ability will put increased importance on positioning of characters on the battlefield, as its full effect will not be captured if it is in the first or last position when it dies, and it's also important that the intended characters are adjacent to it when it dies to receive the buff.
The Martyr ability may also pair very nicely with the Resurrect ability, since when a card with Martyr is Resurrected, it can then apply the Martyr buff again the next time it dies.
The Martyr effect is very similar to the Bloodlust effect (+1 to all stats), so for consistency we will also be making the following two modifications to the Bloodlust ability, both of which will apply to Martyr as well:
- The Bloodlust effect will be removed when hit by a character with the Dispel ability
- The Bloodlust effect will always give +1 Speed, even in the Reverse Speed ruleset. This is something players will have to take into account when using a Bloodlust character in that ruleset.
Weapons Training
Like Martyr, the Weapons Training ability also affects adjacent characters and therefore is also heavily dependent on positioning. A character with the Weapons Training ability will "train" any adjacent characters with no attack, thereby giving them an attack of the same type as the character with the Weapons Training ability. The amount of attack that the Weapons Training ability gives to adjacent, no-attack characters, is still TBD based on initial play testing.
For example, a character with Ranged attack and Weapons Training will grant a Ranged attack to characters adjacent to it that have no attack themselves. Additionally, if two characters with the Weapons Training ability and different attack types are on either side of a character with no attack, then that character will gain BOTH attacks. If the characters with Weapons Training on either side of a character with no attack have the same attack type, then that character will gain the higher of the two attacks.
If a character with Weapons Training dies, then any adjacent characters with no attack will lose the Weapons Training effect and will no longer be able to attack, and similarly if a character with Weapons Training becomes adjacent to a character with no attack at any point in the course of the battle the Weapons Training effect will be applied at that time.
Characters with no base attack that are affected by the Weapons Training buff will also be affected by other effects that modify attacks such as Inspire, Headwinds, Summoner effects, etc, but they will still be considered as having no attack when it comes to being affected by the Oppress ability, which will still do double damage to them.
Additional Comments
The new set of soulbound reward cards is planned to contain 6 cards with the new Weapons Training ability - one Legendary rarity card from each element (not including Neutral). Two of those will have Melee attack, two will have Ranged attack, and two will have Magic attack. We realize that the Weapons Training ability is more or less powerful when paired with the different attack types, and we have done our best to take that into account when designing these cards.
Additionally, it is planned that each of the 7 Epic rarity cards in the new set will have no attacks, allowing them to pair well with the new Weapons Trainer cards.
Finally, we want to note that two abilities in particular, that have been relatively under-powered in the past, are likely to be given new life with the changes in the meta that we might expect from the new set of reward cards. These abilities are Oppress and Dispel, both of which will feature relatively heavily with the new soulbound reward cards.
We expect that the Weapons Training ability will bring no-attack cards more into the forefront, thereby making the Oppress ability more valuable as a counter, since, as mentioned above, no-attack cards will still be affected by the Oppress ability even if they have an attack as a result of the Weapons Training effect.
As for the Dispel ability, we want to note that it will remove both the Weapons Training effect, the Martyr effect, and also the Bloodlust effect from characters hit with an attack from a character with Dispel, making it now a counter to three additional strong abilities.
Stay tuned for more updates from the Splinterlands!
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NOTE: All rewards from this post will go to the SPS DAO.