Three days ago Splinterlands announced the imminent release of a new set of reward cards, which will happen on Monday, September 13th, 2021.
The post goes into a series of interesting information for Splinterlands players, but I won't get into every detail.
What I'd like to delve on is the new abilities introduced with the new set of reward cards and which will also appear in the Chaos Legion Cards Edition.
Here they are:
Let's take them one by one.
Amplify
From the descriptive text, I don't clearly understand how Amplify will work.
Will this be a boost to all friendly monsters which have Magic Reflect, Return Fire or Thorns? For example, if a monster has Thorns, will it inflict 3 damage to every successful melee attacker instead of 2? And for Magic Reflect and Return Fire will it be round(attack_power / 2) + 1 reflected/returned to the attacker?
That's how I interpret it.
Forcefield
I like this new ability. So, you can't brute-force a forcefield, because the attack is in the most part reflected from it. But a light attack goes through without any issues.
This ability looks like a counter-balance to over-powered monsters.
Camouflage
This abilty is really cool at first impression. Of course, it depends of the other stats the monsters featuring it will have.
But a monster with camouflage practically cannot be targeted by sneak, snipe or opportunity.
And interesting side-effect here. If a monster with camouflage is last in the lineup, will an opposing monster with sneak be able to attack the monster in front of it or will it be blocked, making sneak useless in this case? I believe it will skip it and attack the next monster, but we will see.
I believe camouflage doesn't offer protection against poison or earthquake, so here's an indirect way to kill a camouflaged monster, even if he's not in front.
And also, I am curious if camouflage offers protection against blast. Probably not, so here's another potential way to kill a camouflaged monster.
Deathblow
This ability may be a counter-balance to Last Stand, but it works on any opposing moster which is the only one remaining on the field. It can be useful against monsters that are hard to kill. But we will understand better when we see the monsters that have this ability.
So, we'll have 3 new defensive abilities and 1 offensive ability with the new set of reward cards. We will see how they'll play out in practice, but I believe they were designed each to rebalance certain imbalances, as well as add to the possible strategies one can adopt.