Welcome to another article where I write about my journey playing Splinterlands! With the end of the season we had a patch, outside of the usual schedule, to move the game over to the new ranked system. The leagues have essentially been collapsed, so everyone is now playing under Champion rules - there's no level cap on Summoners.
Aside from the ranked changes, there were a few other big items. You can now buy energy, i.e. additional battles, with Vouchers. It's a nice use for them, and hopefully we'll see the supply start to go down. There are also two new rules sets, one where you can at most play 4 monsters and another where you can at most play 5 - instead of the normal 6.
For other updates, purchasing a spellbook was moved over to the new client. A lot of little bugs were fixed - including a bad one where Dispel was giving Weapons Trained monsters extra attack types. There were also some minor improvements that don't really merit discussing in detail.
To make it an incredibly busy day, there was also a Town Hall following the update. There wasn't a lot of news, though they talked a bit more about the next big thing being the reward system changing to one where you get points and can buy the rewards you want - instead of getting random chests. One new item was that they may change letting you burn Gladiator cards for Dark Energy Crystals and instead you would be burning them for Merits, the currency you buy Gladiator packs with.
There was also some artwork shown for Land 2.0 buildings.
I got a few more Rebellion packs, as the set seems to have a few strong cards and be holding up its value well. That and it's fun to open packs. Here's what I got this week:
Off to a good start with two epics and a rare!
Brawls
Due to the timing of my last article and this end of season, the next brawl ends after the end of season, so I'll put it in my next article!
The Rest
I decided to lock up my profits from selling the epic totem fragment, that I had found last week, into land and got another SPS mine under construction. This leaves me with 2 remaining land plots that are sitting idle. Not sure when, or if, they'll ever get around to letting other people use your plots for a split of the rewards.
As for the end of the season, I managed to crawl up into Diamond III on my main before it ended. Plus, I remembered to actually advance into Gold III on my alternate account this time around. I got a ton of Silver chests on my alternate account, though not a lot exciting in them:
A lot of common and rare cards, potions, and small numbers of Splintershard tokens (SPS) or Merits.
I did a bit better with Diamond chests on my main account:
A few gold foil commons, an epic card, a big SPS chest, and two gold foil legendary cards!
I have only played a little bit of the new ranked system, and the early days are a bit of a bloodbath in Modern. There are a lot of people with max level cards trying to grind their way up in a lot of leagues, normally smacking down people with less expensive collections. Hopefully it will start to even out as the days progress, though Wild still seems to have more accounts playing with lower-level cards.
That’s about it for this week. My goal is to see how I can do in this new ranked system. I will say the SPS rewards for battling seem to be higher, though I'm not sure if that is just a temporary spike. At any rate, I'll be back next week with my mid-season thoughts on the new ranked system!