Welcome to another article where I write about my journey playing Splinterlands! With another big update hitting this past week, there are a few things of note to cover. The Voucher shop and liquidity pool were added, the Guilds and Brawls portion of the game were moved to the newer client, plus a whole host of smaller updates that you can read about over at the official patch notes here.
Neither of the major updates went particularly smoothly. There was initially a bug with the liquidity pool and a whole mess of Vouchers were minted by one user. The game was taken back down and this was fixed, though the company has said it will address the extra Vouchers by buying and burning them going forward to eventually make up for the extra generated. The Brawls update was also fairly riddled with issues, making one question the effectiveness of their quality assurance testing.
Not to say it was all bad. The Voucher shop selling the new Mana Warden card seems to be working fine, and overall the move of the Brawl over to the new client has made creating a team on Mobile devices a lot better experience. There were also a lot of quality-of-life updates to the site in response to feedback on Discord.
One of the more useful features is a countdown to when the pricing increase happens for unbinding Chaos Legion reward cards. At the time of this writing, there's less than a week left before the price multiplier goes up. I expect that there won't be a lot of unlocking done after this price increase, although it has already burnt over 140 million Dark Energy Crystals (DEC) to make those reward cards tradeable.
For my own account, I had enough vouchers to buy 25 copies of Mana Warden to get a single gold foil one. The Hall of Legends promo event opens up in a few days from when I'm writing this, though I expect that I might buy only one copy of the rare card. I still have a lot of account-bound cards that I should probably unlock and move around.
Hivefest, the yearly festival for the blockchain that the game runs on, is also coming up soon. I believe that the CEO of Splinterlands was going to be a keynote speaker at the event. I personally won't be attending, as a trip to Croatia would be quite the flight from where I live.
As far as playing the game goes, I've made it to Gold III in Modern on my main account and Silver II on my alternate account. Mana Warden has been a useful card to play in some matches, usually to make my Pelacor Conjurer even harder to kill. That being said, it is a pretty slow climb on my main account as I've been running into a lot of decks with max level cards.
I haven't spent any more Glint on more card draws yet, as I'm trying to gauge how much I'm getting in a season. So far, it seems like I've gotten about 23K on my alt and 36K on my main. We'll see how much I end up with when the season ends next weekend.
That's about it for this mid-season update! Thank you for reading, and if you have any questions or comments please leave them below. I'll be back in about a week with the season wrap up.