My first thought when Matt said it would be a bot friendly format, was .... " Damn!, no way will I play that and be insta-murdered by bots, then suffer a cooldown on my cards for ranked".... I was a bit annoyed.
Then I thought about it for a bit, read a few different options and started to form a different opinion that goes a bit like this....
This mode was never for me anyway, regardless of having a few duplicates of the nicer CL cards, there is no way I'll stack up on duplicate summoners at this stage, there are better places to put cash ( like the max Avina the Wolf I just bought :-) ) and right now , the fall-back of renting them does not yield much.
The new "revival potions" may see significant demand, especially for key limiting cards, like expensive carry cards ( Yodin, Kitty) that ppl really want to play but may not have duplicates. Additionally, even winning a match will result in "dead cards" , so if you want to leverage those summoners, you may need to revive key cards like healers or tanks
The Revival Potions will cost DEC I hope, this would be ideal. If this DEC is burned, this could be a very active DEC sink.
Assuming it's a whale bot game with a good share of SPS per win due to the low number of players, especially at higher levels, the potion purchase will be a pure RoI question, thus moving SPS effectively into DEC burn.
While it may not be a mode for most, it caters to a small niche, and that niche may be encouraged to actions that drag the wider ecosystem up, and all for existing cards.
My concerns are that it may reduce match liquidity as more players have less cards to play manual Modern with due to cooldowns, especially summoners
I am also concerned about the DAO funding rewards to a small group , unless we see the benefit mentioned above.
Matt will be paying the rewards at first, so there is a buffer of some time to see what the data looks like.
I think we look on it as a free trial, and I'm happy now I realise that it's not a mode I should really even be thinking about playing .... ignore the shiny thing :-)
I agree with you about the positive aspects of the new format but I also think that Splinterlands has not understood how favoring bots means having a negative spot in attracting new players.
In my opinion in the medium to long term perspective having a pro-bots game image = driving away new players
Thank you for your long commentary full of interesting thoughts