You cannot have missed it, Splinterlands launched Brawls 2.0 yesterday.
This means, that from now on, participating in brawls can earn you personal benefits rather than just glory for your guild.
If your guild wins Crowns by ranking well in a brawl, this will award you with Merits. This is a new in-game currency that can be spent in the guild store (a new guild building) once it reaches level 2.
Wait, if this launched yesterday, how can I already have Merits and open Gladius packs? That's because Mavericks (players who purchased 500 booster packs from the official store), were invited to QA test the new brawl battles and have been awarded 5,000 thank-you merits in return. Enough to buy two Gladius packs (and still have 1,000 merits for future use).
I thought I'd record and share the purchasing and opening of these packs just because I'm excited about the new stuff! Check out the video if you're interested.
Alas, no epic or legendary cards and no gold cards. :( This is especially a downer for me as these Gladiator cards are the first soul-bound (non-transferable) cards in the game and they are now sitting in my gold card account while being regular foil.
But who am I to complain. They still count for collection power and may make for decent workers on my land plots. :-)
A big thank you to 
Promo offer for new players/investors: Use my ref link and contact me here or on discord (handtalk5#6665). I will get a $0.50 referrer bonus if you buy the summoner’s spellbook to unlock the Play2Earn features. If I can confirm you as a referral who made the purchase, I will return that to you in form of Splinterlands cards. Just message me the card(s) you want for up to $0.50 and I will get them off the market for you.
Disclaimer: No financial advice included in this article. Just sharing my personal experience. Do your own research!
Some links in the article might be referral links, feel free to use other sign-up methods.
Images courtesy of @cryptomancer or @flauwy.
