Splinterlands - Rebellion Card Thoughts & Soulbound Strategy

As was previously announced, we now have 43 new soulbound cards to collect in Splinterlands which has added some new fun in to the game. The old soulbound collection is now finshed and you could unlock your cards to turn them into NFTs, but there was an expensive tax placed on the community to do so.

Usually we are wanting to buy new NFTs because owning your own in game items is a key feature of web3, but it seems the focus for Splinterlands is now more web2 and soulbound items are the future model. We have currently Glad cards and now the 2nd set of soulbound cards already, so 3 sets in total. Apparently this is to stop exploitation by bots that the team actively encourages as part of the Splinterlands gameplay.

Of the 43 new cards, we know from my last post they will be made up of 12 common cards, 12 rare cards, 7epic cards and 12 legendary cards. My strategy this time is to focus on upgrading the common cards as the first priority because there are so many in print and they are the cheapest to level up and could have the most impact on improving my deck.

With the slight increase announced by the team of just 50% to buy reward cards and chests, it should reduce the card inflation somewhat and make it harder to get the complete collection this time.

Whilst the graphics are good for the new Rebellion set, I am not liking the lighter frames on the cards compared to the chaos legion set. Here you can see the Riftwatchers card against the Rebellion card and it looks more prominent and things stand out more. It is somehow better on the eye. I don't know if this is also a reason that I am not getting so attached to the new cards.

Of course the price of new rebellion cards is very expensive compared to the chaos legion set and seems totally out of whack. I am surprised the team do not adjust the pack prices downward to the new market reality that they are in. They could generate more sales if the cards were more attractively priced to the community and earn this way instead of trying to extract value through burn events that have a scammy feel to them to unlock cards you have already earned in the game.

The new reward cards also make earning cards more attractive than buying at the current prices, so there is no real appeal for the rebellion NFT set, outside a few meta cards.

According to DappRadar, Splinterlands is ranked between 57 and 74 depending on your timeframe for top blockchain games. The below chart shows the history over the last year.

The transaction volume and unique active wallets have hit new lows. With the wild league having around 3k players, we know that they are mostly all bots too. So the real number of active players could be upto 5000 in modern. This seems to not be enough to support the game any longer and the team are now being funded to the tune of nearly $3k per day from the Hive DHF or DAO.

Added together, this can only make you feel more bearish on the Splinterlands game and economy at this time.

My current rebellion soul bound collection is at 6% for common cards and this is my main focus to grow these cards to max level as soon as is possible.

My status with these cards so far is that I have many at level 3 already and approaching level 4. With no penalty anymore for playing lower level cards, hopefully some of them might come in useful. So far, that isn't the case, with just 1 of these cards being used in the last 24 hours when I had a gap to use and not because the card had a good ability or anything.

I am still wondering if I will buy any legendaries with my end of season glint or pile it all into the common cards and get them fully upgraded. It is always nice to get legendary cards, but at 35k glint, they seem less attractive as usual and being they are only 1 mana cards, it is likely they will not be meta cards.

How do you play the new soulbound cards?

Thanks for reading.