Hi guys,

this is an exciting one not gonna lie. Soulbound reward cards are officially announced and currently live on the test server for play testing. They're set to go live shortly after the current season ends, which is less then a week.

You can read the official post here.

In this post I want to briefly go over what I think are the most important things to know, let's get into it!

Set Info

The new reward cards will count towards the Chaos Legion set and will consist of 43 cards in total.

37 Monster cards
6 Summoner cards
12 Legendary cards
7 Epic cards
12 Rare cards
12 Common cards

And here are the drop rates for the new cards:
Bildschirmfoto 2023-01-25 um 18.34.12.png

Basically each splinter will get:

1 Summoner
2 Legendaries (Dragon / Neutral 1)
1 Epic
6 Rares
6 Epics

For everyone who hasn't been following the recent news, these cards will be souldbound (meaning non tradable in any way or form) until they go out of print, which the team estimates will take 1-2 years. After that there will be some kind of fee (probably DEC) to make them tradable. I won't go over what this means for the game / economy / bots, because its a topic for itself and I want to focus on the cards here.

New Abilities

There will be 3 new abilities introduced with these cards: Conscript, Martyr and Weapons Training.

Conscript

All the new summoners will have this ability and it enables the use of gladiator cards in non-brawl battles, meaning tournaments and ranked play. In brawls it will enable the use of 2 gladiator cards!

This is huge as gladiator cards are very powerful and can (like soulbound reward cards) only be acquired through playing the game.

Martyr

A monster with this ability will give +1 to all stats to adjacent monsters when it dies. With this they also made a change to Dispel which now dispels both the effects of Bloodlust and Martyr and becomes way more powerful. And also to Bloodlust itself (besides being able to be dispelled) making it so that it always gives +1 Speed. Previously in Reverse Speed rule sets it would reduce your speed by 1.

Weapons Training

Monsters with this ability will give half of their attack (rounded up) to adjacent monsters with no attack. This will be huge as you can now have a Baakjira for example, who heals himself and has Void and tons of health, with melee attack. Also you can give the same minion two different attacks if there are monsters with the weapons training on both sides of it. A Truthspeaker could potentially get ranged and magic attack this way.

Potions

Bildschirmfoto 2023-01-25 um 18.39.23.png

Will now be usable for reward chests and in the same way as with packs increase the chances of receiving a legendary card (Legendary Potion) or a gold foil card (Alchemy Potion). Legendary potions will now also increase the chances of getting an epic card (only for reward cards).

As far as I understand it potions will be consumed automatically for reward chests, unless turned off in the settings and will only consume a charge, when there is a card in the chest. One charge can also give multiple epics, legendaries or gold foils, as there's now the chance to pull multiple copies of a card from one chest.

Bildschirmfoto 2023-01-25 um 18.43.07.png

They also changed the rates for which type of item you pull from a chest a little bit and the new numbers are shown in the graph above.

Cards and Stats

Finally, what's probably most interesting, the actual cards and their stats. Unfortunately they didn't reveal the cards officially as they're still subject to change during the play testing. However a couple of YouToubers who are also mavericks and have access to the test servers made videos showing every single card and also shared their opinion about them.

Here are two I like the most:

Bulldog1205 complete overlook
Bildschirmfoto 2023-01-25 um 18.49.03.png

Hawks21 overlook in multiple parts
Bildschirmfoto 2023-01-25 um 18.49.55.png

While these two are way more experienced and better players than I am and you should go watch their videos, it's safe to say that some of these cards look extremely powerful on first glance. They will bring endless new possibilities to the game and I expect the meta to be greatly influenced by these cards.

Since you can't buy them, but have to play and earn them, the beginning will be extremely fun in my opinion as you will have cards others don't have. I also think these cards are so strong that you will use them to some extent, even if you don't have them maxed out for your league.

Summary

New reward cards will be here next week. They look awesome. I can't wait to open chests and get my hands on them. Just imagine pulling a legendary early on, when almost no one has it and the boost it will give your play and potentially win rate!

That being said, the current reward chests as well as end of season rewards will all contain the old reward cards, which by the way will then go out of print and therefore become more scarce and hopefully valuable.

I'm excited and looking forward to next weeks update on Tuesday!

Disclaimer

None of this is financial advice. These tips are for educational purposes only and might all fall out of date as both Splinterlands and the Crypto Market in general are subject to constant change.