The Splinterlands Update Introduces a More HODL Friendly Format

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Twenty games into the new season with zero SPS rewards and a new metric called reward points. What does it mean?

Digging deeper, I found the official announcement for the update:

Splinterlands Release Notes

2026-09-30

Modern Brackets

Per this passed proposal, the Modern ranked format has been reworked to use a bracket system similar to Survival. To heavily summarize, Modern is now split into 6 brackets: Novice, Bronze, Silver, Gold, Diamond, and Champion with different restrictions on the levels of the cards playable in those brackets.
Each bracket is split into 9 divisions, starting with Division 9 at 0 rating, and increasing every 500 rating until Division 1 at 4,000 rating. Advancement chests have been reworked to scale by bracket and division.
You may reset your bracket at any time, until you receive an advancement reward for reaching the next division. Resetting your bracket also resets your rating and reward shares back to 0.
The SPS prizes will be awarded at the end of the season, based on your reward points won in battles compared to the others in your bracket. The overall pool is also split between the pools with 1% going to Novice, 3% to Bronze, 6% to Silver, 12% to Gold, 25% to Diamond, and 53% to Champion. The prizes for each bracket will also be reduced further if an insufficient number of players enter before the end of the season.
Glint rewards remain unchanged and are still rewarded for each win.
Per the proposal, cards played in a bracket format are then locked to the account until the end of the season, and may not be sold or traded when on this cooldown.
Energy purchases have been disabled for this first season while we monitor how these changes shake out. All Modern battles now use energy, regardless of Division.

Source: https://docs.splinterlands.com/platform/release-notes/2026

The HODL friendly part is here:

The SPS prizes will be awarded at the end of the season, based on your reward points won in battles compared to the others in your bracket. The overall pool is also split between the pools with 1% going to Novice, 3% to Bronze, 6% to Silver, 12% to Gold, 25% to Diamond, and 53% to Champion. The prizes for each bracket will also be reduced further if an insufficient number of players enter before the end of the season.

I interpret this to mean daily grinders won't be able to dump SPS rewards every 24 hours anymore. They'll need to wait till season's end, which could help stabilize SPS, giving it more long term value.

The pool splitting and percentage breakdown I'm not certain on. But it is still great to see devs taking steps to promote HODL life.

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