@saydie here, playing Splinterlands everyday!In my last post, I talked about how Splinterlands now has four different ranked modes that players can participate in. There is Wild, which is meant to be a place for players with older cards to compete, as well as Modern for players who have the most recent sets. We also have Survival, which is meant for players with a huge card collection of cards, and just recently, we also finally got a mode for new players. What I mean by this is a mode that is a full, free-to-play experience, so any new players who want to try the game can play it without any prior investment and hopefully stick to the game if they enjoy it.
And so, for this week's Community Engagement Challenge, allow me to walk you through the #frontierformat where new battle mage can hone their skills.
Splinterlands was one of the OG Web3 games that has been around for more than 7 years, thanks to the passionate community that continues to support the game ever since it started. But we cannot always rely on the old players to carry the game. Eventually, we will need a new blood that hopefully finds the game enjoyable as we do, and will also start investing in the game. However, for new players to start investing in the game, they should first know whether it is good or not, but how will they know it if they need to first invest in the game, buy or rent assets, before they can try the game?
To give you a real-world example, let's say you want to buy a new car. Before you decide what car to buy, I assume you will first try to test drive the car to see whether it's good to drive or not.
For a long time, Splinterlands did not have an obvious means for new players to test the game without spending money first. Not until recently, when they launched the Frontier Mode, which is fully free-to-play. So now, any new players who want to try the game will be able to do it without before they decide whether they want to have a long-term relationship with the game, invest in assets, and be part of its robust ecosystem.
In order to participate in the Frontier Mode, players must first play the Campaign Mode, which is an interactive PvE mode where not only players can learn the basics of the game but also will earn Foundation Cards. Foundation Cards are the only set that can be used in the Frontier Mode. It was not necessary for players to complete the campaign. You can try to finish up to chapter 11, just to get the most of the summoners and units, but having them all will increase the odds of you winning the battle.
Once you were done with the campaign, you can immediately proceed with playing Frontier Mode. To do this, just switch to Frontier when you go to the battle page.
Unlike other ranked formats, players do not need to have any staked SPS or own/rent cards from other sets. The only thing that they need to have is their Foundation cards, start the battle, and submit their team.
Similar to Modern and Wild Format, Frontier Mode uses the same energy system to limit the number of plays that each players could play, and has a separate energy pool from Modern and Wild. On the other hand though, you cannot purchase energy in Frontier, so it is important to properly manage your energy wisely.
This is because by winning a certain amount of battles, players can claim daily rewards
that will allow them to get more cards that they can use to upgrade their deck as well as to get cards that are not available in the Campaign Mode. To know what cards you are missing, you can filter it on the User Collection page.
Unlike soulbound rewards, Foundation cards can be sold, rent and transfer. Though, if you feel like they may become a problem due to oversupply, that was not entirely the case since this cards cost huge mana to use and has very low stats.
There was also leaderboard rewards for players that achieved high rating, but unlike the other modes where the rewards are Glint, What you can get in Frontier Mode are either Foundation cards or packs. The leaderboard is also capped to Gold League as to match the levels of cards. Last season, I was able to be in the top 27 of the Bronze leaderboard and get 4 foundation cards and this time, I was already competing in top 16, though I can't be so sure if I will be able to maintain it.
Fromntier: Season 1
Fromntier: Season 2 (On- Going)
While I previously said the main target of Frontier Mode are the new players, that doesn't mean that old players cannot play the game. Some may play Frontier just so they can collect the cards, or if they have already used up all their energy in other formats and want to play more battles.
With the Foundation set, being tradeable, there is also a plan for packs to be available in the shop. Currently, the price for each pack is not yet determined, and we might wait for some time for it to be finalized. So, in case players want to complete the set, purely for card collection, but do not want to play Frontier Mode all the time, they will have the option to do it by purchasing packs, perhaps, even to build a max-level Gold Foil Foundation set. Since we also have Black Foils and Arcane cards, it is also possible that we will see them in the Foundation set, but may not give the same bonus in the other rank modes and just purely cosmetic.
With Splinterlands finally having a free-to-play mode, we unlocked another means of onboarding new players to the game, and this time without forcing them to invest in any assets right away. This gives new players the opportunity to better understand the game before fully commit to it.
Thank you and see you on the next post!
This were assets that I edited using Adobe Photoshop and more of this assets were available in this post for anyone who likes to use them.
All the assets and images that I used here belong to Splinterlands.
All the battle links provided come from my personal accounts.
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