The Neglected Evergreen Card

Runi (Runicore) was one of the promo cards under the Chaos Legion set. However, of all the promo cards that we have now, Runi remains to be quite unique because, of all the promo cards and even all the cards in Splinterlands existence, Runi was the first and only NFT card that was minted on the Ethereum blockchain, so the way that it can be bought or sold was through Opensea. The idea was to bridge Ethereum PFP culture with the Hive blockchain. At some point, there were also plans to include a component swapping feature that would allow players with multiple Runi to swap individual parts between their Runi, but it was eventually scrapped.

Nowadays, Runi has been mostly used as a Land utility card with the "Evergreen" status in Modern, so it will always remain a playable card in Modern, but with how Modern battles evolved, just being an evergreen card was just not enough.

Runi is a legendary neutral unit that costs 6 mana to summon. For its abilities, it has the Opportunity ability that will allow it to target the unit with the lowest health, and with True Strike, its attack is guaranteed to not miss. It also has the Deflect ability that makes it immune to blast and return damages. But the cream of the crop of this card was its Rebirth ability that allows it to self-resurrect when defeated. As a promo card, A Runi gives an automatic 10% bonus on ranked rewards, and owning a Runi allows a player to conduct Custom Challenges without paying a fee.

However, because it was not a very strong card, it is barely used in battles, and as long as you have at least 50k SPS, you can play custom challenges without a fee, making Runi obsolete.

When it comes to land, Runi perhaps serves its best use case as an alternative to a Power Core that will enable land to function, saving the player 5000 DEC. At the same time, Runi also functions as a 6th Worker for land, which can typically only have 5 workers, which increases the resource yield of that land while also removing the DEC that is required for a plot to reach 100% production efficiency. And as a max-level Legendary worker, Runi gives a 100% production point boost to a plot that is equivalent to a legendary Totem.

But with the addition of the Inaugural land cards and the Visions of Verico set, which also functions as a replacement for Power Core and reduces DEC staking requirements, Runi was once again overshadowed. In some cases, putting the land cards over Runi brings much more benefit, such as less Grain consumption, the change to get premium foil versions of land cards, winning different skin airdrops, and a change to get more Glint.

Runi used to be an avatar a player could use on their account, but it was removed. Instead, we now have customizable avatars with more custom options added over time. But even if Runi remains as an avatar option, I think players would likely choose to have a customizable avatar, because they could have a better representation of themselves in the game.

With the current Modern meta, Runi was not even a part of the conversation, and its other utilities as a land card, other land card also has, making Runi more and more overshadowed despite its Evergreen status. Maybe at some point, the team will do something to give reasons for holding Runi. Like maybe they could sell Runi parts in the form of skins that could also boost the stats and give additional abilities to the card. But for now, Runi remains to be neglected.

Thank you, and see you on the next post!