✦ Last update we told you the board stands up. This post is about how — where the figures come from, what they do from the moment you deploy them to the moment they fall, and why an arrow will never look like a spell.
New here? Splinterlanes is three-lane battles for your real Splinterlands collection: tickets cost $0.01, winners roll real cards, delivered on-chain. How to play · Battle now
Every figure on the battlefront is cut whole from original Splinterlands card art — the same illustrations on the cards you own, from every era of the game, freed from the frame. No redraws, no stand-ins: when your Monster steps into the Lane, it's that Monster, the one the artist painted.
The numbers, because we're proud of them: 882 of 884 playable Monsters and 105 of 106 Archons have their figure today. The last few stragglers simply show their printed card until their cut makes the grade — a figure that can't pass our quality checks stays benched rather than fight badly cut.
A figure isn't a one-off flourish. It rises once, and stays — swaying on its feet while it waits, stepping up when its turn comes, flinching when it's struck, and falling only when it dies. Deploy to death, your card is a combatant on the field, not a portrait in a slot.
The stats never left, either. Every figure stands inside its card's placard, so speed, armor, health and carried effects stay readable at a glance while the fight plays out around them.
One rule shaped every attack in the system: ranged and magic must never read alike. A ranged Monster looses a real, physical arrow that crosses the Lane and lands. A magic user hurls something larger and stranger — a haloed orb that glows all the way to its target. (A screenshot can't hold an arrow in flight — watch for it in your next battle.)
And every effect — projectiles, impacts, auras, the motes when a Monster falls — is drawn in that card's own colours, sampled from its artwork. A Fire charge burns red-gold; a Water bolt glows cold. Two Lanes fighting side by side look like two different battles, because they are.
Beyond the shared choreography, individual cards carry hand-tuned performances of their own — dozens of staples already act out bespoke beats, matched to what the card actually does.
Your Archons don't sit the battle out. Each one stands at its Lane's end — a head taller than the troops, as an Archon should be — with its name and its buff printed clearly on a band beneath, so you always know exactly what it's granting the Lane.
If you bring a Gold Foil, everyone will know it. Gold Foil copies wear a gilded frame with a slow shimmer sweeping across card and figure alike; Black Foil wears an obsidian-violet gleam of its own; the Arcane tiers run deeper still, a violet edge that sets a Gold Arcane apart from a plain Gold Foil at a glance. On the battlefront, shiny finally looks shiny.
The figures fight on desktop and phone alike — portrait mode gives each figure its own window on the Lane strip, stats uncropped. And because battles are rendered from their match logs, your replays got the upgrade retroactively: open any old match from your History and watch it fought the new way.
The card art that made this possible belongs to Splinterlands and its artists — we just taught it to stand up. If a figure of yours misbehaves — a bad cut, a strange pose, anything — comment below with the card's name. Player reports already shape these waves, and we read every one. ⚔️
