Losing every Monster on the board is the worst moment in a Splinterlanes match. Second Wind exists so that it is not the last one. Today it changes in two ways, both live now.
What Second Wind is
If a battle round ends with one player holding zero Monsters anywhere while the opponent still has some, battles pause for three placement rounds. Mana keeps flowing for both sides, and the wiped player places every round of the pause, so they come back with a stack of Monsters rather than feeding them into a wall one at a time. The Monsters they place during the pause arrive with protective buffs that grow with each wipe.
That part is unchanged. What changed is what the other side may do during the pause, and how strong the buffs are.
The other side's board now holds
Until today, both players kept placing during the pause. The side that had just won the board could keep building through all three rounds, so the recovering side often returned to a board that had grown while they rebuilt.
Now the unwiped side's board holds at 3 Monsters during the pause. With 3 or more standing, they place nothing until battles resume. With fewer, they may place until 3 stand. Their Mana keeps ticking the whole time, so nothing is lost; it waits. The wiped side is unaffected and places every round as before.
Tapping a card while your board is held tells you why, and the banner across the top of the board says whether you hold or may still place.
Stronger buffs at every step
The protective buffs the wiped side's placements arrive with are stronger at every tier, and there are now five tiers instead of three. Each wipe keeps everything from the one before and adds more:
| Wipe | Buffs on the wiped side's placements during the pause |
|---|---|
| 1st | Divine Shield + Thorns |
| 2nd | Divine Shield + Thorns + Shield + Void |
| 3rd | + Magic Reflect |
| 4th | + Return Fire |
| 5th and later | + Heal |
As before, these re-apply every battle round for as long as the Monster lives, so a granted Divine Shield absorbs one hit per round, not one hit ever. Thorns from the very first wipe is the big one: a re-entry stack that bleeds its attacker every hit changes what the leader can safely do next.
A wipe is still a bad place to be. It should now be a much better place to fight back from, and a leader who gets careless after a wipe can lose a match they had in hand.
Why
Three-lane battles reward getting ahead, and getting ahead compounds: the leader's Lanes fight the recovering side's trickle one Monster at a time. The pause already answered the trickle; the hold and the deeper buffs answer the compounding. We want the match after a wipe to be a fresh fight, not a formality.
The full rules of Second Wind, with the rest of the game, are in how to play Splinterlanes, which was updated today.
Also since the last post
- Last Stand is now earned. A Monster gains it when an ally in its Lane falls, keeps it while it stands alone, and loses it when the Lane is reinforced. Placing a Monster alone in a Lane no longer grants it.
- The Talisman panel on the battlefront now opens in front of the figures on the Lane. It was hiding behind them.
Questions, bug reports and replays of your best comeback are welcome in the comments. Sign in with Hive Keychain at splinterlanes.com and your Splinterlands collection is already a Deck away.