"Draft Mode is here (beta): open fresh Packs, cut your Deck, climb ...

🃏 New: Draft Mode (beta)

Instead of battling with your collection, you battle with what you open. Buy a Bundle of three Draft Packs and they open into 3 Archons and 60 Monsters. Then comes the draft call: cut 10 Monsters, landing exactly on the 3-Archon, 50-Monster Deck shape. Your new Draft Deck battles in its own Draft queue with its own Rating — Draft Decks only ever face other Draft Decks, so everyone climbs from what they opened, not what they own.

Two kinds of Bundle:

Virtual — draft the whole game. Virtual Draft Packs deal from every playable card in Splinterlands, including Foundations. Cards far too scarce or valuable for most collections turn up here, and they are yours to battle with for the whole run. A Virtual Draft Deck lives 10 battles, and the Bundle costs a tenth of a Real one.

Real — the cards are yours to keep. Real Draft Packs hold real cards off the house shelf: all 63 are delivered on-chain to your Splinterlands collection — the 3 Archons and every one of the 60 Monsters, even the 10 you cut. Yours forever, long after the Draft Deck's 20 battles are spent. And the Bundle's Talisman arrives already Engraved, no fee.

Inside every Draft Pack (Tier 1 — the Bronze band):

1 Archon and 20 Monsters it can lead — 3 of them guaranteed Neutral.

Guaranteed 1 Legendary and 1 Epic, plus 3 Rares and 15 Commons — drawn from across the editions, including Foundations.

Cards arrive combined to the Bronze band — Commons at Level 3, Rares and Epics at Level 2, Legendaries at Level 1 — real levelled cards, not loose singles, and the Pack's Archon plays every one of them at full Level. Higher Tiers come later.

Your chance of opening a Draft Pack with a Legendary Archon is 1 in 100.

A Bundle never repeats itself: 3 different Archons and 60 different Monsters, never a duplicate — plus a Talisman guaranteed Tier 2 or higher (kept forever with a Real Bundle, dealt for the run with a Virtual one).

Draft battles work exactly like Ranked: 1 🎟 a match, and every win rolls a real card prize the moment it ends. Bundle prices are quoted live from the cards on the shelf, paid in DEC with one Keychain signature.

Find it under Draft in the top menu — or the new Draft tile in the battle lobby, which now lines up cleanly alongside Practice and Ranked. It's a beta: if anything feels off, comment below and we'll look at it quickly.

🖼 Every page wears its own engraving

The backgrounds behind Splinterlanes are original vector works traced from centuries-old public-domain engravings — Dürer behind the battles, Cellarius behind the lobby. Until now several pages shared one plate; today every page got the artwork made for it: the Tutorial, Talismans, the Market, your Match History — and Draft Mode wears a brand-new plate traced from the oldest engraved playing cards in existence, the Master of the Playing Cards' Nine of Beasts of Prey, cut around 1440. Nine lions and bears for a mode about drafting Monsters felt right.

⚙ Sharper matchmaking and lobby

Ranked matchmaking now always searches for at least 10 seconds — the short wait lets the matchmaker pick you a closer-rated opponent when several players are queueing.

The lobby's top-prize showcase now shows the card's Level and BCX, so a combined card's value makes sense at a glance.

Dropping a card onto the enemy's half of a Lane has always counted — your Monster simply musters on your own side of the battle line. Now the game makes that obvious: your half pulses and a message confirms the placement.

New here? The full guide lives at How to Play Splinterlanes, and every battle costs a single $0.01 ticket with 98% of revenue flowing back as prizes.

See you at the Draft table.