As this is unlikely to ever happen again for me, I thought I would write a little about the latest craze in Splinterlands that I am late to the party on - Survival mode. The idea is pretty cool, though I don't know all the ins and outs of it at the moment. Essentially, you play the line up and if you lose, all of your cards go into a cooldown phase and can't be played for some length of time (which I am not sure about). But even if you lose a single card, that card goes into a cooldown too. Some low level cards I saw had 9 days cooldown on them! But the max gold Acid Shooter I lost, had 36 hours on it.

Is there a list of times somewhere?

Oh and you can't play the cooldown cards anywhere.

Which I remembered after I lost the Acid Shooter.

I was 19 for 19 and lost the single card on the way and then remembered....

Brawls!

Luckily, I have a spare regular foil Acid Shooter anyway, but it would have been pretty embarrassing to turn up to brawls empty-carded. So I put down my suicidal tendencies for a little bit and submitted my Teams for the current Brawl - which has a bit over a day left.

Then back to jumping off cliffs.

Damn it.... I got to this point and I won the last round so I am 32/32, but it was a poison round and I lost cards. I am now down four cards. And I think the competition is getting harder now too. I have a pretty decent set for modern, but hardly anything for Wild, and almost zero extras. Cards that go on cooldown, are all playable cards.

But, I am not going to play the end of the modern season.

And it is a bit of a problem, because I think a lot of people aren't playing in Modern at the moment, because the Leaderboard rewards have gone from DEC to Glint. The people who were in the rewards (very rarely me) already earn a crapload of Glint. There is still SPS on offer from each win. but supposedly the SPS coming from Survival Mode in these early days well outperforms it. It can reach into the hundreds of SPS for a single win.

The most I have got is 10 SPS.

One of those has a good win ratio.

And I am guessing that bots are allowed in Survival? The longest streak I can see in the top 100 is 63, but many are doing really well, as I am guessing they too are coming up against heavily depleted sets that have a lot of cards on cooldown.

And some have a lot of cards

I don't know if I am doing the right thing playing my playing set, but I guess since it is the end of the season, it should be okay if I play now and perhaps most of the cards will be back in the rotation come start of next season. I say "perhaps" because I still don't know how long the cooldowns are.

It'll be fine.

And, it looks like it has had some effect on the card markets, as people are picking up as many of the very cheap (from when I bought at least) cards to burn through rounds. There are heaps of reward cards out there, and I am guessing that people are going to be soaking them up and combining them for the higher leagues as they get opened up. I won't be doing that, even though it has been fun to play with this level of "risk" a bit. If however I am able to get high enough in a league to have a few days of Survival - I will walk along the edge of the cliff once again.