These are exciting times in Praetoria. Splinterlands has a pending release of a new set of rewards cards coming in October. There is also a potential new miniset to be released later this year.

Because of that, it feels like a good time to freshen up and resurface the ideas for new card abilities that I posted almost three years ago. These ideas were gathered from guild members and messages I had seen in Discord.

A few ideas from that post made it into the game. Probably just by coincidence, as I doubt anyone from the team saw that post. The name "mimic" was used but the ability is different. The "medic" ability (Cleanse Rearguard) also made it into the game. That was a fairly obvious idea and perhaps inevitable that it would eventually be added.

Image generated with Google AI Studio. Prompt: Make a new icon inspired by Splinterlands for this ability. It's A Trap!: When an enemy monster attacks this monster, it triggers a trap, applying a debuff.

Ideas for New Card Abilities 💡

Here is an updated list of ideas for new card abilities. I've added icons (courtesy of Google AI Studio) and refined some of the names and descriptions.

Icon	Name	Effect
	Decay	Reduces armor by 2 every round. Like poison for armor.
	Trap	When an enemy monster attacks this monster, it triggers a trap, applying a debuff.
	Assail	Targets a monster with any healing ability.
	Confusion	A monster hit with confusion has a 50% chance of attacking a friendly monster.
	Quicksand	Like slow and changes based on the ruleset. Increases your opponent's speed for reverse speed or slows them in standard rules. To differentiate from slow, this could have double the impact (-2 or +2) speed.
	Plague	If any monster on the team is poisoned, the poison spreads to one monster each round. Similar to "Incendiary."
	Paralyze	A super-stun. A monster hit with paralyze cannot attack for the remainder of the battle unless cleansed. Or perhaps is stunned for two rounds.
	Replicate	Replaces the monster in the tank position (with the mimic ability) with a copy of the opponent's tank monster.
	Certainty	All RNG abilities on friendly monsters have 100% chance to proc instead of 50% (poison, retaliate, etc)

What are your thoughts about these abilities?

Which one would you most like to see included in the future?

Your Ideas

It would be easy to prompt an AI model to generate dozens more ideas for new abilities, but that isn't very fun and takes away from our own creativity. I'm curious to know if the community has any ideas for other new abilities that might pair well with Conclave Arcana and Rebellion.

The last time I posted about new abilities, @mattclarke added a few of his own ideas in the comments. Most of these probably fit more as a new ruleset than an ability, but I still like them a lot. I wish I had remembered to include them in my post about more rule sets.