Splinterlands is a great game, but getting into Splinterlands is not the easiest or cheapest of endeavors. One of the coolest parts of Splinterlands is upgrading your monsters to increase their stats and gain access to new abilities, but to utilize those improved monsters, you have to have a summoner. Summoners aren't cheap, even with the the Chaos Legion dip. There are plenty of monsters that can be bought/earned and leveled up, but first a new player needs to shell out a significant amount of cash or play in Bronze League until they earn enough to buy one. But what if there was another way? What if players could earn summoners just by playing? What if we could implement it in a way that would retain the value of current summoners?

I present the idea of Shitty Summoners.

How to Earn Them

These cards should be earned through gameplay. They could be added into the reward pools or distributed via another method. I like the idea of getting a bonus for playing a certain number of days in a row. It could be a bonus for moving up a league.

What About the Value of Our Current Summoners?

To protect the value of the current summoners, I propose two solutions. The first is that they are just plain bad compared to their peers. The second is that they are account-bound, like the Gladius cards already are. You would only choose these summoners if you don't have a leveled up summoner for the Splinter AND you have leveled up cards for that Splinter.

How Does this Benefit the Community?

This would help significantly with player retention. The cost of summoners almost kept me from getting into the game and has been directly related to why some of my referrals have stopped playing. They played for a couple weeks and realized that it was going to be a long slog before they would be able to really utilize the multiple copies of their reward cards. Feeling like you are making steady progress towards a consistent goal is rewarding, grinding out dailies on the hope of lucky draw isn't. This would probably have minimal effect on the summoner market, while boosting the monster market. It will be good for all of us Splinterlands asset holders if the game continues to grow.

What Would They Look Like?

The simplest version is high cost summoners that give no benefits other than being able to use your leveled up cards. The only time high mana cost isn't a negative is in really high mana point battles. But there's another more interesting idea.

In this scenario, we make the summoners a normal cost, but give them disabilities (either buffs for the other team or de-buffs their own). We want to make sure that the disabilities are always a negative despite list selection and combat modifiers.

Terrible Tiger - A random monster with an attack value on the opponents team gains Halving.

Cap'n Soggy-Bottom - Two random monsters on the opponents team gain Divine Shield.

Sean The Un-Lucky's team all have -1 to their Health.

Harey Ashhole's oponents never miss, thanks to Bullseye.

The Count makes 2 monsters on the other team so mad they gain Enrage.

Conclusion

Thanks for reading. Please leave a comment with your thoughts below. How do you think these cards would impact the current market? What would be some good disabilities for summoners? Do you have ideas for increasing player retention?

I have submitted a proposal here. If you love this idea, please give it a vote.

Thanks

Thanks to @dark-hamburger for creating the awesome Splinterlandscardmaker.com.

New to Splinterlands?

Use my referal link and buy the Spellbook. I'll delegate you enough Collection Power to start earning DEC for your first week of play. At least until I run out of collection power to delegate.