Hey everyone and welcome back to my Splinterlands blog, it's that time of the week to start making another blog post for this weeks Social Media Challenge, which is the same as last weeks:

🔥 Share Your Most Remarkable Splinterlands Moments: Do you possess a battle of epic proportions that deserves to be seen by all? Have you crafted something extraordinary within the Splinterlands realm? Maybe you've got profound thoughts, insights, or strategies related to stats, cards, abilities, or gameplay that are waiting to be shared? We want it all, and we want it to be nothing short of AMAZING!

And well.. with the team working so hard to improve the game there's no such thing as no epic moments in the last months 😆 actually, it's choosing which is more epic to write about!

To find out how you can participate in the challenge yourself, check out the splinterlands post here.

The biggest thing for me this week was brought by the team after the last update cycle on maintenance last Tuesday, It's been spoken of many times now but I really not expected this to be done this soon, but it's VERY important so the team put priority to this, well done @splinterlands team!

What am I talking about? Splinterlands now has a free to play option! The title in my thumbnail was a little clickbait because it's not ALL free to play of course, but the problem in the past was you couldn't do a lot in the game until you bought the $10 spellbook, and while it's not much for some people I can totally understand why this is a deterrent for a lot of people because you don't know if you like it yet, if it's something for you and now you have to pay first and try it out later!? - NO MORE!

Of course you can now say 'a trading card game auto battler is nothing for me' but you don't know if you never try, many players here are TCG die hards and played similar games like heartstone before, but for me, I had NEVER played a trading card game before, I was always in to the nerdy stuff, playing VGA Planets a lot when I was young, and later different versions of pokemon but I could not have imagined for myself to become a die hard trading card game player to be honest, but like many things in life... you can't know if you haven't tried it!

Free-To-Play experience improvements!

• All players can now earn Glint from their Ranked victories starting in Bronze league!

• The base “modifier” for Glint is now 1x, even with no SPS staked, this means you can start earning reward cards to level up you deck without any upfront costs.

• The Starter Card penalty for earning Glint has been removed, previous you would receive less glint if you didn't own the cards, starter cards are 'borrowed' cards from splinterlands, meant for starting players.

• All players can now earn League advancement rewards, meaning when you promote between leagues, for example from bronze 2 to bronze 1, you will receive a certain amounts of chests for you to open which can contain various items like cards, battle energy, potions to improve future chest openings chances of getting better items and merits you can use to buy special Gladiator cards with.

• A Spellbook is no longer required: to join a guild, earn Glint from ranked play, purchase Credits, purchase cards, receive gifts of packs or cards, receive card delegations, participate in Brawls and earn Merits, rent cards seasonally, combine cards, open packs, or purchase Rewards from the shop with Glint. Meaning you can do MOST things in the game so you can experience how it's like without any upfront costs, this is more like the web2 version of the game, you earn glint to level up your cards and expend your card deck so you can win more battles, earn more glint and on and on!

• A Spellbook is still required to: sell cards, transfer cards, delegate cards, list cards for rent, hold Dark Energy Crystals (DEC) or Splintershards (SPS), enter a Tournament, create or own a guild, hit Jackpot rewards, access Land, access Soulkeep, and earn SPS rewards. Meaning after you've decided you're actually enjoying the game and want to dive deeper in to it you can now upgrade your already existing account you starting to level up in the free version to now earn full rewards, the game now becomes the web3 version basically meaning you can now earn real world value from playing in the form of SPS or cards you can later unlock for a fee so you can sell them.

• New users can now pick a name as long as it does not conflict with an existing account. It will get suffixed with _lite, which can be removed when a Spellbook is purchased.

Why this is such a huge thing?

Most other games in the crypto space already had a free to play version, and it's an important step for attracting new players in to the game. With all the improvements made to the game in the last months like fighting off the bot farms, improving gameplay, adding different rulesets and much much more this was the missing part of the puzzle the game needs to start growing, with crypto in general now taking of I think everyone in the space is quite happy at this point, and hopefully with some earnings they can start diving in to the game when they like it, it is how I started with splinterlands over three years ago, with earnings I made in another crypto game I started my splinterlands journey, one more important thing is that in my play2earn journey I started in 2020, many games came and went, and many has died (leaving players with worthless assets - it happened to me too) but with all problems faced, splinterlands has still survived, it's why I decided not to try out new web3 games but stick to the proven OG game called splinterlands. 🙂

It's almost like with bitcoin, many, many times people said it was dead, same with splinterlands - tons of comments on various platforms, the game is dead and people sold their assets and moved on (which is a great thing on it's own that this is possible, when you want to stop, you can sell your assets) now some of them are already returning because they see all the good things being done here, and the best thing is.. we're just getting started!

Interested already!? please consider using my referral link to sign up, I'll happily send the amount I get for your signup back to you in DEC or SPS to help you start, also when you just start as a free to play player, let me know and I'll answer any questions you have to improve your starting and gaming experience!

Are all problems gone?

Hmmm... I don't see everything as a problem but no, not everything is peachy just yet but it's being worked at! The biggest change that's about the come in April 2025 is the arrival of the new set Conclave Arcana, so we have to be patient for a while.
In the past, mistakes have been made, one of the mistakes currently having a big effect on the game is the Chaos Legion set being so dead cheap making Modern League very top heavy, meaning a lot of players are playing with a maxed out set (including myself) and while the earnings are pretty nice for me at this point, this is not how the game is meant, because at this point most of the players play in the higher leagues.

With the arrival of the new set, I will be forced to become a Bronze or Silver player again when I want to keep playing in Modern because I simply can't afford to be a high level player anymore, which is perfectly fine on it's own because many players with me will have the same issue (I'm not calling this a problem because it's not) so after the launch of the new set, there will be a lot more players in the lower leagues again including myself.

Planning ahead

I made a post about this topic a while ago, with this big change coming it's important for existing players to plan ahead for this.

My situation is this: I play two accounts, my main has (well at this point HAD) max CL summoners and when I bought them, it was almost cheaper to buy them at max level them to upgrade my gold levels to max, and this way I would be able to delegate the gold level summoners to my alt account, so I did exactly that - and while my alt is missing a lot of the strong legendary cards it's fun to play it and will mostly reach Gold 3 at the end of the season.

After the change, this will probably mean this account with the max set will be playing in wild, maybe I will let a bot play it or I do it manually I have not decided this part yet and I will be playing my alt account @nozem in modern so I need to invest in to the Rebellion set and the new set, Conclave Arcana. I do this with earnings from posts like this one as well as some personal funds I put in to the game every month.

The reality was, this account, playing with the max set was earning between 120 and 180k glint every season, so it was able to buy a lot of the common, rare and epic cards and level them up until the point they got pretty strong, it has some legendary cards too but I feel they're not as important on this set, at least not when they're lower level.

The 'problem' for my alt account was, it wasn't earning enough glint for me to be able to build a big collection of reward cards with, meaning it was low on epic cards and it didn't had a single legendary card....

Switching around!

So, planning for the future already meant I needed to make some changes so I switched the cards between my two accounts, which was about two hours of work, looking at which account needed which cards, delegating back and forth and then waiting out the cooldown before I was able to play again, a tedious job but an important one!

So now, with about five or six months left before the big change, meaning around ten to twelve seasons I hopefully can earn around 150k glint, I can level up my reward deck to max silver level, it's where I aim to be at one point, I don't know if it's affordable to me just yet but we will see how it goes, I never expected to be a max level player and yet, here I am for the time being, just working hard and maximizing my earnings and maybe, just who knows I can be in modern gold some day!

Conclusion

With all the improvements the team is making like this latest free to play version but also being able to play the game on a smartphone (an app will be launched later) I think there's a bright future ahead for everyone in the splinterverse.
Bitcoin at the moment is $90,652 so I think it's safe to say the next bull cycle is confirmed, things might become a little crazy from now on, if this is your first bull market, remember to take profits on the way up!

'But what if the price keeps pumping!?'

This is always a possibility, but when you don't do anything until the bull cycle is over you're just back where we are now, every bull cycle have big crashes as well, just perfectly normal and a good moment to buy back in with (part of) your profits, but, like everything is crypto, this all is not financial advice, I'm just a random guy on the internet making my own journey, and always do your own research!

Well, thanks for reading trough everything if you've made it this far, with one day and four hours left in this splinterlands season, I have some work to do, I plan on draining both of my accounts battle energy to zero before the end of the day!

Thank you for reading!!!

If you haven't made an account already, please consider using my referral link to sign up, I'll happily send the amount I get for your signup back to you in DEC or SPS to help you start.

Have a great day!