Soulbound Reward Cards Will Feature A Full Set of Rare Summoners!

A few hours ago Splinterlands published an article detailing what to expect from the upcoming soulbound reward cards. You can get all the juicy details from the article, so I'm not going to rehash what it has to say. Instead, I want to focus on one point that I found pretty interesting among all the other information it contained: Among the 43 new reward cards that will be introduced by the end of the month, there is going to be a full set of 6 Summoners! These will be of rare rarity and there will be one Summoner for each Splinter expect neutral.

These summoners will be 6 mana, have a minor stat boost like +1 Speed, +1 Health, and so on and will each come with the new conscript ability, allowing players to field one Gladiator card when composing their team. Frankly, I'm not sure yet how powerful that's actually going to be. Obviously there are some really powerful Gladiators out there, but paying 6 mana for a chance to play one and a minor stat boost seems like quite the ask. For just one mana more you could be playing a Byantine Kitty or a Yodin Zaku, which arguably boost your regular cards by quite a bit.

Either way, this should have some interesting implications as it's the first time that a whole set of Summoners can be acquired by just playing the game. Ever since its inception, Summoners kinda acted as a gate keeper for advancing your deck. You could always grow it with different reward cards, but if you wanted to be competitive, you always had to buy Summoners coming from packs. Now you'll obviously be at a somewhat major disadvantage if all you have is a 6 mana summoner of (at least sometimes) questionable efficiency, but especially at lower levels, this will allow players to play their higher level (reward) cards without having to buy a corresponding Summoner first.

There's more to it than just gameplay implications, though, and that part is even more interesting to me personally. We don't know the exact details yet, but what we do know is that working your plots of land eventually will require a Summoner and several monsters. So far, preparing for monsters was pretty easy. Anybody that paid any attention should hopefully be set up in terms of monsters. With reward cards trading below burn value for several weeks, I for one picked up all the monsters I'm going to need in order to run my whole region. Summoners on the other hand have still been really expensive. Right now, the cheapest max level Summoner starts somewhere around the $90 mark while you can still buy maxed reward cards for about $3.

As an obvious effect, I still need a lot more Summoners in order to work all my land at peak efficiency. Now this is all speculation, but I somewhat expect land buildings to work like Summoners in terms of limiting what level of cards you are allowed to play. Because of that, I fully expect that lower level summoners will suffice initially and that you'll only need a max level copy once you've maxed out your land building. That's the most important reason why I haven't bought too many max level Summoners yet, and that's also something that would come in really handy with these new Summoners.

As indicated in the blog post, the upcoming reward cards will run for at least a year, maybe longer. At the same time, playable land is probably still at least 6 months away. That would provide me with ample time to acquire as many reward Summoners as possible. Let's math it out a bit and see where we end up. For starters, here are the updated loot tables for the upcoming release:

As you can see, regardless of what league you play in, each chest will have a 33% chance to be a reward card and each of these cards will have a 20% chance to be rare. There are another 6 rare cards in the set, so only every second rare reward drop will actually be a summoner. That means that 0.33 * 0.2 * 0.5 = 0.033 or 3.3% of all chests will contain Summoners. Taking into account my season reward chests, I usually earn about 12 chests per day, so every 2.5 days I should be greeted by a Summoner in my rewards.

Now the magic question is what is the multiplier looking for reward cards at higher levels? There's not too much to go buy yet, but I expect it to be substantial in Diamond and especially in Champion. For one, the multipliers for Merits, SPS, and Potions are pretty big already. And the article also states that you could get multiple gold foil legendary cards from a single chest. Lastly, with 43 reward cards around, maxing them all out is going to take really long if the multipliers are too low. So I would expect something like 10 copies for Diamond and 20 copies for Champion could very well be a realistic number. I usually spend a little bit more than half my season in Diamond and the rest of it in Champion, so I'll go with something in between and assume 15 copies per Summoner I find.

Putting all together, that would mean that I can expect about 180 BCX worth of Summoners every month from my chests. With at least 6 more months to go, that means that I'm looking at roughly 1,080 Summoners before land phase 2 gets released. And fun enough, that's more than I would need to at least assign a level 1 Summoner to each of my plots. While the first few upgrades probably come fast, I fully expect it to take several years before I get all my land plots to max level giving me a lot of time to acquire more Summoners as I go. So in essence, while these numbers are made up and could turn out worse than what I expected, these new Summoners should help immensely with getting my land set up and working, at least initially. Mid to long term, I probably won't be able to rely on reward Summoners alone, but either way, this should make my life as a land lord way way easier. Exciting times!

And that's all from me for today. Thank you all for reading and see you next time!