The Rebellion is Coming!
It has been years since the invasion of Chaos and the rise of an Empire. The cries of anguish have been replaced with the silence of oppression.
And yet…there are whispers of rebellion. The Defiant are gathering in the secret places, and a single word is fervently uttered in the dark alleys, rural homesteads, taverns, caves, and towns across Praetoria..
VONAK.
Together, We Rise.
The Splinterlands team is extremely excited to announce the release of our fifth core edition — Rebellion! The Rebellion set will be our most ambitious card set release ever as it introduces mutliple entirely new elements to Splinterlands gameplay that will provide more player agency and engagement to the game.
The Rebellion set will consist of 96 cards, including two limited-edition promo cards available only during the Rebellion presale, and nine Legendary airdrop cards which will be distributed via a completely re-imagined system that will incentivize players to hold on to their Rebellion packs and cards in order to receive the rewards.
Additionally, when the Rebellion set is released the Untamed set — including Azmare Dice and all related reward and promo cards — will no longer be allowed in Modern format battles. This will be the first time that a set has rotated out of the Modern format since the format was introduced, and we are excited to see Modern format collections become significantly more affordable and accessible to a much wider audience.
Rebellion Booster Pack Details & Pricing
Each Rebellion booster pack will contain five randomly selected cards from the Rebellion set, with at least one guaranteed rare card. The two limited edition promo cards will not be available in packs, nor will the nine airdrop cards until after each airdrop occurs. The chances of receiving cards of each rarity, or of receiving a Gold Foil version of a card, are the same as in the past. Legendary and Alchemy potions may be used to increase the chances of receiving Legendary or Gold Foil cards at the same rates as previous sets as well.
Each Rebellion booster pack will have a base price of 5000 Credits or 5000 DEC, and purchasers may spend VOUCHER tokens in order to receive a discount on the base price. Each VOUCHER token used will reduce the price by 200 Credits / DEC and the maximum discount available using VOUCHER tokens will be 20%. This means that with the maximum available VOUCHER discount, each pack will cost 4000 Credits or DEC plus 5 VOUCHER tokens.
Considering the price of DEC and VOUCHER tokens on various external markets at the time of writing, the total USD cost for a Rebellion booster pack, not including bulk bonuses described below, will be roughly $3.10.
There will also be bonus packs available for bulk purchases, however the bonus amounts will be reduced somewhat from the levels in previous pack sales. Purchases of 100 or more Rebellion booster packs from the Splinterlands shop in a single transaction will be eligible for 5% additional packs at a cost of 5 VOUCHER tokens each. At 500 packs or more the bonus eligibility increases to 10%, and at 2,000 packs or more the bonus eligibility increases to 15%.
The reduction in bonus pack amounts will help reduce the rate at which bulk purchasers can undercut the shop on the secondary market, which should help maintain pack and card values and encourage more sales to go through the shop. This should ultimately benefit both the company and the players through the proposed revenue split on Rebellion pack purchases with the DAO.
Rebellion Presale
500,000 (500k) Rebellion booster packs will be made available for sale before the set is released. The presale is scheduled to begin on Wednesday, October 18th, at 2:00 PM ET / 18:00 UTC in the shop section of the Splinterlands website. The presale will continue for 30 days or until all 500,000 presale packs are sold out, whichever comes first. The pricing of the presale packs will be the same as during the general sale as listed above, however packs purchased during the presale will be eligible for a number of limited-edition bonus rewards.
Please note that Rebellion booster packs purchased during the presale will not be able to be opened until the Rebellion set is released, however they will be able to be transferred, bought, and sold on the various Splinterlands assets marketplaces. Any packs out of the 500k that are not sold by the time the presale phase ends will be burned.
Presale Leaderboard Prizes
The top six accounts with the most total Rebellion booster packs purchased through the Splinterlands shop during the presale phase will win the opportunity to participate in the design of a Legendary Summoner card which will be one of the nine airdrop cards to be added into the Rebellion set. This is an amazing opportunity to get your own character design added into Splinterlands lore forever!
The account with the top spot on the presale leaderboard will be able to choose the Element (or possibly Elements?) for their Legendary Summoner design first, and the remaining five winners will choose the Element for their Summoners in order of their leaderboard position from the options remaining.
Additionally, the accounts in the top 250 spots on the presale leaderboard at the time that the presale ends will earn an in-game title based on their leaderboard position. The titles awarded will be as follows:
- Position 1–30 — “The Dawnbringer” Legendary Title
- Position 31–100 — “The Defiant” Epic Title
- Position 101–250 — “The Rebel” Rare Title
Presale Limited Edition Promo Cards
In addition to the leaderboard prizes listed above, players who purchase Rebellion packs during the presale will also be eligible to receive not one, but two new limited edition promo cards! These cards will ONLY be minted during the Rebellion presale, they will not be included in Rebellion booster packs, so the only way to get them is to purchase packs during the Rebellion presale, or buy them on the market later from someone else who did.
For every 10 Rebellion booster packs purchased during the presale, including bonus packs available with bulk purchases, players will receive one Grimbardun Smith Neutral Rare card! Each Grimbardun Smith card received will have a 4% chance of being a Gold Foil version of the card, and players will be guaranteed to receive at least one Gold Foil version of the card for every 250 Rebellion booster packs purchased during the presale.
On top of that, every single Rebellion booster pack purchased during the presale will have a 1% chance of receiving a Mantaroth Neutral Legendary card! Players will be guaranteed to receive at least one Mantaroth card for each 100 Rebellion booster packs purchased and at least one Gold Foil Mantaroth card for each 2,500 Rebellion booster packs purchased during the presale. Each Mantaroth card will also have a 4% chance of being a Gold Foil version of the card.
You may have also noticed that the Rebellion cards feature a completely redesigned card frame that really allows the amazing artwork to shine through. The Splinterlands creative team did an amazing job with this new look and we can’t wait to see how the new Rebellion cards transform the look of the website and the battlefield!
Rebellion Set Release & General Sale
The Rebellion set is currently scheduled to be released on Tuesday, December 5th, during the regularly scheduled maintenance period. At this point all packs purchased during the presale will be able to be opened, all of the new cards and mechanics will be added to the game, the Untamed set will rotate out of Modern format, and players will be able to claim their rewards from the Rebellion presale.
The general sale of Rebellion booster packs will also begin at this time. There will be a total of 9.5M Rebellion packs available during the general sale, and the pricing and bulk purchase bonuses will be the same as described in the pricing section above.
Every day, starting on the date that the Rebellion set is released, if fewer than 25,000 (25k) Rebellion booster packs are sold that day, the remainder of the booster packs (up to 25k total) will be removed from the sale pool. Of the packs removed from the sale pool each day, 90% will be burned and 10% will be sent to the DAO for use in future promotions or however the SPS token holders wish. For example, if 8,000 Rebellion booster packs are sold in one day, then at the end of the day an additional 15,300 Rebellion booster packs will be burned and 1,700 Rebellion booster packs will be sent to the @sps.dao account.
This ensures that the set will be sold out within at most roughly one year from the date that the general sale begins, regardless of how many Rebellion booster packs are sold during the general sale. This will allow the market to ultimately determine the amount of Rebellion packs and cards there will be in circulation in total.
New Abilities
The Rebellion edition will feature four new unit abilities which should open up a host of new battle strategies and combinations for players to use, and that players will need to watch out for from their opponents! Each new ability is described below and we can’t wait to see how they will shake up the arena:
- Armored Strike — Any unit with this ability gains an ADDITIONAL Melee attack using its Armor stat. This allows characters to improvise with deadly force, using their gauntlets, shields, helmets, or perhaps physical attributes (spikes, hard shells, etc) as weapons!
- Corrosive Ward — When hit with a Melee attack, a unit with this ability does 2 damage to the attacker’s Armor AND reduces the max Armor of the attacker by 2. This is the nemesis to the Repair ability. You can’t Repair something that’s been melted into acidic goo! Note that this only affects units with Armor.
- Flank — If the unit with this ability is in the first position, then the unit in the second position gains the Reach ability. Prepare to leverage positioning and the element of surprise. Now your first two units can work together to bring down the enemy tank!
- Lookout — A unit with this ability results in adjacent allies taking one less damage from attackers with Sneak, Snipe, and Opportunity. Give your team a heads-up when stalkers approach from the shadows. It’s always a good idea to have a Lookout!
Multi-Element Summoners & Summoner Tactics
While the new Rebellion unit abilities will bring some exciting new gameplay into the Splinterlands arena, it is in the new Summoner mechanics where the Rebellion set truly shines. The Rebellion set will feature five Rare Summoners and one Legendary Dragon Summoner, in addition to six Legendary Summoners designed by the top six pack purchasers during the presale.
We are planning for some (but not necessarily all) of the Summoners in the set to be dual-element — meaning that they can Summon cards from two of the five basic Splinterlands elements together on the same team, plus Neutral cards as always. The Dragon Summoners in the set will not be dual-element beyond their normal ability to summon both Dragon cards as well as cards from any other single element.
These new, dual-element Summoners will typically come with a higher Mana cost than their single-element counterparts, so players will need to decide whether or not it is worth spending the extra mana to have a larger card pool available to draw from. In battles with very restrictive rulesets, dual-element Summoners may be a no-brainer, but in more open rulesets it may be better to have extra Mana available for the rest of the team. It’s up to you to decide!
In addition to featuring dual-element Summoners, the Rebellion edition will also introduce a game-changing new mechanic known as Summoner Tactics. Summoner cards with this new mechanic will have two different sets of buffs or debuffs that are available for the player to choose from after both players have revealed their teams! It is currently planned that most, if not all, of the Summoners that are part of the Rebellion set will have the Tactics mechanic.
For example, a Summoner could have a choice of giving a single target the Shield ability, OR giving an entire team -1 Ranged attack. After both players have revealed their teams, players who chose a Summoner with tactics choices will see both teams laid out on the battlefield and will have an additional minute where they can choose which tactic they want to use, and to which target or targets they should be applied! Please note that this example is for illustrative purposes only and the final Summoner stats will be revealed as Rebellion nears release.
In the above example, the player would need to look at the enemy team and if it was Melee-heavy then it would probably be better to give a single friendly unit the Shield ability, however if the enemy team has more Ranged attack, then it might be better to give the entire enemy team -1 Ranged attack. To make things even more interesting, if the enemy team features some units with the Forcefield ability, it may even be better to apply the -1 Ranged attack to your own team in order to get their attacks below 5 damage so they won’t be deflected by the enemy’s Forcefield!
Hopefully you can see from just this one example how vast the possibilities for this new mechanic are, and how much this will completely change the dynamics of Splinterlands battles! This new mechanic will ONLY be available when using the new Rebellion Summoners for now, so you’ll want to make sure you have them ready for battle in your collection.
For those of you thinking that these new Summoners will make all of the existing Summoners obsolete, rest assured that we will do our best to make sure that the ability choices and Mana cost of the new Summoners are balanced in such a way that the older Summoners will still be competitive, if not clearly the better choice, in many situations. That’s ultimately what Splinterlands battles are all about — choosing the best options for the given situation!
Some of you may also note that this new mechanic seems similar to what we have been planning for the Item and Spell cards that will eventually be produced through the Secret of Praetoria land expansion — and you would be correct. This same system of making choices post-team-reveal is planned to be used for Item and Spell cards in the future, and this new Summoner Tactics mechanic will give players an early taste of what Items and Spells will be like and how they will completely redefine the way Splinterlands battles are played!
Finally, we want to note that for asynchronous battles, such as most tournaments and guild brawls, players may still use the new Summoners, however they will not be able to wait until the opponent’s team is revealed before choosing their Tactic. In the future, when post-team-reveal decisions become more commonplace, we plan to extend asynchronous battles to add a second phase for post-team-reveal decisions, but for the time being they will stay as they are and the Summoner Tactic, if available, will need to be chosen before being able to see the enemy team.
Airdrop Conflicts
As if there wasn’t already enough exciting new things that are part of the Rebellion set, we are adding one more, which is a complete revamp of how the airdrop system works. In the past, players who purchased packs would simply receive airdrop cards based on the number of packs they originally purchased, regardless of whether or not they held those packs or immediately sold them all on the secondary market.
With Rebellion, there will be a new airdrop system put in place, known as “Conflicts”, that will require players to stake unopened Rebellion booster packs, or Rebellion cards, in order to participate in the ongoing war to fight the Chaos Legion and earn the new, powerful airdrop cards as a reward in proportion to the amount of packs and/or cards that each player contributes over the duration of the Conflict.
Each Conflict will be scheduled to run for approximately one month, with its associated airdrop card becoming claimable once the Conflict ends. The first Conflict is currently planned to start in December shortly after the launch of the Rebellion set, meaning the first airdrop card is expected to be claimable in early January to ring in the new year! The next Conflict will begin immediately after the previous one ends, so with nine airdrop cards in total that are part of Rebellion, we expect the Conflicts to run for roughly nine months in total.
Each Conflict will have a fixed amount of the next airdrop card that will be available for players to earn at the end of the Conflict based on their participation relative to all other participants. To participate in a Conflict, players will need to purchase one or more “Battle Wagons” using a small amount of VOUCHER tokens (final cost TBD) in which they can stake their Rebellion cards and booster packs.
Each Battle Wagon will allow 5 cards and up to 100 packs to be staked. Cards and packs can be added to a Conflict at any time and can be unstaked instantly. While staked, cards and packs will not be able to be transferred, listed for sale/rent, delegated out, or used on land, however cards that are staked on a Conflict will still be able to be used in battles.
Note that only Rebellion cards and Rebellion booster packs may be used in Conflicts, and it does not matter how those cards or packs were obtained (i.e. via the Splinterlands shop or on secondary markets).
Every hour over the duration of the Conflict, the total Collection Power of the cards and packs that are staked will be counted for each participating player and added to a points total for that player for the Conflict. Each pack that is staked will count for 150 Collection Power towards the Conflict. Keep in mind that the Battle Wagons will only have 5 slots for cards each, so players are encouraged to combine their cards to level them up and get the most value out of each wagon slot. The goal here is to discourage players from staking thousands of level 1 Common cards, as they will need to spend more VOUCHER tokens on more Battle Wagons in order to have enough slots for those cards as compared to someone who combines their cards into fewer, higher level versions.
At the end of the Conflict period, players who participated in the Conflict will be able to claim their rewards. The more points a player earns during the Conflict, the more chances they have to receive more of the fixed pool of available airdrop cards. Each airdrop card awarded will have a 2% chance of being a Gold Foil version of that card, and players will have the option to spend VOUCHER tokens in order to increase the chances of receiving a Gold Foil version to 4%.
The points will reset for everyone when a Conflict ends, so everyone will start back at zero for the next Conflict, however players will only have to purchase Battle Wagons once and can use them in all Conflicts going forward and their cards and packs will remain staked from the previous Conflict into the next one.
The days of being able to simply buy packs and flip them while still earning all of the future airdrop rewards are over, and going forward players will need to hold on to their cards and packs (or pick some up on the market) and combine their cards in order to earn the rewards. We are very excited to see this new system in effect and we feel that it will go a long way towards the goal of rewarding players who are committed to the game and to the ecosystem for the long term and not those who are looking to make a quick profit.
For players who already hold onto their cards and packs, and combine their cards to the highest level possible for use in battles, this system should require relatively minimal changes and possibly more rewards. Please note that the final naming and other details of this new feature may change before it is released.
Join the Rebellion!
Everyone reading this has the opportunity to get in at the ground floor of the most ambitious and literally game-changing new card edition in the history of Splinterlands. We expect the release of Rebellion to mark the beginning of a completely new phase of gameplay that brings the value of player skill and quick decision-making to the forefront.
Last, but not least, we want to remind players of the currently active SPS DAO governance proposal which will allow the DAO to earn 50% of all revenue from Rebellion pack sales through the Splinterlands website! This is yet another exciting and innovative part of this project that serves to highlight how blockchain-based games can provide a vastly improved relationship between the playerbase and the development company than was ever possible in the past.
The Splinterlands team cannot wait to fight against the forces of Chaos on the battlefield alongside our amazing player community…VONAK!
