In Brief:
- Splinterlands (official site) has shipped its weekly update, bringing a fresh ruleset plus a batch of gameplay fixes and quality-of-life tweaks.
- The Escalation pack sale has entered its closing days. The buy-20-packs bonus still hands over a free Mage Wagon, with a ceiling of 20.
- Escalation cards staked onto wagons build toward the next Legendary Airdrop, while pack revenue flows to the SPS DAO.
Splinterlands has taken its weekly update live, and it is the Escalation pack sale that carries the clock.
“This week’s update marks the final days of the Escalation sale, introduces a brand-new ruleset, and includes several gameplay fixes and quality-of-life improvements,” the studio wrote in a post on X.
Update is Live!
This week's update marks the final days of the Escalation sale, introduces a brand-new ruleset, and includes several gameplay fixes and quality-of-life improvements.
Escalation Sale Ending Soon!
The Escalation Sale is almost over!
If you've@SplinterlandsView on X ↗
No fixed end date has been published; instead, the shop page runs a live countdown. Each pack costs 350 SPS or 5,000 DEC, and Credits are accepted as well.
The purchase incentive is unchanged. Twenty packs come with a free Mage Wagon attached, up to a maximum of 20 wagons. The studio is telling players to place Escalation cards on wagons in order to qualify for the next Legendary Airdrop.
How the wagons pay out
A single Mage Wagon has room for five cards and 100 packs, and whatever is staked there produces points. Each 100,000 points translates into one chance at an airdrop card. Locking in a guaranteed card requires a minimum number of chances, and that floor rises with every additional card or Conflict.
Wagons from the Escalation era are soulbound, meaning no transfers, rentals or sales. Cards sitting on them remain usable in brawls and tournaments but cannot touch the market. There is a 15-minute cooldown on adding cards, stretching to 60 for bulk actions.
The point weighting tilts toward pricier tiers. A Legendary pack is worth six times the Conflict points of a standard Booster, and an Alchemist pack three times. Starter packs contribute nothing.
June 22 saw the start of the Second Escalation Conflict, headlined by a Legendary Archon named Ghezira that carries Flying and Weary. Wagons assembled during the first Conflict remained eligible.
The set itself
Escalation arrived with 43 cards: 12 common, 12 rare, eight epic and 11 legendary. The pull rates break down as 75.2% common, 20% rare, 4% epic and 0.8% legendary, with a 2% chance of gold foil. Potions double the odds on legendary, epic and gold foil.
Rulesets keep stacking
The latest addition joins an already crowded year of them. Junior Varsity limits summoning to units and archons priced at six mana or below, caps those matches at 42 mana, and now extends the restriction into tournaments and brawls. Elite Force shuts out Common units. Anemic holds every unit to four health.
Pandamonium shuffles where units start. Brute Force, a community-originated ruleset, puts the highest-power units at the front.
Fixes and housekeeping
Final Rest was reworked in recent patches. The ability now shuts down an opposing Rebirth, Resurrect, Resurgence or Soul Siphon a single time per game unless the unit has Last Word, and it resets should the unit carrying it be resurrected.
Further fixes addressed units with valid bloodline synergy that could still be played while their color was inactive, Charge overriding Apex Strike targeting, ability tooltips rendering incorrectly on hover, and non-depositable cards turning up on the unfiltered Guild Library deposit page. Matchmaking waits in Champion I were shortened, and an API fix finally surfaced Escalation cards in rental history.
Interface work included a Tokens section and sticky headers across the How To Play pages, a countdown placed in the header and lobby, Phoenix Ash usable straight from the collection to wipe land cooldowns, seasonal tracking added to the SPS burned leaderboard, mobile memory fixes for campaign stability, and a repair to the Escalation shop’s low-currency links, which previously pointed only at Dark Energy Crystals rather than at whichever token was being spent.
Coinbase payments are still switched off in-game. Coinbase shut down its Commerce service, and the team says it is working through setup on the replacement Coinbase Business program.
Where the money goes
Tokens spent on Escalation packs are treated as revenue and sent to the DAO. A passed proposal gives the SPS DAO 100% of proceeds from in-ecosystem sales following the Feb. 28, 2026 update, running until it has recouped its initial investment plus 20%. From that point the split becomes 50/50 between Steem Monsters Corp and the DAO.
Another proposal currently up for a vote would transfer full ownership of the Splinterlands IP to the DAO and put the company on a two-year Master Service Agreement.
The Verico sale is also drawing to a close. An eighth anniversary event kicks off Aug. 8 featuring exclusive skins, Fortune Draws, a shot at Gold Foil Arcane voucher cards and two new Dragonkin cards.
Dragonkin had previously been removed from the card search dropdown, since no card in the game carried that bloodline.