Splinterlands | My Go-To Survival Mode Deck !

I tested some more of the new Survival Mode in Splinterlands and am slowly starting to warm up on it just using my Max Level Cards. This has been my go-to 'unbeaten' deck so far...

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My 2nd Survival Mode Experience

So my initial dissapointment with Survival Mode (Link) was one where it was kind of a frustrating experience having to make a custom deck to put cards safe while I often just got matches against high-level players leaving me no chance. I opted to remove the set again and only put a couple individual cards safe from Survival mode and just play my best deck that I believed could survive without a single monster getting killed which so far is working out ok and got me to a 680 rating currently in 32th place as everyone is ranked currently in Bronze League.

I did get a 27-Game Win Streak I believe not losing a single monster often running against bots who just use soulbound reward cards. Right now though, I tend to only run up against High level players who have 10M+ Collection Power

It's a bit of a Plague for Survival Mode that the best strategy when seeing you are up against big competition is to just concede and play a level 1 summoner and a level 1 card you keep there just for that purpose and the risk of losing the match and seeing your cards go on cooldown is just too high. The last 3 matches were just that either the opponent throwing the towel against me or me not willing to go up against some whale players. I do have a ton of level 1 Furious chickens which really come in handy for this mode.

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My Best Survival Deck!

So to get a good survival deck, you want one that has a high chance of fully surviving which means you need to dictate where the attack will go to with a high likelihood of that card surviving. One of my favorite wild decks does exactly that.

It is a lily Shieldpaw Death Speed deck with the Nightmare as the main tank and a lot of Speed buffs. In 2nd place I tend to play the Venator Kinjo mainly as it gets blast protect and it also slows down the opponent. There are a lot of 6-Mana cards that are perfectly suitable which all have speed buffs in the Spirit Miner, The Boogeyman, & The Supply Runner. This with the Undead Priest also as an option.

Only in 1 match so far against another Max Level player who used a lot of scattershot, I was at risk but still pulled through (Battle Link. The Shadow Presence is also a card that I regularly use in this lineup as it helps to give extra health and +1 Melee attack.

This deck is also great against Magic as those cards usually have low speed while the Nightmare has the Phase ability. It without issues was able to crush this max-level Earth Magic Deck (Battle Link). The Heal of the Corrupted Pegasus in 2nd place was needed though.

So far I managed to keep all these key cards from getting on Cooldown mode.

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Survival Mode SPS Earnings

So an equal reward pool to Wild and Modern was added to Survival mode which increases the SPS inflation. At the start, the reward pool was still filling up an everyone starts at the lower levels so earnings at the start were very low. On ly last win as a 680 rating player I did earn 1.863 SPS which only should go up form there and I'm really tempted to give Survival Mode a real go to see how far I can stretch it. Especially seeing what the top player right now is earning.

@vugtis in his last 3 Battles played them all against @lorkus and won 3 times which gave him 160 SPS just in the last battle and 464 SPS in those 4 battles. So there is certainly a lot to be earned with this mode as not that many players seem to be playing it at a higher level. At the same time, the SPS earnings in Wild seem to have gone up a bit also as likely fewer players will pay the entry tax now that they can use their cards in survival mode.

The main question now is how for this all will put sell pressure on the SPS price as you cant' just increase the reward pool by 50% without any concquenses especially since Survival Mode is not something that will bring in a single new player in the ecosystem.

Low Level Cards Still Useless?

My main account now has 6063 cards and only 38 of those were depleted. If you just surrender, the game will play randomly 2 cards and most likely that will include higher level ones. So you are better to have cards for that on the side. Since you can only choose the highest level card available, owning a bunch of lower level cards is useless unless also because it's hard to create a custom deck just with those in it. So I'm not sure if I should get some more cards to max level or to sell off my collection as I'm not really planning to go play survival mode with level 1 cards.

Survival Mode = Bot Soulbound Value Extraction Heaven.

From what I have seen, either you are up against real players who have big max level collections which most of the time cautiously play their cards not going with the top decks. This or you are up against bot accounts that just spam lineups that only really include soulbound reward cards. I guess they often get matched up with each other which is how they are able to extract some value. This is something that really needs to be handled one way or another as it makes no sense to go this route again.

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Conclusion!

While I'm warming up a bit to Survival Mode, I still can't say I'm 'wild' about it as it's basically the same thing with more problems that are created with it. I do still think they could have dome so much better with this creating something that also appeals to new players.

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