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Hello Splinterlands Summoners and welcome to another edition of Community Engagement Challenge! After end of season a yesterday, the game went on maintenance and afterwhich, Survival Mode went live. Survival Mode is a new way to play and earn in Splinterlands. What is it it and how do you play it?

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Survival Mode

Survival is a new mode of play that allows players to use all cards in their collection. This is wilder than wild format since you can use all cards, even Gladiators cards that can only be used in particular rulesets or with special summoners. Players can play as much as they want, no energy required but there is a cost. Cards that get eliminated in a Survival mode battle will be in cooldown and it will not be able to be used again until it is revived. Also, cards in cooldown cannot be listed for rent, played in brawls or tournaments, or used on land. Basically, cards in cooldown will be rendered useless until the cooldown is over.

Cooldown Rates

Cooldowns for each card will be based on the card's rarity, level, and foil, and will be calculated based on the following formula:

base_cd - (base_cd - max_cd) * bcx / max_bcx

Where base_cd is the base cooldown time for a 1 BCX card of that rarity and max_cd is the cooldown time for a max level card of that rarity, both of which can be found in the following table:

source

A 1 BCX card will follow the Base cooldown from the table above and will not use the formula. Additionally, Gold Foil cards will have half the cooldown time compared to their regular foil counterparts.

For example, a 300 BCX regular foil Common card would have a cooldown of 180 hours (7.5 days):

360 - (360 - 120) * 300 / 400 = 180

Similarly, a 5 BCX Gold Foil Epic card would have a cooldown of 78 hours (3.25 days):

(240 - (240 - 72) * 5 / 10) / 2 = 78

For a player with not many cards, that is a long time for cards to be inactive. On the other hand, cooldowns reset at the end of each season so players may consider to go all out on Survival mode near the end of each season.

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How to Prevent Cards from Being Used in Survival Mode

As discussed, all card can be used in Survival Mode. If you don't want to risk your card being in cooldown, then you have to prevent them from being used in Survival Mode. There is an option to do this in the card menu.

Simply tick the highlighted button in the status of the card and it will not appear among the card choices in Survival Mode.

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Rewards

The Survival Mode will have an SPS reward pool similar to Modern and Wild formats. There will also be Glint rewards based on rankings as follows:

source

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Final Thoughts

In my opinion, the Survival Mode is a great idea by the team to provide another utility for excess cards. Before, we are worried what will happen to tons of Chaos Legion cards in circulation. Will it be burned causing a DEC inflation? Now, players will find use for their excess cards since clearly, superior number of cards is an advantage if you want to compete for ranking in Survival Mode. The more cards you have, the more battles you can play and more chances to win and rank up.