Survival Brackets is fantastic and purpose built for wide collectors

I've been collecting Splinterlands cards for years now. I remember Alpha/Beta cards being worth pennies on the dollar, way back in the day. I decided to try and keep up and collect every card from every set, that was relatively available. There are some super ultra rares that I didn't even care to try to collect.

So its kinda nice having a wide collection of low powered cards. I do have some powered up cards from playing around the Untamed, Dice and now the Foundations eras, but for the most part, most of my cards are level 1-3.

But then there is the question, whats the point of having such a wide collection for a game that has room for 1 archon/summoner and 7 monsters?

Having a survival bracket fixes this. A bracket in which the strategy of choice in your cards not only affects the current match, but potentially affects future matches as well. It maybe makes me hold off using this or that card if it might be removed from my roster of usable cards for future matches. But then again, you have to use power if you want to continue advancing in the bracket. So there is this constant risk/reward payoff.

Gives me an idea for a new bracket: WARBANDS

Imagine a bracket that combines the idea of Survival + Brawls.

This isn't like the standard leagues where you play a single match, win/lose, move on to another match. WARBANDS would be more like Brawls, with setting up your battles at the start or STAGING to then have them resolved during the BATTLE stage.

The idea is having to setup multiple combats at the beginning of the season, like brawls, but having your card pool limited by card count. If you only have 1 Captain Frankie archon, then you can only use that card for 1 fight. Using a card in a WARBANDS fight, win or lose, will still subtract it from your usable pool for other battles.

This bracket could include new cards and mechanics. For Splinterlands CONFLICTS, you need Wagons. Perhaps for WARBANDS, you need BattleWagons, and certain BattleWagon cards give benefits or bonuses in the conflict. Perhaps there could be other cards as well, vehicle cards or environment cards, which affect multiple WARBAND battles when played. Maybe WARBANDS could incorporate the Praetoria lands as well, and build real battle content within the lands of Praetoria.

WARBANDS brackets could be separated by BattleWagon ownership. 1 battlewagon = Wood League, 2-5 battlewagons = bronze league, 5-10 = silver league, 10-25 = Gold league, etc.

IMPORTANT - Since this bracket is built for long term collectors, I would make access and deployment of your units as streamlined as possible. I would have the ability to save previously deployed BattleWagons. If a collector has the perfect setup for 99 MANA + Earthquake battle scenario (or whatever scenarios you can think of) the collector should be able to save BattleWagon setups that they can 1-click deploy, instead of having to rebuild the team each time.

As Splinterlands ages, more and more collectors will have wide collections

Building brackets for these collectors is a great way to keep them engaged in a longer sense. Survival is a great new way for me to look at my collection more as a whole, instead of as "heres my massive collection and the handful of cards i use ALL the time". Having a reason to widen my collection even further is an added value metric for the Splinterlands network as a whole.

Thanks for reading!