Vonak: Lit The Flames of REBELLION- Splinterlands 5th Core Set

Hi! @saydie here playing Splinterlands everyday!

As much as I want to continue with Exploring the Chaos, I need to set aside that this week to give way with the presale of Rebellion which is the 5^th core set of cards released by Splinterlands that will introduced new gameplay mechanics to the game. At the same time, it will replace Untamed and Dice sets in modern format, including all the related promo and rewards card which I admit to be very strong but also very expensive, making it hard to collect them.

The set will consist of 96 cards including two promo cards, only available in presale and nine legendary airdrop cards which is way lower than Chaos Legion consist of 103 cards including the legendary airdrops for its core set but lower than Untamed with only 84 cards, Beta with 79 cards and Alpha with 59 within their core sets.

Rebellion Booster Pack Details & Pricing

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Rebellion packs will be like previous packs which comes with five cards with one card guaranteed to be rare or better and the same chances of receiving a rare, epic, legendary, and gold foil card as in all previous editions but the difference with this set is that it comes along with 2 promo card unlike with Chaos Legion which only have Doctor Blight.

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.

Its price was 1000 DEC higher than Chaos Legion and will require 5 Vouchers to have 20% discount which makes it at least cheaper than Riftwatchers that requires 5000 DEC +1 Voucher but I think this was better in order to reduce the Supply of DEC in the market so it can reach its peg value as soon as possible and we can start the SPS Flywheel and the fact the credits can also be used which makes it easier for players to buy with fiat money.

For bulk buyers, there will be available bonus packs based on the number of packs they buy but it was reduced by 5% for each tier compared with the Chaos Legion. This was made in order to undercut sales on secondary market which was noticeable to the previous card sets.

No. Of Packs	Chaos Legion	Rebellion
100 - 499	10% additional pack bonus	5% additional pack bonus
500 - 1999	15% additional pack bonus	10% additional pack bonus
2000 +	20% additional pack bonus	15% additional pack bonus

New Abilities, Summoner Tactics and Multi- Element Summoners

With new card set comes new abilities which can change the results of the battle depending how they were used and Rebellion will introduce 4 new abilities.

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!

This was an interesting ability cause it would increase the melee attack of the monsters with its armor and the damage could be further increased with summoners that adds armor which Chaos Legion already has such as Kelya and Grandmaster Rathe and will give monsters such us Arkemis the Bear or Queen Mycelia with the Protect ability though I'm still not sure what would happen to their attack when hit with Shatter or Corrosive Ward.

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.

This is similar to the Cripple ability where monsters lose max health every time they were attacked with the difference that the monster should be attacked for the attacker to lose their armor which means you need to take damage for the ability to take effect and that they are limited to melee attack.

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!

With Possibilus the Wise monsters gained the Reach ability such as using Coastal Sentry with its Double Strike but what they lost instead was the + speed and armor of Kelya Frendul but with this ability, we might see the same interesting combos on Kelya Frendul and other elements.

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!

I usually play sneak and opportunity teams cause they usually target the most vulnerable unit of the opponent but with this ability reducing the damage inflicted by those attacks, one might consider whether it is better to focus fire the attack on the front or not.

Aside from the new abilities Rebellion will also introduce Multi- Element summoner as part of its new game mechanics, meaning they can summon two of the five basic elements which will birth to new monster synergies and combination. The best example for this would be Zyriel which was a range unit promo card with both Life and Death attribute.

Another mechanics that they would add was the Ability Choice which lets the player select which summoner ability they would apply whether it was to buff your team or debuff the opponent along with Target Options which will allow you to choose which of your units to be applied with the buff. I find this new mechanics to be interesting cause it could change the outcome of the battle and more importantly, will make it harder for bots to use this card as even with the changes on modern format, we cannot be completely sure that we eliminated all the bots and battle helpers.

Limited Edition Promo Cards

With the presale of the Rebellion comes with two limited edition promo cards which means that it can only be minted during the presale. One of rare rarity which is guaranteed for every 10 pack and one legendary unity for every 100 packs with 4% chance to be gold foil for both cards. With this new promo cards, we can see that they redesigned the card frame to focus more on character artwork though they were quite different from what they show at the Splinterfest.

Aidrop Design	Design from Splinterfest

Although the card frame was quite similar with what they show in the Splinterfest, icons below the card element was noticeably missing which if I'm not wrong has something to do with spells but with land still not yet delivered, I can the reason why they remove it. They change the design for the SP bar but it was way thinner than what was shown in the Splinterfest which I kind of like more. In terms of the stat bubbles, they retain the design from the previous set which is fine for me since I was already get used to it.

Now, looking at the stats of the promo cards Grimbardun Smith seems to be a replacement for Almo Cambio that will be moving to wild and can be a really good tank and substitute for Baakjira, having the Immunity debuffs such as the Poison and Affliction from Dr. Blight. With Void and Shield, it will also received less damage from all kinds of attacks together with Repair which can restore the armor of any allied unit that receives damage. Possible Combinations would be on monsters with Weapons Training ability such as Kulu mastermind and Ferexian Hero.

Regarding Mantaro, this card would be more scarce than Doctor Blight, only having 1 guaranteed card for every 100 packs while while Doctor Blight guaranteed for every 50 packs not to mention that there was only 500 m packs available on presale which was only half from the Chaos Legion presale but in terms of utility, I still think that Doctor Blight was better. It has decent amount of armor and with the Armor Strike ability, it could attack really hard, considering that it has True Strike and Blast along with it so if for example, we can partner it along with Conqueror Jacek to compensate for its lack of speed and give it the Piercing ability. Just like Grimbardun Smith, it also has Shield and Repair ability.

Presale and Airdrop Details

The presale starts on October 18 and would last till 30 days from the said date. There will be titles that would be given for the top 250 buyers and for the top 6 accounts that bought the most amounts of packs, they would have the opportunity to participate with the design of a one of the legendary airdrop.

	Position 1 - 30 - "The Dawnbringer" Legendary Title
	Position 31 - 100 - "The Defiant" Epic Title
	Position 101 - 250 - "The Rebel" Rare Title

As for me, I initially bought 25 packs at the start of the presale which cost 100 k DEC and 125 Vouchers so I do not really expect to won any of this title and by checking at the leaderboard, I have already fell outside the top 250 only just after the few hours of the presale. That said, my main goal was to have enough cards for my bronze deck so I might need a little more to buy to have them all.

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Rebellion comes with the new Airdrop System called Conflicts where packs and cards would need to be staked in order to get the airdrops because during the previous sets, buyers will get the airdrops regardless of whether they sell or keep their packs which resulted for the pack to be sold at the secondary market at a lower price. The packs and cards will be staked for a month in association with the airdrop and would require vouchers to be staked. This will help the cards to retain their value and for the buyers to hold for their packs. Luckily, despite being staked, cards seems to be still playable so people can still use them but renting or card delegation is not possible.