A New Reason To Fight In Frontier

Splinterlands now has four different ranked modes that players can participate in. There is Wild Format, which is meant to be a place for players who want to play their cards from all the card sets, whether manually or through the use of automated services, since anything goes there. There is Modern Format for players who own the two most recent sets, but can only compete through manual play. There is also the Survival Mode that you can play to farm for Glint, so long as your cards did not get defeated and are on cooldown. And finally, we have the Frontier Mode, which is a full free-to-play mode that both new and veteran players can participate in without any prior investment and be able to build their deck by only playing the game.

Until a few seasons ago, the team was very reluctant to add new cards to the Frontier mode, but then they may have seen that player count has dropped as time goes by, probably because some players have already completed their Frontier Collection, so they introduced Arena Vanguard. And maybe now, player count has started to drop again, so they now introduce Starlight Caravan to Frontier.

Unlike Arena Vanguard, which is composed of cards inspired by influencers and can be obtained simply by participating in influencer Streams, tournaments, or using their Sparks Token in the Sparks Shop, Starlight Caravan is a complete set of cards, which is made of 6 new Archons and units, available in both regular and premium foils. And you cannot just get it by playing Frontier or by directly buying it in the shop. You need to meet some conditions before you get a Starlight Caravan set.

The Starlight Caravan has three different pack types: the Sky pack, the Stellar pack, and the Cosmic pack, each with different costs, card drop rates, and pack allocation. At the same time, you can not just simply purchase them. You need to have a specific type of token before you can purchase them, which you can only get through playing Frontier. The tokens were also Soulbound, so you can neither buy nor transfer them.

Packs were also Soulbound, and unless the owner of the pack opens them, it is the only way for them to trade or transfer whatever cards were in their possession.

Pack type	Allocation	Cost	Token	Drops
Sky Packs	7,188	500	Skydrop	5 RF
Stellar Packs	8,570	1,000	Stellardrop	4 RF, 1 GF or 1 BF
Cosmic Packs	281	15,000	Cosmicdrop	4 RF, 1 GFA or 1 BFA

To acquire the tokens, you need to play Frontier format, and with every 5 wins, you have a chance of getting any of the tokens as part of the Jackpot prize. Another option for you is to also participate in the Weekend Tournaments with a total of 2,03 Drop tokens allocated in a total of 50 weeks, which is managed by the SPS DAO.

Daily Win Milestone	SKYDROP	STELLARDROP	COSMICDROP	Combined Rate
First 5 wins	2%	2%	0.10%	4.10%
Next 5 wins	3%	3%	0.15%	6.15%
Final 5 wins	4%	4%	0.20%	8.20%

With this new set, we can no longer say that Frontier Mode is a 100% Free-to-play experience, given that there is a set that players will need to purchase using real money to own, and that might upset other players because not owning these cards means that they get into a disadvantage when playing Frontier. But at the same time, I do not think that we should give too many cards in Frontier since they can also be used in Modern. Well, the team made a slightly different approach by selling these packs, but let us see how this would impact Frontier.

Thank you, and see you on the next post!