Escalation sale enters final days as Splinterlands ships weekly update

In Brief:

• Splinterlands (official site) pushed a weekly update live that adds a new ruleset along with gameplay fixes and quality-of-life changes.
• The Escalation pack sale is in its final days. Every 20 packs bought still returns a free Mage Wagon, capped at 20.
• Escalation cards staked to wagons feed the next Legendary Airdrop, and pack proceeds route to the SPS DAO.

Splinterlands put its weekly update live, and the Escalation pack sale is the piece with a deadline attached.

“This week’s update marks the final days of the Escalation sale, introduces a brand-new ruleset, and includes several gameplay fixes and quality-of-life improvements,” the studio said in a post on X.

The shop page carries a live countdown rather than a published cutoff date. Packs run 350 SPS or 5,000 DEC each and can also be bought with Credits.

The purchase bonus hasn’t changed. Buy 20 packs and a free Mage Wagon comes with it, up to a maximum of 20 wagons. Players are told to put Escalation cards on wagons to earn the next Legendary Airdrop.

How the wagons pay out

Each Mage Wagon holds five cards and 100 packs, and staked assets generate points. Every 100,000 points earns a chance at an airdrop card. Guaranteeing a card takes a minimum number of chances, and that minimum climbs with each new card or Conflict.

Escalation-era wagons are soulbound. They can’t be transferred, rented or sold. Cards parked on them stay playable in brawls and tournaments but are locked out of the market. Adding cards carries a 15-minute cooldown and bulk actions carry 60.

Pack weighting favors the expensive tiers. Legendary packs are worth six times the Conflict points of a standard Booster pack and Alchemist packs three times. Starter packs don’t count at all.

The Second Escalation Conflict opened June 22 with a Legendary Archon, Ghezira, carrying Flying and Weary. Wagons built during the first Conflict stayed eligible.

The set itself

Escalation shipped 43 cards: 12 common, 12 rare, eight epic and 11 legendary. Pull rates sit at 75.2% common, 20% rare, 4% epic and 0.8% legendary, with gold foil at 2%. Potions double the legendary, epic and gold foil odds.

Rulesets keep stacking

This week’s addition lands in a year already dense with them. Junior Varsity restricts summoning to units and archons costing six mana or less, with those battles capped at 42 mana and the restriction now applying in tournaments and brawls. Elite Force bars Common units. Anemic caps every unit at four health.

Pandamonium scrambles starting positions. Brute Force, which came out of the community, sends the highest-power units first.

Fixes and housekeeping

Recent patches reworked Final Rest. It now blocks an enemy Rebirth, Resurrect, Resurgence or Soul Siphon once per game unless the unit has Last Word, and it resets if the unit carrying it gets resurrected.

Other fixes covered units with valid bloodline synergy being playable while their color was inactive, Charge overriding Apex Strike targeting, ability tooltips displaying wrong on hover and non-depositable cards appearing on the unfiltered Guild Library deposit page. Champion I matchmaking wait times were cut. An API fix got Escalation cards to show up in rental history.

On the interface side: a Tokens section and sticky headers on the How To Play pages, a countdown in the header and lobby, Phoenix Ash usable from the collection to clear land cooldowns, seasonal tracking on the SPS burned leaderboard, mobile memory fixes for campaign stability and a repair to the Escalation shop’s low-currency links, which had pointed only at Dark Energy Crystals instead of the token being spent.

Coinbase payment options remain off in-game. Coinbase discontinued its Commerce service and the team said it’s working on setting up in the replacement Coinbase Business program.

Where the money goes

Tokens spent on Escalation packs count as revenue and are directed to the DAO. Under a proposal that passed, the SPS DAO takes 100% of proceeds from in-ecosystem sales after the Feb. 28, 2026 update until it recovers its initial investment plus 20%. After that the split is 50/50 between Steem Monsters Corp and the DAO.

A separate proposal is up for a vote that would hand the DAO full ownership of the Splinterlands IP and contract the company under a two-year Master Service Agreement.

A Verico sale is also winding down. The eighth anniversary event starts Aug. 8 with exclusive skins, Fortune Draws, a shot at Gold Foil Arcane voucher cards and two new Dragonkin cards.

Dragonkin had been pulled from the card search dropdown, because no card in the game carried the bloodline.