Splinterlands brings brackets to Modern ranked after player vote

In Brief:

• Splinterlands (official site) said Modern Ranked Brackets will go live in the upcoming season, following a community vote.
• The new structure has six brackets with nine divisions in each, replacing the single Modern ladder where players of every collection level meet.
• The change extends a bracket model the studio first rebuilt for Survival mode in February 2026.

Splinterlands will split Modern ranked play into brackets starting next season, the studio said Tuesday on X.

“You voted for it. Modern Ranked Brackets arrive this upcoming season!” the team wrote. “6 Brackets. 9 Divisions each. A whole new climb.”

The post didn’t give an exact launch date, bracket requirements or reward allocations. It linked players to a guide and warned that the new system would take some getting used to.

“Expect a little ‘wait, how does this work?’ at first,” the team wrote. “Take your time, learn the ropes, and get ready to battle.”

What changes

Modern ranked currently runs on one rating ladder. Leagues run from Novice to Champion and act as a visual marker of a player’s rating range, according to the game’s documentation. Every league except the lowest is split into three tiers.

Players gain 20 rating points for a win and lose 20 for a loss, with win streaks paying 40. Updates shipped on March 3 raised the swing for upsets. A player who beats an opponent rated more than 1,000 points higher gains 60 rating, and the loser drops 60. Beating someone rated 500 to 1,000 points higher is worth 40.

The docs say players need at least Bronze III in Modern or Wild to earn Reward Points.

Under that setup, low and mid-level accounts can draw fully leveled opponents. Brackets are designed to separate them.

From pre-proposal to launch

The push for Modern brackets surfaced in March. A player’s end-of-season recap dated March 15 said, “There’s now a pre-proposal to bring brackets back to modern, in the past we had leagues – which had it’s own problems.”

That writer said the change would mean no more facing higher level decks. They said they’d been playing less because “it just felt like a waste of time when I would constantly face max level opponents.”

Splinterlands hasn’t published the final vote tally alongside Tuesday’s announcement. A community post from this week said a recent event had been run to test the brackets and collect feedback before they reached Modern. According to that post, players who completed 250 matches with a win rate of 50% or better and left feedback earned 250,000 Glint.

The Survival template

The bracket model isn’t new to the game. Survival mode came back on Feb. 15 after a pause, rebuilt around 11 brackets with caps ranging from Novice level to Champion level.

Each Survival bracket sets its own summoner and card level requirements, difficulty and automation rules, the team said in a Feb. 7 post. Players choose between human-only play and bots-allowed play. They pick one bracket per season and stay locked in until it ends.

Bracket caps in Survival also set cooldowns, which range from 10% of standard cooldowns at Novice up to standard rates in higher tiers.

Governance votes have since reworked Survival rewards. One passed proposal split the pool 30% to manual play and 70% to automated brackets, with each side divided further by bracket based on Collection Power contributions. Another paused SPS rewards for Survival in favor of fixed GLINT pools per bracket, with the top 25 in each bracket earning an entry token to a post-season tournament.

The studio later changed Survival Brackets 1 through 5 to the Modern format and moved Bracket 6 to Wild, according to release notes dated June 30. Survival ratings now reset the same way as ranked play if a player stays in the same bracket between seasons. Players who switch start again from zero.

Modern’s history

Splinterlands split ranked play into Modern and Wild in June 2022, giving each format separate leaderboards and prizes. Modern is limited to cards from the two most recent core editions. Wild allows every card.

Matchmaking in Modern has been tweaked several times this year. A Feb. 24 update adjusted Champion I matchmaking to “greatly reduce wait times before being matched.” On March 3, the terms of service were updated to say “you can only play one account in Modern Champion at a time.”

The team’s announcement ended the same way it began, with a nod to the players who asked for it: “You voted for it.”