Hello fellow Hivians!

Today I opened a Gladiator pack and it sparked the desire to talk about Splinterlands Guilds, Brawls, and the uniquely related Gladiators. Brawls are generally played out the same as standard ranked battles however they include the ability to play Gladiator cards regardless of the ruleset which are truly my favorite cards at the moment.

What are Gladiators?

Gladiator cards are a special category of cards that possess a unique and powerful ability called "Bloodlust". The "Bloodlust" ability allows these cards to increase their stats such as attack, health, or speed, by one point each time they secure a kill during a battle. This means that the more kills a Gladiator card racks up during a single battle, the stronger it becomes within that specific match. This makes them some of the most powerful cards in the game.

How to get them?

First of all, Gladiator cards are Soulbound, which means they can not be traded, bought, or sold. This means each player has to independently work and earn their cards. There are no shortcuts to get them. With that said, there is a relatively simple process to obtain gladiator cards.

The most critical step is that you first must join a guild like mine Acolytes of Helio.

Guild's are the key to both earning large numbers of Merits and access to purchase the powerful cards. After joining a guild, you should then actively participate in that guild's brawls. After each brawl, guild members that participate will receive a payout of both SPS, and more importantly in this regard, Merits.

As you can see, my guild's most recent brawl resulted in a hefty payout of 1,575 Merits. However, you should keep in mind that the number or merits awarded varies based on the tier of brawl you compete in, your guild's placement, and your guild's building upgrades.

Once you have saved up 2,000 merits you'll then have enough to buy a gladiator pack but only if your Guild has sufficiently leveled their Guild 'Store' building. The ability to purchase Gladiator packs unlocks with a Guild 'Store' at level 2. Luckily my guild's store is level 5. As referenced above, your guild's store level also increases the number of merits you receive per brawl fight. At level 5 my guild receives an additional 80% per brawl which means my guild's most recent payout included an additional 700 merits!

So assuming your guild has that level 2 store you'll want to navigate over to the guild store page and make your 'Gladiator Case' purchase. This will add the pack to your pack collection which can be seen on your 'Open' page just like any other card pack you obtain.

So I'm normally not one to share the results of my pack opening but given the pack I just opened contained many of my favorite Gladiators and it sparked the desire to even create this post I thought I'd share.

The key cards here include Quora, which is currently my favorite card in the game, Chimney, and Isgald. Chimney and Isglad are both common cards and generally offer a lot of power. Isgald in particular has 'opportunity' which makes him target the weakest enemy. This ability synergizes significantly with bloodlust making him scale very quickly in many fights. Chimney on the otherhand is just so tanky which generally lets him survive long enough to secure a kill and then snowball. Now Quora is really a beast of her own. With multiple attack types and the heal ability she can often single handedly defeat entire lineups on her own. I've had many fights where she ends up with 15+ speed and over 20 health which would then have her self healing 5-6 HP per turn. Truly she is almost unstoppable.

Ecency Giveaway

Finally I also wanted to talk about a really cool feature that is unique to the Ecency Hive front end UI and that is Ecency Points. Ecency points are essentially a reward metric for utilizing the Ecency frontend. You can earn them by doing just about anything (posting, commenting, voting, etc). What is cool about these points is that you can spend them to boost or promote your own posts which provide either an upvote from the Ecency team or have your post featured on the frontend which of course helps you obtain more views. This can make a huge difference for someone just starting out with their blogging.

Ecency votes were some of the major impactors for me when I was first building up my HP so I wanted to include a giveaway here for 150 ecency points. This is the minimum required to obtain an upvote from the ecency team so I hope it helps you as much as it helped me.

To participate all you have to do is leave a comment telling me your favorite Gladiator card.

Cheers!

Interested in Splinterlands and joining my guild:

To join Acolytes of Helio please complete the below steps:

1. Join our Guild Discord channel.
2. Once in discord introduce yourself with a bit of your Splinterlands background and why you are interested.
3. Pay our monthly 100 DEC or 2 SPS membership fee to @acolytesofhelio

Guild Requirements:

We strive to have an active membership that is interested in both Splinterlands and the idea of working together. As such we have a few requirements:

1. Keep current with guild membership fees: 100 Dec per month or 2 SPS
2. Interact with the guild regularly on Discord. Discord is our primary communication medium
3. Post on Hive. At the end of the day, we value members that value the Hive environment. Our members have all grown their Hive accounts by actively supporting each other and we expect the same from newer members.

Guild Benefits:

Why join a guild and pay a fee; well because you get benefits to do so of course.

1. Bonus reward points per win: 5% currently
2. Access to Brawls and Gladiator cards
3. Automatic curation from the Guild account for all Hive Posts
4. Voting rights on the fate of the guild and its assets.
5. Free cards with winning all matches during a brawl
6. Access to knowledgeable members to help you build your decks

Disclaimers

Helpful Details

For those of you that blog but don't like to curate content, consider delegating your tokens for daily payouts. The following Curation accounts will payout 95% of all curation rewards received back to you automatically allowing you to indirectly support great content while earning great APY off of your crypto. There are many other curation accounts similar to these but these are the ones I'm most involved with.