Splinterlands' Conclave Arcana, Explained: What the Sixth Core Set Actually Added

Splinterlands cards from Conclave Arcana shipped 82 at launch: 24 Common, 29 Rare, 14 Epic, 15 Legendary, plus nine abilities, with only Bloodline Dominion really changing team-building. More cards came through 2025 via Conflict airdrops.

The 43-card Reward Set is a separate, account-bound pool won through ranked play, live October 21, 2025, not bought in a pack.

Splinterlands renamed summoners to "Archons" and stamped every card with a bloodline tag. Human. Hippo Ulund. Others.

Bloodline Dominion, quoted at launch by Hive writer rentmoney, reads "You can summon any unit of the same bloodline as this archon, regardless of element", breaking the one-summoner-one-element rule. Hive writer mango-juice confirmed it: an Archon can summon across all elements once the bloodline matches. Honestly, the biggest deck-building shift since element-locked summoners existed. Our crypto TCG deck-building basics guide covers it if that's unfamiliar.

Card analyst bravetofu's card breakdown has the fun stat and the ugly one. Fun: Gramel the Hunger is the set's only three-attack-type card. Ugly: only seven Rebellion-era Archons existed at launch, giving early holders an outsized Modern-format edge until more circulated.

A standard booster ran 4,000 DEC, roughly $4. Splinterlands' own SPS governance proposal shows the set was DAO-funded: 600M DEC upfront plus 50% of pack revenue.

Pull rates: Common 75.2%, Rare 20%, Epic 4%, Legendary 0.8%, tighter on Rare than the general booster's 24.8% on docs.splinterlands.com. Caveat: the official pull-rate page 403'd when I checked, so treat this as community-verified, not source-confirmed. Gold and Black Foil rates get quoted often too; we couldn't re-verify those live, so they're out.

Price is where the community split. Hive commentator psilence argued for $2 packs, since the SPS airdrops and bonuses that made $4 tolerable during Rebellion were gone. One reply: "At $4/pack for rebellion I drew the line...I'll pass on Conclave as well."

Concede the obvious first: a review that never concedes anything is an ad. Splinterlands has run eight years and remains the biggest browser TCG on Hive (see our full read on whether Splinterlands is still worth it in 2026). 82 cards on a DAO-funded budget is a team still building, not coasting.

Where it costs you is the door. Competing or earning meaningfully means owning cards, and cards mean $4 packs at the odds above, or the secondary market. Stellarch, a provably-fair browser TCG on the same chain, handles that door differently. A brand-new account drafts a full legal 7-card team from a synthesized "ghost catalog" floor, so no purchase gates your first match, and ownership only ever adds to that floor.

On fairness the gap is sharper. Splinterlands' set odds got community reverse-engineered partly because the official page wouldn't load. That's the same trust gap our look at whether Splinterlands' ranked ladder is still fair ran into on the bot question. Stellarch's combat runs on a seeded RNG engine and replays byte-identically from its seed, so you can verify a match result yourself. Different thing from pack odds, but it's the half that decides who won.

Signup takes Hive Keychain, email with a PIN, Google, or an EVM wallet. No wallet needed, browser only.

Now the honest part: Stellarch is a closed alpha behind a waitlist, deposit and withdrawal rails off, no ranked token earning yet. If cashing out this month is the goal, Splinterlands does that and Stellarch doesn't. What's live is a 290+ card catalog across 8 affinities, plus a fairness model you can verify.

This is what wrecks search results. Escalation opened its own presale February 10, 2026, general release February 24, 2026, per Splinterlands' own 2026 release notes. Conclave Arcana's banner came down around March 10, 2026, final Conflict card roughly three weeks later. The two overlapped briefly but stayed separate sets. Escalation isn't an expansion or a part two.

Conclave Arcana's real legacy is bloodlines: the mechanic outlives the set that carried it, more than most crypto-TCG expansions manage. The $4 pack argument outlived it too, and it'll be back with whatever ships next.

If Splinterlands' pack cost is what's kept you out of on-chain card games, Stellarch's waitlist is at stellarch.io. Closed alpha, no earning promises, and you can draft a team without buying one.