Splinterlands: 7 Years In, Still Running — The Only Battle-Proven CCG in Web3
By BCGamer —
Tags: splinterlands, hive
There's a trading card game that launched in 2018 — back when most people still thought "NFT" was a typo. It was called Steem Monsters. It looked janky. The art was fine, not spectacular. Nobody from Crypto Twitter was shilling it. No VC firm put $40 million into it.
Seven years later, it's still running. The name changed to Splinterlands. The blockchain underneath it changed. The market crashed, recovered, crashed again, and the entire play-to-earn narrative went from "the future of gaming" to a punchline. And this game is still processing 55,000+ battles per day.
That alone makes it worth talking about.
What Is Splinterlands, Actually?
Splinterlands is a blockchain-based collectible card game (CCG) built on the Hive blockchain. Think Hearthstone meets Magic: The Gathering, except every card is an NFT you actually own, the battles take 2-3 minutes, and the entire economy runs on-chain.
The gameplay loop is straightforward. You pick a summoner (now called an Archon in the newer sets), select up to six monster cards that fit within your mana cap and match the ruleset for that battle, and the fight plays out automatically. No real-time clicking. You build the team, you submit, and the outcome is determined by your card choices and the strategy behind them.
There are currently multiple card sets in the game spanning its entire 7-year history:
Alpha / Beta — the OG sets from 2018-2019, now collectible relics
Untamed — the third core set
Chaos Legion — the set that launched during the 2021 mania
Rebellion — released in the post-crash era
Conclave Arcana — the newest core set, launched in 2025 with new mechanics including Archons (evolved summoners), Bloodline Dominion abilities, and new card types
Foundations — a starter set specifically for the free-to-play Frontier format
Cards come in different rarities (Common, Rare, Epic, Legendary), different foils (Regular, Gold, and now Black and Arcane variants in Conclave Arcana), and can be leveled up by combining multiple copies of the same card.
How the Game Formats Work Now
Splinterlands runs three ranked battle formats as of early 2026:
Frontier — This is the free-to-play entry point. Uses only Foundations set cards. Has its own separate energy system. You complete a campaign to unlock it and earn cards by playing. New players can jump in with zero money. You earn Foundations cards and packs from daily quests (win 5 games) and seasonal rewards.
Modern — Uses cards from the two most recent core sets (currently Rebellion and Conclave Arcana), plus Foundations cards. Free to play. This is where most of the competitive action happens.
Wild — Uses every card ever printed across all sets. Requires purchasing a Wild Pass each season. This is where the whales and long-term collectors play with their full arsenals.
There's also Survival Mode — an experimental format where lost cards go on cooldown and can't be used temporarily. Adds real stakes to every battle decision. Launched in 2025 and has been one of the more interesting additions to keep veteran players engaged.
Beyond ranked play, the game has Guilds with Brawls (guild vs guild combat), Tournaments with prize pools, and the Land system.
The Land System
Land has been a long-running expansion called "The Secret of Praetoria." The system lets players own Land NFT plots, construct worksites, stake cards onto them, and produce resources. It went through phases — Land Phase 1.0, 1.5, and the latest 1.75 update (March 2025) introduced new resources: Wood, Stone, and Iron, alongside existing Grain, SPS, and Research production.
It's essentially a passive economic layer on top of the card battling game. You stake cards on land plots, they produce resources, and those resources can be traded through DEC liquidity pools or used for crafting. The system also introduced Land-exclusive cards that can only be crafted through the Land system.
150,000 total land plots exist across 150 regions. It's a deep rabbit hole and honestly one of the more complex systems in any blockchain game right now.
The Economy: SPS, DEC, and Glint
Splinterlands has a multi-token economy. Here's what each one does:
SPS (Splintershards) — The governance token. Runs on Binance Smart Chain with a max supply of 3 billion. Used for staking (currently ~10% APR paid in liquid SPS and VOUCHER), governance voting through the DAO, and as a multiplier for ranked rewards. As of early February 2026, SPS trades around $0.007-0.008 with a market cap of roughly $4-12 million depending on the source. That's down over 99% from its all-time high of ~$1.06 in July 2021.
DEC (Dark Energy Crystals) — The in-game currency. Pegged at $1.00 per 1,000 DEC. Used for buying and renting cards, card pack purchases, and trading on Hive-Engine and other DEXs. Currently trading around $0.0006 per DEC. Available across Hive, BSC, Ethereum, and Tron.
Glint — A newer reward currency earned from ranked play that's spent in the Rewards Shop for card packs, reward cards, potions, and other items.
VOUCHER — Earned from SPS staking. Used to purchase exclusive promo cards and access certain presale events.
Half of all revenue goes directly to the community DAO. That's not marketing fluff — it's a structural feature of how the game distributes value.
The Numbers, No Sugar Coating
Here's where we keep it real.
Peak (October 2021): 500,000+ weekly active wallets. 350,000+ daily active users. The game was the #1 most-played blockchain game on DappRadar. Multiple millions of daily transactions. SPS was above $0.50. The hype was insane.
Now (Early 2026): ~4,000-6,200 daily active users depending on the source and measurement method. ~55,000 daily battles. ~81 new signups per day average in 2025. Over 1 million cards sold since January 2025. SPS at $0.007. The Conclave Arcana pack sale generated $2.81 million in revenue with 400,000+ packs sold.
That's a 98%+ decline in daily active users from peak. The token is down 99%. If you're looking at this from a pure "number go up" investment perspective, this has been a catastrophe.
But here's the other side of that coin: the game is still generating millions in revenue from pack sales. It still has thousands of real humans playing competitive ranked battles every single day. It's shipping major feature updates consistently — Conclave Arcana, Frontier mode, Survival mode, Land 1.75, new reward systems, a complete UI overhaul. The team hired a new COO (Dave McCoy) in early 2025 specifically to streamline operations. They're still building.
In a space where projects with $50-100 million in funding have zero players and abandoned Discords, that counts for something.
The Founders
Jesse Reich ("Aggroed") and Matthew Rosen ("Yabapmatt") founded the game. Reich is a former scientist and chemistry professor — zero gaming industry background before Splinterlands. Rosen worked as a developer at RockYou and Ryzing before going full blockchain. They've been running this project continuously since 2018, which in Web3 years is basically an eternity.
What's Actually Good About It
The core gameplay is genuinely strategic. The combination of mana caps, elemental restrictions, rulesets that change every match, and hundreds of cards with unique abilities creates real depth. This isn't a click-and-wait idle game pretending to be a "game." Actual competitive players study rulesets, build specialized decks, and grind leaderboards.
The Frontier format finally solved the "barrier to entry" problem that plagued the game for years. New players can now actually play, earn cards, and learn the game without spending anything upfront.
The infrastructure is rock solid. Hive's feeless, 3-second transactions mean the game runs smoothly without players ever worrying about gas costs. Every card trade, every battle, every reward claim — all on-chain, all free.
The card economy gives actual ownership. You can sell your entire collection at any time. You can rent cards you're not using and earn passive income. Cards have real market prices and real liquidity on the Hive-Engine DEX.
What's Not Great
The bot problem has been a recurring issue. At peak, a huge chunk of those "active users" were bot accounts farming rewards. The team has made progress — Survival Mode specifically targets this since bots can't adapt as well to cooldown mechanics — but it's an ongoing battle.
Card set power creep is real. New sets tend to dominate the meta, making older collections feel less relevant. This is common in any TCG but stings more when your cards have real dollar values attached to them.
The learning curve is steep. There are now hundreds of cards, multiple formats, Land mechanics, staking, DEC, SPS, Glint, Guild Brawls, Conflicts, Wagons — the amount of systems layered on top of each other is overwhelming for someone walking in fresh.
Token prices are brutal. Both SPS and DEC are down massively. Anyone who bought in during 2021 hype is deep underwater. The inflationary dynamics of the reward system create constant sell pressure. The economy still fundamentally needs new players spending money to sustain value, and new player acquisition has slowed significantly.
So What Is This Thing?
Splinterlands in 2026 is a fully-featured, deeply complex blockchain TCG with real ownership mechanics, real competitive play, and a real community — running on proven infrastructure with zero transaction fees. It has survived longer than virtually every other Web3 game that ever existed.
It's not going to make you rich. The "play-to-earn" era is over, and anyone still approaching it as a money printer is going to be disappointed. But as an actual game with blockchain ownership built in, an active competitive scene, and 7 years of continuous development? There's nothing else like it in Web3.
Whether the token ever recovers, whether the player count rebounds, whether the narrative ever rotates back to blockchain gaming — that's all speculation. What's not speculation is that this game works, it's been working for 7 years, and the team is still shipping.
In this space, that's the rarest thing there is.
Disclaimer: This is not financial advice. Always do your own research before making any investment decisions. The crypto market is volatile and you should never invest more than you can afford to lose.