Splinterlands Social Media Challenge - my experience with Survival mode

Survival mode is the newest way to play Splinterlands. It uses all the cards, which means that any card players can use in Wild, they can also use in Survival. The biggest difference is that instead of having energy, players can battle as much as they want, as long as they have enough cards available. That's because every unit that dies in this mode is put on cooldown, even if you win the game. If you lose the game, all units and the summoner go on cooldown. Other than this, there are a few other differences. There's no win streak bonus to rating, there aren't Glint rewards, and there aren't any chests from advancing a league. There's also nothing like the Wild Pass, which forces people to pay 2k DEC per season if they want to play in Wild. However, just like in Wild, players are free to use bots and battle helpers.

I'll talk about the cooldowns in depth now. The cooldown applies to every format, which means players must be very careful about using cards in Survival. That's because by every format, I mean not only Survival, Wild, and Modern, but also tournaments and Brawls! Here's a table with the cooldown for each rarity:

The Base CD is for 1 BCX cards, and the Max CD is for cards at the max level. There's a formula to calculate the cooldown for whatever BCX you have, but it's not that important since just looking at the maximum and minimum will give everyone an idea of what to expect. For gold foil cards, the timer is halved. That makes GFs very valuable since they will spend much less time on cooldown. Legendaries and epics, in particular, are amazing because it's possible to deplete the energy, play a ton of Survival games without fear of losing them because they'll be back before the energy is full. One of the most important aspects of the cooldown is that it resets with the end of the season. That means players can lose all their cards close to the end of every season and have them ready to play after the new one starts!

I have some duplicate cards, however, they are mostly rented out. I also don't have any spare summoners at the max level. I could opt out of Survival for every single card that I use for Modern ranked and use a few lower level cards to play during the season, including some extra soulbound cards, but it's a lot of work to keep adding and removing them when it's the end of the season. So, what I do is play with everything in the last few hours of the season. I still use just a level 1 summoner and a random level 1 card when I see that the opponent is very strong. Otherwise, I play my best team and hope to win with the fewest casualties possible. In the final few hours of last season, I did this, and I ended up earning about 250 SPS. It's not much, but it was nice getting a bit extra. It could have been more, but because I start the season at bronze and finish at silver, the first few battles I get less than 1 SPS per win. It would be nice to have some extra cards to build the rank during the whole season so that I could earn more and reach a higher rank when I'm using all my cards.

What do you all think about Survival Mode? What is your strategy for it? Let me know in the comments! Thank you for reading!!