Hello everyone! The general sale of Conclave Arcana started yesterday (on May 13th), and with that, Chaos Legion moved out of Modern. Now, it can only be played in Brawls, Tournaments, Wild, and Survival. Out of those, if you want to play your Chaos Legion cards, you can only avoid bots in Tournaments and Brawls. And if you're going to avoid old OP cards like Yodin and Kitty, you only have Tournaments, and not most of them. You'll need to find Chaos Legion only tournaments or some others that allow just two sets, one of them CL.

But let's go back a bit. I joined Splinterlands in September 2021. At the time, there were no packs for sale except in the third-party market, and most cards were very expensive. There were a few Chaos Legion reward cards to be earned, some of which were pretty expensive, especially Djinn Oshannus and Venari Wavesmith. On 17th January 2022, came the general sale of Chaos Legion. For the first time, I and many other players could actually afford to buy some cards above level 1, especially summoners.

Most of us know what happened after this. Real players were massively overestimated because of bots, and the general crypto market entered a long bear run, which we are still feeling today, even though it has recovered a lot, mostly on Bitcoin, though. With the earnings plummeting, bots started to become unprofitable; some were turned off, some kept going, and other players also started to quit and sell off. Prices of assets got cheaper and cheaper. There was also a massive special sale with huge discounts around the end of 2022, where Arkemis the Bear was given out. That further decreased Chaos Legion's prices.

In the meantime, Rebellion was released, and it has held value much better than Chaos Legion, which continued to fall to a point where most reward cards and many core set cards were selling at burn value when DEC was at 60% to 70% of peg value. The introduction of Survival mode slightly increased the prices of these cards, but not too much, and it's still possible to find cards for sale near burn value, although that is currently higher because DEC has been very close to peg since the pre-sale of Conclave Arcana was approaching.

There are many players who are very happy Chaos Legion is leaving Modern. Many of them would have taken it out before, if they could. I'm not one of them. Despite taking a big loss in value with it, it's still my favorite set of the game and the most balanced, by far. I'm not including Conclave Arcana because it's still too early to know. I hope it becomes my favorite, since that means it was even more fun to play!

Alpha and Beta were very experimental since it was the start of the game. They might have some iconic cards and some very good ones, but they make for a pretty terrible format to play alone. I have tried playing a tournament in the past because I was already gonna rent those cards for a Brawl, and both were not fun experiences. Untamed was the first set of the game that wasn't called Alpha or Beta. That is usually where these types of games gain some more identity and start feeling like a better game. I think it did, but there are very clear issues with it. There are many underwhelming cards and some OP cards. It's a very unbalanced set. It might be true that the cards that are underwhelming today were not as underwhelming before Chaos Legion, but the power level difference between the top 10 cards of the set and the rest is massive. Cards like Yodin, Llama, Kron, and a few others, are still amazing today. They have lost some of their power because there are better tools to fight them. Deflect (formerly known as Reflection Shield) is amazing against Yodin. And there's Byzantine Kitty, which is still clearly the best card in the game despite some people claiming it is Eternal Tofu. There are some good cards Untamed commons, rares, and epics, and they play important roles in specific rule sets. Failed Summoner is a pretty good common card. But it's the truly OP cards that the very top players would need.

Now let's take a look at Chaos Legion. It's a much more balanced set. The rare summoners are better than the ones from Untamed, except for Lorna and Mylor (I know they are from Azmare Dice, but that's a mini set that belongs to Untamed). Lorna is very good, and Mylor is another OP card, although not as much today. Kelya is better than all the other 4, and Sloan is the worst of the pack, but these are much more balanced. On the other hand, the legendary summoners are good but not OP. Again, some are better than others, with Immortalis probably being the best one. None of them are OP, and it's not always clear which one is better for a given game between the rare and the legendary one. Riftwatchers dropped the ball on the summoners, with only Ilthain being good. At least it gave life one good summoner because Sloan and Grandmaster are probably the weakest among their equivalents in the other splinters. Other than the summoners, the set has many good and cool cards that are much more likely to continue to see play where they are allowed. To be fair, the team was much bigger during the creation of Chaos Legion than any other set.

Let's that a look at Rebellion. It is Untamed 2.0 in several ways. It sold much less than Chaos Legion, it held the prices better, and it is very unbalanced. There are many underwhelming cards in Rebellion. In fact, its power level was considerably low before the airdrop cards. There were a few pretty good ones like Daarg Deadblast, Moxian Rebel, Anasth Soothsayer, and Akane. There are some others, and we can't ignore the pre-sale promo cards Mantaroth and Grimbardun Smith. Any player with a mostly full Chaos Legion set and a few key Rebellion cards would do very well. The early meta resolved around Lily Shieldpaw, Grimbardun Smith, and Tank Heal. Scattershot became more desirable because of it. There were also some low mana games being won with just Avina of the Wolf and Grimbardun Smith. I believe the team saw both of these issues (very few Rebellion cards needed to compete and an uninteresting meta based around strategies that involved taking games into Fatigue) and tried solving them by making airdrop cards very good and able to counter these strategies. This resulted in another very unbalanced set with Venka, Rage, Cryptic, and Eternal Tofu as amazing cards, and many others pretty weak. Rebellion was now needed, but only in the same way Untamed was needed. We have very good legendary summoners (ignore Nidhoggr) and mediocre rare summoners. Even Avina has lost her appeal. The common summoners are interesting for low mana games, Little League, and especially Silenced Summoners, but other than those situations, there are better options. There are also many (too many) promo cards with varying power levels. Some are not needed, others are maybe too good, and all were sold for far too much money.

Gameplay-wise, Chaos Legion is by far the best set in the game. Its biggest flaw, not counting the several mistakes that led to it being overprinted, is the Soulbound Reward set. This set has some very powerful cards that many players were locked out of for many months due to bad RNG. It also includes summoners, which most people agree it shouldn't have. This is probably the only area where Rebellion was better designed than Chaos Legion. There's also Lux Vega, which many believe was a mistake, since it could very effectively replace the need to have any other summoner.