Splinterlanes Ranked — how the Ladder works, and how to climb it

✦ Splinterlanes has a Ladder now. It is public, it is shareable, and — as of this week — the number on it means something it did not mean before. Here is what a Rating actually measures, and the handful of decisions that decide whether yours goes up.

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The Ladder

Find it under Battle ▾ Ladder at splinterlanes.com. It shows every player's Rating for the Season in progress, and it has buttons for the Seasons that have already finished — those standings had been kept since Seasons began and never shown to anyone, so they are all on the page now.

The Ladder is public. You do not need to sign in to read it, and the link works for anyone you send it to.

Everyone starts at 1200. At the end of each Season every Rating is squashed halfway back toward 1200 — a player at 1800 starts the next Season at 1500, a player at 800 starts at 1000. Nobody is ever locked out by a bad Season, and nobody banks a lead forever.

One thing worth saying plainly: your number changed this week. Ratings were moved onto a new scale on 6 September, in exactly the order they were already in. Nobody overtook anybody. If your Rating looks smaller than you remember, so does everyone's above you.

What a win is actually worth

This is the part that changed. A Ranked result used to move both players by a flat amount, whoever they played. Now it depends entirely on who you beat.

Say you are sitting at 1200:

Read that table twice, because it contains the whole strategy of climbing.

An even match is worth exactly 20, the same as it always was — nothing about ordinary play got stingier. But beating someone far below you is worth almost nothing, and losing to them costs you nearly everything a single battle can cost. The reverse is just as true: a player 800 points above you is a free roll. Beat them and you take the maximum; lose and you barely feel it.

What this kills is climbing by volume. You cannot grind a Rating up by winning a great many easy battles any more — a hundred wins against players well below you is worth about a hundred points, and a single loss to one of them gives back forty. The Ladder measures who you can beat, not how much time you spend.

What it rewards is playing up. If you want to climb, take the hard match.

So how do you win more of them?

Ratings are arithmetic. Winning is not. The rest of this guide is the part that actually moves your Rating: the decisions that decide Splinterlanes battles, in the order they come at you.

Win the Command Lane, or lose the match in it

The middle Lane is the Command Lane, and it is the most important square of ground in the game. Here is why.

Monsters in Splinterlanes never stand idle because their opposition died. When the enemy half of a side Lane empties, that Lane's Monsters turn and strike the enemy Command Lane instead. And when the enemy Command half empties, your Command Lane acts twice every battle round — once against one side Lane's opposition, then again, with whoever survived, against the other.

Those redirected attacks are one-way strikes. The group being hit does not hit back — it already has a battle of its own, elsewhere on the board. Passive defences still punish the attackers (Thorns, Retaliate, Magic Reflect and friends all fire as normal), but nothing else answers.

Put those two rules together and the shape of a Splinterlanes match falls out:

• Clearing any Lane converts into free damage somewhere else. A side Lane you win does not go quiet; it starts hammering the enemy Command Lane for nothing.
• An undefended Command Lane loses matches on its own. Let it empty and your opponent's middle acts twice a round, unanswered, while you are still fighting on the wings.
• A Lane you are clearly losing is not always worth reinforcing. Sometimes the right play is to let it go and make sure the Lane that clears next is one of theirs.

New players almost always spread evenly across three Lanes. The players who climb do not.

Mana is the real constraint, and it is per Lane

Each Lane has its own Mana pool: 12 at the start, +2 every round. Over the 25 placement rounds of a match, that is 62 Mana for that Lane — and no more. A Lane cannot borrow from its neighbours.

Two consequences people miss:

• Your Archon's Mana comes out of its own Lane's pool. A seven-Mana Archon is not just a set of buffs, it is more than a tenth of everything that Lane will ever spend. Which Archon leads which Lane is a real decision — it sets the Lane's colour, its level cap, its buffs and its budget, all at once.
• Cheap Monsters are not filler. Sixty-two Mana across a whole match will not buy six expensive bodies. A Lane that spends its early rounds on one big card is a Lane that is outnumbered when the battles start in round four.

Your Friendly Lane is your Lane

The board is mirrored: the Lane at the top of your screen is your Friendly Lane, and it is your opponent's Hostile Lane. It fights under your Talisman's rules, and it breaks full action-order ties in your favour. Your Hostile Lane does the same for them. The Command Lane is always Standard rules.

So a Talisman is not a flat bonus — it is a bonus that applies to one specific third of the board. Build the Lane that suits it.

Take the Mulligan. It is free.

Until you place your first Monster, you can redraw your whole opening Hand once, for nothing. It does not touch the clock, and your opponent only learns that you redrew, never what.

An opening Hand of five with nothing cheap in it, or nothing that can hold a front line, is a Hand worth throwing back. Players lose battles in round one by keeping a Hand they would not have chosen — and the first three placement rounds have no battles at all, so a slow start is not just survivable, it is the shape of the game. Use those rounds.

The draw decides more than the Deck

Your Deck is 3 Archons and 50 Monsters, and every one of the 53 is different — no duplicates of anything. You draw a Hand of five, and a played card is replaced from the top.

Over 25 rounds you will see at most half your Deck. That means the fiftieth-best Monster in your list is not a rounding error you can ignore — it is a card you have a real chance of being handed while the match is still live. A Deck with ten strong cards and forty passengers is a Deck that draws passengers.

The Season closes on 14 September

Season 3 ends on 14 September, and the standings are snapshotted the moment it does. Everything after that squashes halfway back toward 1200 and the board opens again.

If you have never checked where you stand: Battle ▾ Ladder. If you have, you now know exactly what the next battle is worth.

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Questions, or something here that does not match what you are seeing in game? Comment below — this blog is where we answer them.