Today's topic has me genuinely excited for the future of the game and I wanted to jump in and give my two cents before a final decision was made on the matter. There has been talk by Yabapmatt and Dave McCoy to bring back non-soulbound reward cards, and it's hard to walk back this kind of talk once it gets out. The real question is how can it be done? Will they revert to the old days of giving out reward cards in chests directly from playing ranked? Will it come in the form of a reward shop chest to buy with glint? Will soulbound cards still exist in their current form, or in a modified version? Those questions need to be answered before anything can be implemented.
First of all, I think the old days of giving out the cards directly from chests in ranked play are over. This would overlap with the glint shop, and since the team spent a lot of effort developing the entire system around glint and rewards, I cannot imagine them abandoning it now. I think the most practical way to introduce non-soulbound reward cards would be through a new Glint shop item, an "Unlocked Card Chest" that would cost roughly the same as an Ultimate chest (I'd suggest 5-10k glint range) and would contain a single unbound card that can be of any rarity or foil, including black foil. This would also become a sink for midnight potions, something the ecosystem greatly needs at this time. Batch limits would be relatively low, maybe 25.
This new system would allow those that want to farm cards to sell to do so by using up their glint. This would indirectly tie glint to DEC, which is a positive thing in my opinion. Finally, a tangible monetary value for glint! What if glint was tradeable for DEC through a liquidity pool? Those are questions for another day. It would also greatly increase the level of excitement around the game, from people that seek to make profits from the Web 3 experience. Frontier mode appeals to Web 2 gamers, but introducing non-soulbound reward cards for glint would appeal to Web 3 gamers much more, and especially to ex-Splinterlands players that liked the good old days of farming Djinn Oshannus to sell on the market.
What about the current system of soulbound cards? I would vote to keep it the way it is, but reduce the unlock cost from 20x to 1x. If people want to sell the card, let them inject DEC into the card, which can be recouped if the card is burned later. Imagine this, somebody injects 2100 DEC into a max level common card to sell it, later the buyer ends up burning the card for 2100 DEC. No DEC was created or lost, but the card itself was destroyed. This is a balanced approach that doesn't hurt the ecosystem, and lets the market decide the value of these cards without an extreme paywall. Personally, I would still want a soulbound deck to play with in Wild, so I probably would not go chasing the more expensive unbound chests right away.
Is this the way to go in order to bring back non-soulbound cards? Let me know in the comments and thank you for reading!