Just set my hair on fire, and bury my smoldering corpse in the backyard.

So the Splinterlands season just ended, and it was an absolute blood bath. I think that everyone who plays the game can agree that: yes--things are getting more competitive. Okay, no. Not competitive.

Psychotic.

The last day of the season is pretty much the Purge. No rules. No mercy. Just straight up gangstas killin' gangstas. Bodies everywhere. Shrieks of despair pierce the air as another 70 rating points are lost to some low level dweeb with a lucky dodge. There's profanity. There's sobbing. There's a few people laughing.

But not good laughter. It's the cackling of a maniac who has nothing left to lose. They've lost so many points. So many precious points...and now they've pushed through the denial and the fear and decided that sanity is just an anchor holding them down.

That's where I was an hour before the season ended. That's when I decided to just "screw it". I'm gonna work on quests. Haha.

HAHAHAHAHAHA!

So I finished my Water quest. 14 minutes left to the end of the season now. Oh wait, what's this? Another quest! This time it's Fire.

Not much time to get a quest done, but what the heck. My goal was to get 5 Wins with Fire in less than 14 minutes. That way, I could grab the Champion level rewards before the season ended.

Loss. Loss, Win. Win, Win. Win.

Oh crap. One minute left!

Loss.

SO CLOSE.

For the last 10 minutes of a brutal season, Malric Inferno gave me strength. He gave me hope. He allowed me some wins before the carnage stopped.

It's only fitting that he become the first subject in my fun, new side project:

THE SPINTERLANDS EMOJI COLLECTION

On a semi-regular basis, I will attempt to squeeze out one emoji at a time, each one representing a Splinterlands character. Hopefully, someday there will be enough emojis created to then integrate into Discord, Splintertalk, and/or the upcoming in-game chat that we're working on for guilds.

The thing with making emojis is that you have to be able to distinguish what it is at tiny sizes, Then you gotta worry about both light and dark modes. It's not as easy as you might think. If you're trying to represent specific characters, then there's the added challenge of emphasizing that character's attributes while using only basic shapes.

So here's Malric from 32px to 128px to 256px.

Every time I produce a new emoji, I'll include a 128px PNG version for you guys to use however you want.

So...here ya go! Enjoy.

Good luck on the next season!