Almost 24hrs into the Splinterlands general sale. What have we learned?

Almost 24 hours have passed since the Splinterlands general sale began and the whirlwind seems to have finally slowed down. After starting the sale on Twitch watching @aggroed open 10,000 packs (and stealing all my good cards, by the way), we're a little over 1M packs away from reaching the halfway point of this 15M pack sale. It looks like there will be packs available on the market for a while, which the #Splinterlands team was hoping for according to the chat this morning. So, mission accomplished; a wildly successful sale while still allowing new players to get in and build their decks without being priced out of the game.

As I laid out in my What's the right move? post, there are different ways to approach the market and there are pros and cons to each. My plan was to take a little less than half the money I had saved for this sale and use it to buy packs. I wanted the excitement of opening them and I also wanted to get enough to be fairly certain I will get the airdrops.

I thought about just going all in and buying packs, but I know from playing this game for the last six months that there are always going to be cards I want from the market that I don't get from the packs. If I used up all my capital, I knew I'd regret it. Especially if the pack-opening gods were against me. Which they were.

I opened up 330 packs and got 0 GFLs and only 1 Epic gold foil. I did get a nice array of regular legendaries and a good chunk of gold foil rares, including a summoner, but overall the dollars I put in certainly didn't pay for my purchase like they did in the first two rounds of this sale. That said, I never sell any cards so I fully expect that somewhere down the road, the value will end up growing in these cards and I'll probably make out just fine. Plus, we still have 11 airdrops coming our way and if I get a little lucky there, all will be good.

In the meantime, after slowly opening my packs (and recording every card like an anal-retentive statistician--see the pic at the bottom), I spent about 5 hours going through my deck and watching the markets. The dollars I set aside for this part of the sale really paid off. I was able to finish leveling almost my entire Gold League Chaos deck and maxing them out to the levels I can play (8 for common, 6 for rare, 5 for epic, and 3 for legendary). I even managed to scoop up some cheap cards from past decks as I'm sure those players were trying to unload them for more cash to buy Chaos cards.

What happens now?

So now the question is: where do we go from here? Will all the new packs being opened drive the prices way down as unneeded or unwanted cards flood the market? Or will the new players coming into the game start buying them up right away? Or maybe, players like me who have decent decks but want to fill them in and possibly advance to the next level will be buying cards by the dozens?

Personally, I really think it's a bit of a crap shoot. On the one hand, there is no question that having all these new cards flood the market will put downward pressure on prices. It's simple supply and demand. Plus, I'm sure there are many people that overextended themselves, probably buying more packs than they should, and they need to recoup some of that money.

On the other hand, having a large supply of cheap cards means that a LOT of them can be bought for not a lot of money. And, as more people get their hands on some of these cards, they're going to start realizing the value of owning them. For example, I didn't really think the Goblin Psychic was much of a card. Sure, it had tank heal, but 2 Magic, only 3 health, and 1 speed? Plus, it uses 6 Mana? Not much to see here. With the low speed, it would probably get killed before it even got a chance to heal. But that was before I leveled Obsidian and realized I could pair it with her. So, 220 cards later (minus the 40 or so I got from the packs), I now have a healer with Affliction and Silence that has 6 health and can do 3 magic damage as well. It's a very handy card to have in the arsenal.

The point of this example is that in a total of 550 packs that I've opened through the first two plus months of this sale, I had about 40 Goblin Psychics. Now I have 220. That's a net 180 of that card off the market, just from one player. And I only took it to level 8. If you want to play Diamond or Champion, you'll need 400 cards to max it. You don't have to have that many players doing that before that "flood of supply" we were talking about starts drying up. And the price will rise, of course. There will be many examples of this going forward.

Predicting the future

The difficult part of this equation to predict is, how the fact that we haven't even come close to opening all the packs yet will affect the prices. I mean, if 10 million packs got opened in the first 3 days, obviously there's going to be a ton of cards on the market. But the fact that only 3 million packs, give or take, have been sold so far in this round, with another 8-9 million to go, means that we don't really know how many cards are out there or how many are yet to come; or how fast. If those packs take a few months to sell out, then the supply on the market isn't as great as people think. It will bleed into the market slowly as the packs get bought up and opened.

This is why I went ahead and pulled the trigger on buying today. It's a bit of a gamble as I know prices could continue to come down, over the next few days especially. But I'm not so sure that's going to be the case with cards that really have a good niche. There were a few cards today I decided to wait on buying thinking they'd come down. And some did. But there were also a few where someone else came in and scooped them up and now the price is actually substantially higher.

A lot of it may come down to how desperate you are to actually use the card. There is a very legitimate chance most prices will slowly come down over the next few weeks. You can probably wait and buy them then for significantly less than you'd pay now. But then you'd have to spend the next few weeks waiting to use them. That said, the rental market is definitely cheap right now so you could just go ahead and rent the card until you decide it's cheap enough to buy. There are many different options and it will be very interesting to see how this all plays out.

What am I doing?

For me, I'm a buyer. I've been going back and looking at the prices of similar cards from Untamed, Dice, and Beta packs, and I've decided I don't want to risk waiting only to find out I have to pay double or triple or more for cards I want. If you like the price and it fits in your budget, buy it. The price may go up or it may go down, but if you're anything like me, chances are you won't notice too much. Why? Because you'll be busy playing the game with your new cards! lol

Anyway, I hope your luck was better than mine with any packs you bought and I look forward to potentially battling it out with you in the game.

Thanks for reading. As always, comments and questions are welcomed and appreciated. Drop a note below and engage. It's what Hive is all about. Happy battling!

Pretty high-tech, I know. :-)

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