Splinterlands | Let's discuss card prices + predictions

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In this article I wanted to take the time to discuss the prices of splinterlands cards and also look forward and make some price predictions. Everything is obviously my personal opinion and I can be waaaaay off, make sure to keep that in mind. Nevertheless I like to share my thoughts and maybe even open a discussion here.

The last few months

Let's start by stating the obvious here, the last few months splinterlands blew up. More and more players found their way to this magical nft play2earn card game.

With this increase in players, the demand for splinterlands related assets went way up. This drove the prices for cards, land plots, splintertalk tokens and dark energy crystals (basically any splinterlands related asset) way up. Obviously, SPS is part of the reason that this happened, but that's a story for another post.

On average, cards went around x10 since the beginning of the boom.

To give you a visual, simply take a look these images that were originally posted by the official splinterlands account.

Keep in mind that there is a usually a delay between a new splinterlands player signup and the related demand in cards. A player usually gets to know the game a little bit before he will actually invest in certain cards. Taking a look at the new signups is actually a pretty important factor to predict the increase in demand for cards.

Game vs investment

The way I see it, splinterlands should be seen as a game first. Only after you understand that, you should consider investing. Well, unless the game just keeps on gaining in popularity, than it doesn't even matter whether you buy terrible & overpriced cards, you will still do allright because every splinterlands related asset will go up anyway.

However, this is not the way I would like to invest. Understanding the value of a card and making those decisions based on that information feels a lot better and safer.

You have to remember, the main goal of the splinterlands team is to create a fun and balanced game, not to make us all rich. Because of this, I believe that they will try to solve the "scarcity problem".

It's not a bad thing that the entire market cap of splinterlands goes up and that we all earn more because of it. However, newer players should be able to progress on an acceptable pace, just like a good non-play2earn game should work. Can you imagine playing an RPG where you have to play 100 hours before you can unlock your first weapon upgrade? Okay, maybe not the best comparison, but I hope you get my point.

Sure, people who do not invest time or money into the game cannot expect huge returns, but the game should still be fun for those who don't want to invest bags of money into the game, at least that's my opinion.

Also, realising that splinterlands is a game, you should know that the team will try to make this game more balanced. Since they can't change existing cards they will focus on creating more counter options. This will also result in overpowered cards to become less strong resulting in a potential price drop of that card. In other words, the newer cards might include more options to counter Lama-Kron or Yodin for example. How good these counters will work and how much they will affect current prices is hard to predict, but I'm guessing it will have some impact at least.

So I do think that the most expensive cards at the moment might go down, or rise less quickly than the balanced cards. That being said, I'm also pretty sure that strong cards will still remain strong and expensive, but some balancing is to be expected.

Scarcity

More people start to play the game, but the amount of total cards don't increase, the result? Scarcity.

Scarcity obviously means that demand is rising and supply is having trouble to keep up, the result is that the prices go up.

Because of this, cards get out of print faster than people expected

When people get a reward that they don't need, it often goes directly on the market. Lots of players tend to put the price just slightly lower than the lowest copy that is currently on the market, with the intention to sell fast. This eventually leads to prices going down (if people aren't buying them faster than that they are being put on the market ofcourse). Cards that are still in print are therefore usually cheaper than cards that went out of print. It's important to understand that the price is not based on the value of the card, but on a temporary situation.

Read: there is opportunity here. Buying cards before they go out of print is a pretty solid strategy, especially in times of scarcity.

Ps. When I talk about "value of a card", I consider the amount in circulation, rarity, power and actual value on the battlefield.

Let's take a look at the last cards that are currently being printed:

The fact that these cards are the only ones still being printed drives the price down. For example, Almo Cambio is the cheapest legendary card at the moment. However, he definitely has more value than many others. Once he goes out of print I'm expecting the price to double very fast.

Same story with axemaster. It's a very solid card and has always been one of the more expensive epic cards. Today he is one of the cheapest, again, I'm pretty sure this won't last.

Chaos Legion

Including new cards to the game will affect the value of the existing cards.

The problem is that we don't have enough information to make some precise estimation. However, let's go over the rough ideas.

More cards means a larger supply. A larger supply means that prices will drop, unless the demand will increase more. Since we already had a huge increase in active players and new signups I would think that the splinterlands team would anticipate this and the following edition will probably have a lot more cards than the previous ones. This is definitely not certain, just a personal feeling because I think it wouldn't be good for the game if the new cards would be too scarce.

Supply and demand of power

The game wasn't designed to work that way, but it almost feels like splinterlands power could be it's own token. People are buying lot's of cards for one reason only, the power that they provide, therefore there is a direct correlation between power and price.

I was even working on a tool that would calculate the price of power, but I stumbled upon some issues with BCX vs Card experience... Anyway, it took a bit longer than I expected and I gave up on it. I might revisit the project some day, we'll see.

Anyway, let's get back to the topic. Just like anything else, prices are based on supply and demand. We must realise that the supply will drastically increase when chaos legion comes out. By how much? We don't know yet.

On the other hand, there are lot's of players and investors sitting by de sideline waiting to invest with (new) money once chaos legion comes out. This means that the demand for power will also increase. Also, new players are finding their way to the game everyday and beginners are starting to work their way up on the ladder and find that they are in need of power.

Long story short, supply and demand will increase. The question is, which one will increase most. The chaos legion cards will have lower amounts of power. However, what really matters is the total power of the entire chaos legion set (this is what represents the "power supply") not the power level of a single card.

Let me tell you what I think. Demand will increase day by day, but supply will increase with a sudden spike (assuming that these packs are released the same way as the packs of previous sets). Therefore, I'm guessing that prices might dip for a couple of weeks, maybe even for a month or 2. However, eventually demand will be the winner.

So I'm thinking the price of power will go down for a while once chaos legion comes out, but will start going back up after that. It shouldn't take too long before it becomes expensive once again.

All that being said, I obviously have no idea what the splinterlands team decide upon. I guess they will make an estimation and react on that with the intention of making the game more balanced.

Also, there is the big question of how lands will work. How much will they increase the demand for power? This is another thing that will have a huge impact.

Conclusion

This was a bit of a ramble post, once again, keep in mind that these are just opinions. Do your own research and make your own conclusions please.

What I'm doing right now is trying to sell some cards that I think are overvalued atm (not more than 20% of my cards), take 25% as profit and reinvest 75% in chaos. It's probably a smarter move to sell 50% with the intention of investing more in chaos legion, but there is a lot of uncertainty still and at the end of the day, I do like my cards.

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