The Impact and Potential of Splinterlands' Great Burning Event

If you're out of the loop on the Splinterlands' "Great Burning," you might be living under a rock. Seriously, check your ceiling. Is it stone? No? Alright, let's carry on. This past week, Splinterlands released a graphic titled "The Great Burning," which has sparked a flurry of speculation, especially since no further details about the event were disclosed.

It's a common understanding that Splinterlands has an overabundance of assets, from Cards to SPS to DEC and other NFTs. This surplus hasn't exactly been beneficial for the game, as it's negatively impacted the demand and, consequently, the prices of these assets. Cast your mind back to late 2021 during the Splinterlands bull run; it felt like there would never be enough cards to satisfy demand.

Prices of common cards skyrocketed, and everything suddenly seemed scarce and pricey. If you experienced that bull run, you'd think the demand for cards would never wane. So, what was the team's solution? They launched new sets of cards in larger quantities than the previous edition to prevent another supply shock.

Just as I was penning down this post, the update dropped, revealing the burn details:

In celebration of the five-year anniversary of the initial launch of the Splinterlands website (then called Steem Monsters) and Alpha pack sale, we will be launching a promotional event where we will be giving away TONS of prizes in the form of various Splinterlands assets that the company has accumulated in its treasury over the past 5 years.

The prizes will include new player Titles, lots of land plots, Runi, and all types of different booster packs, including some Alpha packs! To earn the prizes, players will need to burn DEC or DEC-B and there will be both leaderboard prizes for the players who burn the most as well as random giveaway prizes that are available to everyone who participates.

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Before this update, I had hoped that the plan was to burn a portion of $SPS tokens or Chaos legion packs. But in retrospect, those would have only provided temporary solutions to the numerous challenges plaguing Splinterlands. One thing that could significantly improve the Splinterlands economy is DEC burns.

Why? Because a DEC pump directly influences the price of $SPS. If this burn event is successful and ends up eliminating a substantial amount of DEC, the conversion mechanism will cause the excess demand for DEC to spill over into SPS as SPS will be burnt to mint DEC. If the price of SPS pumps, then it means people will earn more valuable $SPS from winning battles. If people win more valuable $sps from battles, then it means battles will be more lucrative.

If battles become more lucrative, then players will be incentivized to strengthen their deck by accumulating or renting cards. Depending on the volume accumulated, we might see the price of cards increasing. The era of cheap cards as we know it today may be drawing to a close.

Combine the effect of this great burn with the new SPS requirement for climbing the battles rank, and it seems that the price of SPs may just have a chance of seeing a resurgence. Now, it's up to the community whether this burn plan will be well received or not. Will the community rise to the occasion to make this Great Burn a success? Only time will tell. As for me, I'm ready to contribute my modest stash of DEC to the Great Burn event! Let's go all in! 🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🧨🧨🧨🚀🚀🚀🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥