Splinterlands offers a wide variety of assets with which you can essentially "invest" in the game. Cards, Land, and SPS are the main ones, although there are rarer things like Titles and Totems as well.
The only thing I don't consider an investment asset is DEC, but I'll save that for a separate conversation. It's only utility outside of being a currency is as an airdrop point, but that has a deadline to it which ends in about 6 months.
So between the three main assets I mentioned earlier - cards, land, and SPS - I have tried to diversify my assets across. They all have pros and cons so I'll break those down briefly before focusing on the point of this article, SPS.
Land is exciting, but ultimately we have no idea how the utility will work. Right now it is all speculation and while I would love to own as much land as possible (I own 1 plot), the unknowns around it make it hard for me to sell other assets for this one. Don't get me wrong, I think the team is going to knock it out of the park, but until we get a little more information (or I find some spare cash), I'll be happy with my 1 plot for now and try to find decent entry points in the future.
Cards are great as well. And I love treating them as digital real estate that I can buy and hold for price appreciation. While holding them, I can use them in my own decks or rent them out which is why I use the real estate analogy.
Here is the tough lesson learned about cards though, while a single card is in fact 'deflationary' due to the limited amount of BCX printed, "cards" as an asset class are somewhat inflationary, or at the very least subject to a wider variety of market forces.
Every time a new expansion is released, or reward cards go out of print and new ones come in, or even with the upcoming modern format rotating expansions in and out - cards values will fluctuate wildly. Both card prices as well as rental values are affected by this, and as evidenced by the release of Chaos Legion this effect can be very dramatic as the market reprices itself accordingly.
So does that mean I'm not buying cards or packs? Absolutely not. I believe in the game long term and am willing to play the long game. But when it comes to cards, I'm more focused on building a deck rather than investing for rental income. I'll take what I can get in terms of spare cards, but I'm not longer buying cards with the sole intent of renting them out - at least not at the scale I was a couple of months ago.
This might change in the future, but for now I would rather focus my efforts on stacking and staking as much SPS as possible. With a hard cap of 3 billion tokens, SPS is limited in it's supply with its list of utility set to rise in 2022 and beyond. As the team has said many times, if you want anything cool in this game, SPS will be how you get it.
One of the best investing mantras is to "be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful". Check anywhere online and combined with the downtrend in the general crypto market, the FUD is nonstop.
This means it's time to grab as much SPS as possible becuase I'm confident in the team's ability to deliver value in the future. Just look at the track record. Sure asset prices are down across the board, but the game is still up and running and players are still earning. Other games may offer exciting potential and hype, not to take anything away from them, but Splinterlands has a solid player base, an incredibly hard working dev team, and a game that is not only functional but fun and improving every single day with more innovation on the horizon.
So, this is NOT FINANCIAL ADVICE, I'm just sharing my perspective on where I am focusing my financial efforts when it comes to Splinterlands. Still very bullish long term and the best part about this investment - I can play with it to earn more along the way!
