What a day!

Yesterday around 11am my time (Dec 05, 2025) the land cards sale opened to general public of Splinterlands. This was a limited mint of 100K common grain card Tireless Farmhand (and also a rare, epic and legendary, so 4 cards in total). It was a staged sale:

• First 3 days, the cards were available to public based their individual asset allocation
• After that, sale was open to all public, like an IPO

At the onset of general sale there were about 52K common cards were available. It took 26 min to sell it all. The common required only Cinder (you get that from burning cards), and grain. Praetoria created 85M Cinder and burned through 2B grain to craft all the 100K common cards. So this was the backdrop of the event which was months in the making and gave quite a supply and price shock to the Praetorian landscape. Let us discuss what happened focusing just of grain.

In the Lands-SPL website, there the many ways to query and visualize land data. Very few people are taking full advantage of it. The website and all the tools designed by @beaker007 and supported by me, have professional level data analysis and visualization tools. In the display above, I show how the Total grain supply in Praetoria was in a steady decline since we started collecting data in late April 2025. This is because we created a lot of grain earlier without any utility or consumption. Then we created additional resources like Wood, Stone and Iron; which required grain. Finally we created Aura, which required them all. Aura was used to create midnight potion which is a physical item with some use.

However, since the use of Aura is limited and sporadic, the demand of the natural resources remained soft. With a lot of supply and soft demand, price always goes down. People cut grain production in a big way, and net daily grain production went negative for most of the year. That is the chart belo with a grain price overlay.

Grain Price to Soften

This is simple supply-demand economics. Let us look at the backdrop in the plot above. You can see the flat to rounded base around 9 DEC that formed from 4-5 months, and then people finally saw the value and need both to buy up the grain, and the early organic rally started from September. Then the land card was announced in November with high grain requirement, and people started buy up grain at any price (I did it myself). As the price rallied, the production increased rapidly as well, but the price outpaced the increased production. Yesterday with the complete sale of the grain card, the price reached 24 DEC and then soften.

Why?

Because, most people don't need that additional grain anymore. So I expect price to soften.

This is what we discuss often and was discussing it yesterday with @vugtis and @cryptomancer. While events like these are good, but the demand created by these events are sporadic and temporary. What we really need from @yabapmatt and @davemccoy and the team is not just sporadic demand, but sustained demand. Let is create the demand first, BEFORE we make another new resource or additional supply for the old resources that the land cards will surely produce. We have just given people a taste of supply shock, it is time to go for the kill! Hit the iron when it is hot. We are not going to have too many chances like this. It is high time what we get into high gear and give people more price/demand shock immediately! That is my request.