I love splinterlands. It's had its issues over the years, but new set releases are my favorite time in this game or any TCG.
With this set, one of the big changes is in how airdrops work. Rather than give airdrop chances based on packs purchased (which incentivized buying packs, dumping them for cheap on the market and then buying more, leading to significantly devalued assets), Rebellion will work based on conflicts. While the details of conflicts are explained in much more detail elsewhere, the gist of them is that players can stake rebellion cards and packs and these will generate points (equal to CP for cards, and 150 per pack). At the end of each month, the total points will be tallied and airdrops randomly assigned.
I was initially very skeptical of this because I was worried that whales would consume pretty much the entire available supply, making buying packs from splinterlands a poor value proposition. However, after seeing the actual number of packs bought and playing with conflicts on the test server, I am confident that there is value for the smaller player (although as with airdrops in previous sets, there is still very little value for the very small player as they won't generate enough points to have a good shot).
To that end, I am now focused on maximizing my chances for airdrops, and I want to try and quantify how valuable CP can be.
The first question is: should you hold packs or cards? If your primary concern is conflicts, the answer is easy: cards. Packs have 150 CP but contain an expected 200 CP, so you lose CP by holding cards not packs. (This of course says nothing if you value the long-term value of having an unopened pack.)
So given that we're holding cards, which cards are best? In a previous post, I dropped the fact at the bottom that GF cards are better CP/$ than RF. In past sets, this has been a nice side-effect, but not enough to make GF a solid value proposition (for me at least).
Now though, buying GF cards, while more expensive on an absolute scale, is cheaper on a relative scale.
| Rarity | RF price | RF CP | RF CP/$ | GF price | GF CP | GF CP/$ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Common | $0.15 | 5 | 33 | $2.0 | 125 | 66.67 |
| Rare | $0.50 | 20 | 40 | $5.0 | 500 | 100 |
| Epic | $2.0 | 100 | 50 | $20.0 | 2,500 | 125 |
| Legendary | $10 | 500 | 50 | $80 | 12,500 | 156 |
The above table shows two things. One: GF give more CP/$ than RF. Two: The greater the rarity, the greater the CP/$, both for RF and GF. My theory on two is that people are more willing to spend smaller amounts of money even if it is less efficient.
This means that generally, the best bang for your buck will be epic and legendary GFs. I can't believe I'm saying this, as I've never bought a single GF legendary before, but I now have over 10 BCX I've accumulated over the past few days. I wouldn't be surprised if GF cards go up in price once people realize how valuable they are for conflicts.
Now to the meat of this post. What sort of return can I expect for putting CP into conflicts. Because the cards are staked, they cannot be rented out or placed on land (but they can be played with, so the first playset has almost no opportunity cost), so we need to evaluate the return relative to those possibilities.
Currently, there are 105,000,000 CP of cards+packs floating around. To avoid painting too rosy a picture, I will assume 100% of rebellion will go to conflicts. So the numbers below will be a worst-case scenario, at least to start.
When you assume everything above, these are the ROIs you get if you buy cards in certain rarities. Even at the floor, the return is pretty decent at ~37%. For the cheapest legendaries, this comes close to a 100% return.
The only assumption I'm not happy with in the above is what the total CP staked will be. For riftwatchers, which was sold in a similar manner, not many packs were ever sold past the first week of release (if memory serves, 500k packs were sold in the pre-release and only 500k more were ever sold), which is why I only assume a doubling for this set. However, the value of conflicts may make people buy more than I expect. If instead of doubling, the total CP staked does a 5X to 500M, then the ROI for everything about halves.
I am all in on conflicts. I assume others will be too, which is why I've made these assumptions as conservative as possible.
I was trying to decide whether to go in on more cards or buy SPS before it maybe takes off, and this analysis has convinced me that conflicts are the way to go.
If you want me to run the numbers on any of this, shoot me a reply and I'll do it! I ran the scenario I think most likely, but I imagine many people will have other ideas, and I want to check them out!
Interested in splinterlands?
Interested in getting in on the action of conflicts?
Sign up using my referral link, and I'll send you a few cards to get started!
