I went deep, deep into Land Math. Took me a few hours to calculate it all, and it's far from perfect, but I was able to get quite a few nice conclusions, tables and plots. I hope you enjoy this bombardment of results!
If you want further explanations on how I got to the results, please comment - happy to explain the process.
Land cards are the new thing for Praetoria, a new use case - but beware! There's a catch.
a) there's a limited amount of cards to be printed
b) the cards boost land production
Which leads to c) there will be a turning point when they turn from being a sink to being inflationary.
That was what I wanted to explore, more or less - when is the tipping point? How big is the sink?
| Production facts! | Facts Facts Facts |
|---|---|
| Total Base PP | 639 Mio. |
| Total Boosted PP | 1194 Mio. |
| Total Boost | 87% |
| Most Boosted Ressource | Aura (243%) |
| Active Plots (with cards) | 48,463 |
| Base PP/Plot | 13,186 |
| Boosted PP/Plot | 24,652 |
| DEC staked | 1,540 Mio. |
| DEC/ active Plot | 31,777 |
First, this is the amount of cards available, in both crafting as well as mining with Labor's Luck:
| The Cards | CC RF | GF | Max RF | Max GF/BF | Total Maxed | DEC/CC |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Common | 100,000 | 380 | 250 | 37 | 287 | 873 |
| Rare | 18,000 | 220 | 156 | 29 | 185 | 2,297 |
| Epic | 6,000 | 100 | 130 | 23 | 153 | 7,925 |
| Legends | 100 | 40 | 90 | 17 | 107 | 45,938 |
That's a total of 732 Maxed copies available, if everything is combined. Which won't be the case, but I had to make a lot of assumptions to get a general idea.
To mint those, the following amount of resources is needed (the sink):
| Resource | Resource for Crafting | DEC/1000 | Total DEC |
|---|---|---|---|
| Grain | 2,300 Mio. | 20.68 | 47.564 Mio. |
| Wood | 540 Mio. | 79.74 | 43.059 Mio. |
| Stone | 90 Mio. | 85.1 | 7.659 Mio. |
| Iron | 40 Mio. | 400.31 | 16.012 Mio. |
| Aura | 95 Mio. | 3903 | 370.824 Mio. |
| Cinder | 142.5 Mio. | 1225 | 174.5 Mio. |
| Total | $419,689 USD | 659.682 Mio. DEC |
$420,000! 660,000,000 DEC! That's quite the sink! Applies only if all cards are crafted. And those are equivalents - the cards are made out of in-game assets.
Aura is calculated based on the cost of resources it takes to produce them. As we stated above, Aura has a normal boost of almost 250%. That is included in the cost.
Aura cost without boost: 9759 DEC/1000 Aura
Aura cost with boost: 3903 DEC/Aura
Cinder was calculated with the currently cheapest card to burn, Epic RF Chaos Legion for $0,117/CC.
These two are one-time-inflation, if all cards are crafted. It's not a ongoing effect, but just applies once.
The new cards get a 2x boost, as I just found out - hence editing here.
All cards together, with respective GF and BF PP, bring 4,554,620 PP to the game. That's 0.6% of the current base PP - so from a PP standpoint, it's no inflation.
All cards have Dark Energy bonuses. That means, DEC can be unstaked and enter the market. If we take the maxed cards, we get the following result:
| Card | Max Reduction | Maxed Cards | Max DEC Reduction |
|---|---|---|---|
| Common | -50% | 287 | 4.56 Mio. |
| Rare | -99% | 185 | 5.84 Mio. |
| Epic | -80% | 153 | 3.9 Mio. |
| Legends | -99% | 107 | 3.4 Mio. |
| Total | 17.69 Mio. |
That's around 1.15% of the currently staked DEC. Even if we add the 0.6% from base PP, we're still at 1,75% - not even per year. Just once.
This one was a little hard. Took me a while, and I'm not that sure that I did it right - though it makes sense. I used the bonuses that each card provides to calculate the inflationary effects that the cards have.
Boosted PP: 25k (average mentioned above)
Boosted PP/Card: 5k
The PP for the Land Cards were boosted with the average of 87%, plus the 2x. Meaning, 1 CC Farmhand has 18.7 PP instead of 5 base PP.
All cards lose in the beginning. The best option is the Miner for Aura, using the calculation of aura price above - which is for production, and does not reflect in the sales. That's why I chose the Iron option for the Miner here.
If we take into account the cost of each card, the most efficient card levels are:
| Card | Level | Days to Break Even |
|---|---|---|
| Farmhand | 10 | 1847 |
| Druid | 8 | 1914 |
| Ox Grain | 5 | 1433 |
| Miner Aura | 4 | 339 |
Again, Aura is to be taken cautiously. But with Iron, the Miner needs 5357 days to break even at level 4. It's calculated based on DEC, so it fluctuates with the price.
Finally. I need another beer before this. Just a second. ... Ready.
Now, for this one there are 2 approaches. One using DEC, and the other using the resources themselves. Let's start with DEC overall, and we treat all cards as RF maxed - meaning, in reality, the tipping point is reached a little faster due to the higher PP of GF/BF.
| All in DEC | Common | Rare | Epic | Legendary |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Maxed Cards | 287 | 185 | 153 | 107 |
| Max Extra DEC/h | 2261 | 1063 | 1563 | 420 |
| Daily Extra DEC | 54,269 | 25,529 | 37,528 | 10,094 |
| Total/Day | 127,420 | |||
| Days to fill Sink | 5177 |
14 years. Nice. It's a sink then! At least for DEC... but that is bound to the price of resources. And a big chunk of the sink is resources - only 25% of the sink is actual DEC in form of Cinder, or cards bought to burn. Which isn't a real sink, as the DEC just goes to another account, and only a part is taken out of the equation.
So, the same for resources. Each card on their best resource.
| Resources | Common | Rare | Epic | Legend | Legend Aura |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Maxed Cards | 287 | 185 | 153 | 107 | 107 |
| Max Extra Resource | 109k Grain | 40,5k Wood | 75.5k Grain | 1.8k Iron | 1.8k Aura |
| Daily | 2,624k | 971k | 1,814k | 42.7k | 42.7k |
| Total/Day | 4,438 k | same | incl. in Common | same | same |
| Days to fill the sink | 518 | 556 | 937 | 2,224 |
Not taking into account bloodlines. Nor stone, nobody cares about stone these days.
1.5 years for wood. 1.5 years for Grain. Around 3 years for Iron, and 6 years for Aura.
Wow. This was fun. Around 1000 cells in 115 lines and 20 columns in Excel. The beer helped. Now, to be clear - there are a million variations of this. Depending on how many cards are crafted, how many combined, what plots they're on, how high the boost is, and so on. But by using averages, I think I got somewhat close to what might be the turn-out.
I'm glad that this sink was implemented. I'm sure that the team will come up with several new use cases in the next 1.5 years which will be a sink on their own, making this calculation obsolete.
And yes, there's real use to this. Especially for lower level players - if you don't have an average plot, the land cards can actually be worth a lot more. 5k PP per card is quite a bit, and it affects the benefit of each land card. The lower PP the card that you replace is, the bigger the relative effect of the land card.
Me, personally - I'm totally going to use my cards. And I'm going to make more. Especially the Farmhand. Cheap and effective!
5% of the rewards will go to 
Calculating Land part 1 - How to get your ROI
Calculating Land part 2 - Are pools worth it?
Calculating Land part 3 - Organic Growth
Land Plot Efficiency for non-whales
Card-Production-Coefficient - Combining LPE and ROI
Renting for Land - at what cost?
What do refined resources cost?
Calculating Totem and Title boosts
Calculating Plot Rarity Boost
Setting up a Rare Stone Plot
My perfect plot - Conclusion of my calculations
Thank you very much for reading, I hope you enjoyed it at least as much as I enjoyed writing :-D If you have any comments or feedback - please let me know! And don't forget to leave your own posts for me to curate. Thank you very much!
If you don't play the game yet, you can use my referral: Click here for referral :-)
Dividers by Saydie - Click here. Always grateful for those!
