Splinterlands is an amazing game that we all want to see succeed, but it canโt succeed if it betrays the ideology behind NFTs, so letโs talk about that.
In the emerging world of NFTs thereโs a lot that is still unknown and untested. Weโre all gambling on what we know in theory is a huge advancement to online-asset-ownership. The problem lies in figuring out when situations pop up involving NFTs that take away from the online communityโs confidence in these asserted values.
This is incredibly relevant in Splinterlands where EVERY CARD is an NFT. Each and every exchange that happens between players buying, selling, or even renting cards is more than just a redistribution of pixels; itโs an exchange of a unique token with an understood and self-regulated real-world value attached to it.
With this in mind it becomes essential to maintain the perceived worth of that token. This isnโt to be confused with the monetary value. As with every real-world asset, monetary value fluctuates with supply/demand as well as the general market. Maintaining that perceived worth entails respecting that the purchase of a card goes beyond the artwork and also extends to the specific attributes (stats and affects) attached to that token. More so, the tokenโs worth is in how those attributes allow it to interact with the gameplay and rules of Splinterlands in a permanent and unchanging way.
You canโt change a cardโs stats. Once a card is created and assigned an owner, that owner now holds claim to that NFT and everything that it represents within the game of Splinterlands at the time of creation. They canโt claim that it has more/less stats anymore than someone purchasing NFT artwork can claim the Goofy png they bought is the Mona Lisa. The same is true for the artist who sold that Goofy png, and as well for the seller of the aforementioned card: Splinterlands. An attempt to change an already-sold NFT by the seller is especially problematic because it risks betraying the confidence of any future buyer in that they wonโt also face the same unexpected changes.
Unchanging cards makes balance impossible if every card is expected to interact with all past & future cards. Pair that with a) an inability to enforce rewriting every copy of a card or b) trying to impose a word-of-mouth ruling in order to apply balance changes, and you end up in an impossible situation. Thatโs where MTG fixed this issue with set rotations and Standard.
We see this issue potentially being acknowledged and respected with the upcoming introduction of that same solution: Standard.
Much like in MTG, with the inability to fix past cards it becomes necessary to allow for gameplay to evolve past older cards without destroying or changing them. Rotating the cards out of Standard allows the balance of the active set to be carefully and meticulously worked around only the cards in that set. The old cards still have a place in competitive play, there are tournaments and matches that bring in older sets, but people approach these with the understanding that things can get weird and unfair.
When a card is BUSTED we see an even more extreme approach to this card filtering, with an outright ban in tournaments and matches that are normally intended to allow cards from the set it belongs to. Once again weโre met with the compromise between the necessity of respecting the worth (the stats and affects) of the card by not altering it while also attempting to maintain a balance in gameplay. The card becomes mostly unplayable, but due to it being a unique collectable item with a now-notorious history it retains (and frequently even gains) monetary value.
Thus far this has mostly been a retelling of why and how NFTS and Splinterlands DO work, but what about the clickbait title? Thatโs where combing comes into play.
If you arenโt familiar with combing in Splinterlands, itโs when you take multiple NFT cards of the same creature and level and combine them together in order to create a new NFT card for that creature but of a higher level. These low level NFTs used in the combing donโt get redistributed into circulation, they donโt change ownership, theyโre just gone. Splinterlands decides the low level NFTs no longer exist (effectively shredding the cards) and mints you a new card.
You canโt shred NFT cards, and trying to do so betrays the ideology behind NFTs. An NFT is a digital token that lives on an immutable blockchain. It simply can't be destroyed. The closest you can get is to send it to a burn address, removing the ability for it to have an owner, but the NFT still exists. So all of those cards you combined to get your level 4 Yodin still exist, itโs just a matter of whether you or Splinterlands are currently the owners of them (and why they magically stop existing in circulation) since a clear purchase/sale was never established.
Itโs simple. Stop complicating things with the shred and mint. Let all of the cards in combining continue to exist after youโve combined them and just have the โcombinedโ stronger representation of them be a collection of their card-ids. Now instead of selling a level 3 Chicken created some time after they were supposed to have been retired youโre simply selling the original NFTs used to represent the level 3 Chicken. This simplifies yet another issue:
Whether itโs burnt or destroyed doesnโt even matter for this. Every combine involving a level 1 means one less level 1 card for that creature. Forever. This is an especially weird situation because it inevitably means the rarest (and subsequently most valuable) version of every card, given enough time, is going to be a 1 star.
But what if youโre never losing those level 1s? What if you can confidently point to your new-stronger card and say, โthis is a combination of the following NFTsโ? Now all of a sudden we live in a world where itโs justifiable to UN-combine. The stronger card isnโt an NFT, just a collection of level 1 NFTs you own, and can easily be broken back down into those single NFTs at any given time.
Youโre no longer working with a) weird destroyed-not-destroyed cards and b) cards created after theyโve been retired, and are instead back to handling transparently purchased and owned NFTs!
Itโs a weird world in crypto and NFT, but in some ways it has clear direction and ideas. For our own sakes, we really want to ensure the game we all love follows closely with those directions and ideas when theyโre present.
