Splinterlands - Hodl or sell your DECs?

The price of Splinterlands Dark Energy Crystals (DEC) had been falling for a couple weeks now. From the high of 0.007 Steem per DEC to around 0.0055 now. I am not sure what's happening but could be due to people offloading their DECs to support for funding of the Kickstarter/Fundition campaign.

Another reason is probably speculating. There had been talks that the Kickstarter will create a whole bunch of cards that people will burn for DECs, mainly the Chain Golem. If the Chain Golem turns out to be another useless card, then majority of it will be sacrificed to the furnace for DECs, which will end up in the market and bring the DEC price even lower. That is what some had speculated.

BUT, let's take a look at some numbers.

The card that will make a difference is the Gold Foil Chain Golem Legendary card. My estimation is there will be around 200 of this card after the kickstarter. The burn rate for a Untamed GFL will be lower than the Beta's, let's assume that at 60,000 DECs. Assuming the Chain Golem is really useless and 150 of them gets burnt for DECs, we will see 9 Million DECs created. That number doesn't sound like a lot and I don't see how it will shake up the DEC market.

On the other hand, the Kickstarter and Fundition campaign had already sold more than 158K packs. I am pretty certain that most of these packs will be opened. Untamed packs are new so it makes no sense to hold them. When opening packs, we can also assume that 95% of them will be done with Potions, both the Alchemy and Legendary Brilliant ones.

A pair of the potions cost 45000 DECs (or slightly less with guild discount) for 100 packs. 158000 packs will require 1580 potions, for a total of 71 Million DECs!!! All the packs will quickly get opened once released, everybody is eager to see the new cards.

Based on what I see on steem-engine, there are only around 92 Million DECs in circulation, and @steemmonsters is holding 65 Million of them. I don't think steemmonsters team will sell those DECs, as those are reserved for funding tournaments. That leaves 27 Million DECs in players' hands. There will also be some in players' account in-game, though I doubt it will be more than a few million.

But we need 71 Million for potions!!

Its good that the Kickstarter is now giving free potions charges upon reaching certain tiers, but those are far from sufficient to open the packs. We will still need many millions of DECs to buy potions.

So I am really puzzled why DEC price is falling. Maybe in another 2 - 3 weeks, people will start to realise they need these DECs to buy potions.

In the meantime, I will try to buy some of these cheap cheap DECs on the market since I will need them to buy my potions too. Going to be opening 220 Untamed packs for myself.