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In this post I am trying to answer the question of what is the expected ROI on Conclave Arcana.

The first thing I did was look at what the top players were earning in Modern League at the end of the last season. Here is a sample of SPS wins among leaderboard players. I have excluded the highest rated players with giant amounts of SPS such as Bravetofu because those are a bit of an outlier numbers.

So here we get a general idea, that a top player with maxed out Rebellion and Conclave Arcana cards can expect to win around 37 SPS per battles.

If you take my average winning numbers from previous season:

We get around 256 wins per season and an average win rate between 55 and 56% then we multiply 256 * 37 = 9,472 SPS per season. Interestingly these numbers are very close to what one of these top players @mondroid just published:
@mondroid/tracking-my-winnings-conclave-arcana-season-159

The number from his post is a bit higher than my estimate by around 300 SPS, but that is probably because he is a better player than me and his average winning rate is higher than mine: 9,764 SPS is what Mondroid said was his ranked winnings in his post.

So for my calculation I will use my number of 9,472 SPS per season because most players are not as good as Mondroid. Since we don't have Survival for the last two seasons and I don't know what it will be like when they bring it back, I will exclude Survival mode earnings from this calculation. I am also excluding Tournaments as I don't play in those because if you are not a top player you might not be able to get back your DEC entry fees.

Based on a one cent SPS price this is around $95 a season and based on 1.5 years worth of seasons left that is about 39 seasons. So 95 x 39 = $3,705 worth of SPS for the average player. There will also be some SPS earnings from brawls, but that really varies based on what Brawl tier your guild is participating in so I will say that we can round up the earnings to around $4,000 in the next 1.5 years.

The cost of a full Conclave Arcana set is around $8,000 so in SPS earnings alone you will be able to return at least half of the Conclave Arcana card cost in the next year and a half.

So the ROI on buying Conclave Arcana depend on how much the Conclave Arcana set will be worth after it goes to Wild only. Will it be like Chaos Legion or more like a Rebellion set?

Card Values

How much will the Conclave Arcana and Rebellion sets be worth in one and a half years once they are relegated to Wild only league? For now we have the data for the Rebellion set and how it has held up since its release:

As you can see the value of Rebellion set has been surprisingly stable between six and eight thousand dollars in the last eight months or so. That is very different from the Chaos Legion set which had consistently dropping values since it's release until it bottomed out around six hundred dollars for a maxed out Chaos Legion core set:

What is the reason for such a disparity in performance of the Chaos Legion and Rebellion sets? In my opinion there are multiple factors in play here:

Chaos Legion core set was severely overprinted. This set came out when there were bots going full force and there was a major bull market in Play to Earn right after Axie Infinity made a major splash in crypto markets and Splinterlands just released the SPS token. There were a lot of players coming into the game at the time which if you look at the guilds I was in at the time most of those guilds and players are basically gone. I would not be surprised if we lost not only bots but also about 80% of the human players since then.

Here is how the Axie Infinity chart looks like:

Their token was worth $165 and not it is worth $2.53. That is 98.5% drop from the top. Their market cap tells a similar story, at one time it was worth over ten billion dollars and now it is worth only four hundred million dollars. To be fair SPS did even worse, we are down 99% from the top and our market cap is down from one hundred thirty three million to four and a half million dollars.

With these kinds of drops in market cap and token price comes a lot of disappointment among players and investors, but it also shows potential of how high this token can go. If we simply re-gain our top market cap that will be around x30 from these levels or up to 30 cents for SPS token. That is a really good potential.

But coming back to our reason for Chaos Legion core set devaluation, at the time** we thought there were 500,000 active daily players.** Yes, most of those were bots, but right now we have under five thousand daily active players according to Peak Monsters:

That is just one percent of the players we thought we had in the game. If we think that 80% of the players we had at the top are gone now then based on the 5,000 player number right now we had around 25,000 active human players at the top of the Splinterlands bull market. Twenty thousand new human players coming into the game would cause a major bull market in SPS, cards and all other Splinterlands assets.

If we compare the number of Chaos Legion packs opened we will see that it is 10,651,000 compared to only 950,000 packs for Rebellion. So the number of Rebellion cards is more than ten times less than the number of Chaos Legion cards. To compare to Conclave Arcana packs, so far those are even more rare: 404,667 packs have been opened so far:

Yes it can be argued that these are different types of packs, now we have: Standard, Legendary, Alchemy and Starter packs but at least we get a general idea of card scarcity via these numbers.

Chaos Legion Discounted Pack Sale. Another reason for depressed values of the Chaos Legion core set is because we had a Christmas Sale for Chaos Legion where you could buy discounted packs. The team committed to never running pack sales again so we shouldn't have this problem again.

Conclave Arcana ROI Potential

If we assume that the value of Conclave Arcana will stay stable just as Rebellion did all the way until it goes out of Modern League, you will have an option to sell it in 1.4 years for about the same $8,000 and keep all of the SPS or wait until it goes out of Modern league and risk a 50% drop in value, which could be more or could be less we don't know, I am just thinking that is a good estimate based on the fact that Wild SPS earnings are about a third of what they are in Modern so a drop of 50 to 66% is very much in the cards.

If we take $4,000 worth of SPS tokens earned in Modern over 1.5 years and x30 based on the return to our top market cap at some point during the next 1.5 years due to another altcoin market and a bull run in Play to Earn coins we get an upside potential of $120,000 worth of SPS earned in the next 1.5 years, that would make for a wild ROI on $8,000 invested into Conclave Arcana. But that scenario is not guaranteed.

Conclusion

Based on the SPS price staying the same ROI on Conclave Arcana will be close to a break even. That assumes one cent SPS price and $4,000 value of a full Conclave Arcana set if it drops half it's value after going out of Modern.

If you are bullish on SPS then these ROI numbers will increase proportionally to the SPS price increase as playing in modern is one of the best ways to acquire SPS. As I mentioned above SPS earnings alone could be worth $120K under the 30 cent SPS scenario.

Regardless of where SPS goes you will get 1.5 years of enjoyment after playing in Modern League with Conclave Arcana cards. So Conclave Arcana seems like a fun and potentially rewarding experience.