It's greeeeen!!

FOMO!

Nevermind.... Back to red.

Best not to care what the markets are doing and keep converting from shitcoin fiats into cryptos and cross fingers it all works out. Sure, if it doesn't, we are fucked - but if we stay in fiat we are fucked anyway. At least going into crypto is an opt-in fucking, rather than a forced economic rape by authorities, spread out over a lifetime.

What is "green" at the moment is the Splinterlands rental market, where it seems players are coming to terms with the new challenges they face with the changes in rewards and the two day rental minimum. As I wrote about yesterday, it does indeed seem that players are chasing the chests from the rewards and renting cards they need for their daily challenges, but are then "stuck" with them for an additional 24 hours, even if they don't help complete the challenge quests.

This means that on "day one" they have what they need, but on "day two" they have underutilized cards with what they need being different to some degree. But, on "day three" there are new quests in the mix, so they may have to rerent the cards from day one, or extend from day two, but with a two day minimum, they have to extend by two days, if there is less than 24 hours left on the rental.

The outcome is that at any one point in time (past day one) all accounts renting to optimize for their quests are going to have more cards than they need, which soaks up a massive amount of cards from the market, making ownership even more important.

This doesn't even go into the wrinkle of choosing to play both Wild and Modern formats.

Interestingly though, there are quite a lot of sales on cards at the moment, with some older players clearing out their inventories at what would be considered "bargain" prices, in comparison to recent past values. Of course, these prices are far higher than the original cost they obtained them for. I have been trying to flesh out my deck a bit with some older cards available.

As someone who has to rent for Champions league, it is frustrating to have to pay large amounts for single cards, but what is worse, is when there are no cards available on the market to rent at all. With so many holes in my deck to play Champion leagues, I have to be careful what I supplement with. @Azircon was surprised the other day that I don't rent a Zaku at all. Not having cards means that I have to play more rounds also, as there are some rule sets that I just can't compete with, and sometimes, those losses are very costly, killing the chances of win streaks and pushing me down the ranks fast.

Own or go Home?

Well, not really, but obviously the more one has to rent. the less lucrative the play2 earn model becomes. Not only that, without ownership, while there is far less risk in the investment, it also means that there is little future upside. Also, what happens if in the future the cards needed to play are no longer available, because extra cards ended up being staked to LAND? This is one of my fears as I need about 35 cards to play in Champions and often, there are several that are unavailable to rent, and that is before the new economic changes of land has been introduced.

However, this also means that the value of these cards goes up, but it also raises the prominence of more readily available as replacements. And, that means that their value goes up too, so all those CL cards that people are selling for scraps now, could actually be worth something in the future - after all, it has happened with every set release so far, why wouldn't it with Chaos Legion?

Famous last words.

Sure, the past is the best indicator of the future but, we are largely in unchartered territory when it comes to what is happening now. Not just in Splinterlands, but the economy as a whole. And at anytime, things can go insane. Even if only 100K new real players decided to play Splinterlands, the impact on the economics is absolutely immense.

Just think, to build a full deck of Chaos Legion playing cards is around 8400 cards, which is around 1670 opened packs, assuming that all of them are the perfect cards to complete the set - which they will not be. The cost of a full CL deck (about 100 different cards) without any golds is $2900 dollars on the open market. However, if 5,000 new players wanted to rent full decks, it would require a total of 42 million cards - that is over half of the contents of all the packs sold and of course, something like Doctor Blight has 20500 printed - so just enough for 5000 maxed versions and most players now, aren't going to give up theirs.

Of course, all of the demand isn't going to be on getting full decks, but my point is - these kinds of numbers are not unlikely, given the change in the gaming economies and culture toward web3. And, with that kind of demand, the value of the entire Splinterlands economy increase heavily.

Yep - all of this is speculation, but that is what investing is - especially investing into new industry and emerging trends. We are trying to predict what is going to happen in the future and it is very possible, we are wrong.

But if we aren't?

Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]