For those who don't know about Splinterlands, I'm going to do a brief intro on why the market mechanic is interesting, if you know Splinterlands and just wants answers jump ahead to the section called the good stuff!
Splinterlands is a card battling game where you build up your deck and use different combinations to win against opponents. While you can buy packs of cards and open them it is normally more efficient to purchase directly from the market. The market price is normally driven by the abilities of the card and how rare they are.
What is interesting in Splinterlands is that how far you can progress is determined by your decks power level. You want to improve your power as higher levels payout more DEC (in game currency) and more chest when you complete daily quests, so moving up power levels is useful.
The Good Stuff
This is where it gets interesting, the power level of a deck is not driven by the market value of your cards but rather by the DEC value to burn them, as set by the makers of the game. This can be vastly different from the market values them due to their abilities. The Burn rate is set by 3 main things
- Which edition it was
- Is it gold foil or normal
- Is it Common, Rare, Epic or Legendary
Here is my summary for ease of reading
So the question becomes "if i wanted to power up my deck what is the most $ efficent way to do so"
Before I delve in some quick rules on how I conducted this, I look at the lowest level you could buy and cheapest price, I did not look at more efficient higher levels. I also took no account of how good a card is, this is just about powering up.
Ok I will start with the result for those who just want to go and buy some cards! But the full workup is below
So the most efficient cards to buy are at $0.00113 per DEC are either
- Gold Foil Rare Alpha at $6.75 per card or a
- Gold Foil Rare Beta $17.00 per card
I added the cost of the card because not everyone is flush or trying to jump many many levels. The cheapest most efficient common is Untamed Gold Foil at $0.70 per card.
Ok for those that are interested, which card did I look at!
Of course, all images are from splinterlands.