We, people, have a problem, quite often: impatience. And it sometimes manifests exactly at the wrong times.
For example, capitulation after a long bear market.
In the Splinterlands ecosystem, we also see plenty of impatience examples, often linked to the general market trends.
We are probably a few months away from seeing the results of over a year of changes that will finally lead to that: cards scarcity.
I may get the order of these updates wrong, but let's take a look at what happened and what will happen.
First, the rewards system was revamped for ranked battles. What did that change? If you used ghost cards, you got penalized. Result: low-league bot farms (and regular players) needed to buy common and rare modern cards.
Rewards were also skewed to be more at the higher leagues and less at the lower leagues. Not sure if it worked by itself as intended, but whoever wanted should have reached higher leagues to get them. To go to higher leagues, one would have to combine cards.
But still, some preferred to stay in lower leagues, perhaps playing multiple accounts. This incentive disappeared or was diminished further as the card level became part of the formula for calculating the rewards.
Then, there are the constant changes that made many of the low-league bot farms not viable. They either stopped completely or moved to higher leagues, from what I heard (haven't checked). The ones that stopped and used rented level 1 cards, automatically left an empty space in the demand for these cards on the rental market. The ones that moved to higher leagues needed higher-level cards, in most cases. Many card owners then adapted and started to combine their cards at least one or two levels up, to find where demand moved.
All these were actions taken for the declared purpose to make owners combine their cards. As you can see, it's not one action, it's a number of them, and they worked over time.
Hhe highest impact measures are still a few months away, but they started to have their influence already: card staking on land, [SoulKeep(@leoglossary/leoglossary-splinterlands-tower-defense-game-spltd), maybe Guild Alliance buildings, etc.
This will have a tremendous impact on how many cards are combined, for sure.
And if that's not enough, during the last town hall, the team talked about introducing a very small DEC fee (to be burned) for changing the rental price for cards. This will obviously affect especially services that change the rental price very often and low-value cards that are rented (level 1 commons and rares, most likely). One more reason why level 1 cards may be combined once this fee will be implemented.
See where this is going? A year-long process from start to end, most likely. Those who acted early, are more prepared than those who act now and in a much better position than those who act late.
I'm not one who acted soon enough (other than maxing out my CL deck). Lack of funds prevented me to do more, even though I saw some things coming. Or at least I understood the team has a plan (shared publicly a number of times) and it seems to be working.