Do I play Splinterlands or do I leave my cards on rental?
Can I retire simply by playing "Magic The Gathering Light"?
The short answer is NO. The long answer is: Well, if I'd invested in the game early on, then YES! That is VERY possible.
Screenshots of people earning $5K+ PER DAY from the SPS airdrop have been floating about on blog posts and discord. @splinterlands is literally going to be creating tons of US$ MILLIONAIRES over the next year with their SPS airdrop. Not to mention what those people's card collections must now be worth with most cards going 10x and a few even 100x. WOW!
But alas, while my @Splinterlands journey DID start late Alpha/early Beta and I was able to scoop up a number of cards, when game card rewards were taken away/replaced and the game became Pay-To-Play, I shelved my cards.
FWIW: Switching the rewards from regular-edition cards to DEC, potions and reward-edition cards etc. is probably the reason why SL is such a winner. If everyone was getting the regular edition cards for free, their would be no market for them.
i.e. I'm not bashing the team (quite the opposite)... I just didn't have the cash to invest heavily and the rewards for playing weren't justifying all that time in something that probably/might turn into the next MTG.
THANK FUCK I DIDN'T SELL THEM though!
You see, my MTG story starts fairly similarly: started playing around 4th edition (and as time passed, I bought up friends' old decks that lost interest containing even earlier editions for next to nothing), and the geek/collector in me wouldn't let them go. Some of these cards are worth a ton of cash now (although some of them are at like 10% of their mint/near-mint value since we'd play them without sleeves, mess beer/pizza on them and so on and so forth), and I figured the same would happen with @Splinterlands... WHICH IT JUST DID.
Source: Wikipedia
... So yeah, I've got a number of Alpha/Beta and a handful of Untamed cards, some lvl 3/4 summoners and some levelled-up game-changer favourites like Ruler of the Seas.
The question I'm asking myself now is:
Do I take all my cards off the rental market and start playing again or do I rent them out for an easy passive DEC income?
I'm getting close to 600 DEC/day renting my cards out
OK... it's going to be closer to 550 DEC/day since almost all my 0.1DEC/day lvl 1 commons were also scooped up (presumably by players wanting to boost their Collection Power to qualify for the next league tier, and these will all be ditched after a day or so once they've claimed their season end rewards).
The math (in my head):
20 games per day (50% win ratio) = 10 games to win DEC.
== I need to win ~55 DEC per game to make the same as just renting the cards out.
I was able to comfortably get to Gold when I was still playing, but things are substantially tougher now. So I'm going to assume I'll be hanging around in Silver II or III.