Splinterlands | The Declining Card Value Problem

One of the problems right now in Splinterlands are the card values going down with no real outlook for older cards that are really rare to become worth a lot more. This is how I see the situation and a possible solution.

---

Buying Packs Makes No Sense Financially

Personally, I have never been a pack buyer and always preferred to just pick up cards that I wanted or needed of the market when the price somewhat makes sense. It just doesn't work that you pay 4$ for a pack and on average expect more value than what you put into it unless there is a crazy bull market where everyone goes nuts. In the end, the mechanic always works that more new players need to come in for prices to hold up or increase since the total card supply is highly inflationary.

Holding Cards Long-Term Makes Little Sense Financially

While everyone that managed to get in really early still did extremely well on the current price values. Right now unless there is a crazy adoption wave or some fundamental changes, it likely isn't the best idea to see cards in Splinterlands as a long-term investment unlike many other card collecting games where generally the old & rare cards can become really valuable.

Since devs make most of their money selling packs, they have a big incentive to make sure that all the value of the older cards moves to the newer ones while they have all the tools in their hands to do so. In the near future when Rebellion is released, all Untamed will likely slash in price as their utility drops like crazy.

Card Price Chart

The chart doesn't actually show the true picture as the card not only has the total value of all cards gone down, the total supply at the same time skyrocketed

---

The Problem

The main problem this brings about is that it almost becomes impossible to actually earn with the game as earnings are nothing more than disguised inflation which eats away at the value of your assets over time. To a certain degree, this is fair, but who will be left willing to buy future packs when knowing in advance that there is very little chance that you actually will get more back from it when playing daily.

This dynamic was already seen in the Zyriel promo card sale which turned out to be a flop now selling at a way lower price compared to what it cost despite a very limited supply.

The same story happened with the Riftwatchers set which now is being burned since it otherwise will take forever. I would be surprised if Rebellion wasn't faced with the same problem since most players came in buying Chaos Legion Packs on which they totally got burned.

---

The Solutions

1. Land Card Staking: one of the solutions to give cards more utility is Land Staking since the older the card, the bigger the bonus they are getting. This should take quite some of the supply off the table but the question remains if this will be enough. One of the things that can be done in the future is to only allow cards that are not allowed in modern to be staked on land.

2. New Game Modes & Rental Pools: Splinterlands should really get some game modes that are purely based on skill putting everyone on a level playing field. Not only will this make the game way more accessible to new players, it also provides an opportunity to give cards that are older and rarer a solid use case. If card owners can stake their cards inside a rental pool and earnings based on fees paid are distributed based on the actual use of the cards it would give a massive value boost to solid older rare cards and they would continue to be used in the game. This on top would offer a very user-friendly way for investors to earn passive returns on cards.

3. Card Burning: The current mechanic of burning cards for DEC is one that works in the absolute worst-case scenario where everything has gone down to rock bottom (which we are not at yet). If in the future for example when Reward Cards can be made transferrable, what if one of the things needed to mint a card is to burn one. So if you want a legendary Soulbound reward card be made transferrable, you need to burn another Legendary card so the card supply stays in a status quo.

4. Switch to Fees Earnings Model over time: Right now the earnings model is all about creating more cards and flooding the supply while it would be better for the team to somehow earn enough to keep things running just from market fees that are paid by those who are buying or selling cards on the market. I'm not sure if this is fully realistic but at least partly this should be possible.

5. New Bull Market & Adoption Wave: While this is not a real solution, when it happens we likely could see another situation where demand becomes way higher than the supply increasing the prices. The last time this happened in between Untamed and Chaos Legion while next time Rebellion most likely will be available and the number of new players also needs to be exponentially higher so it likely will be way less extreme.

---

Conclusion

The way things are currently going with the crazy card inflation eating away at the value of the existing cards, there is no real reason financially for anyone to actually buy Rebellion Packs. It is a real problem that somehow should be fixed without the need for a crazy bull market. In the end it all remains a situation where more new money needs to come in to hold things up and this simply doesn't happen gradually. Everyone wants in when things are crazy expensive and everyone wants out when everything is dirt cheap, that is just human nature.

---

Play2Earn Games I'm Playing...

---

Crypto & Blockchain-Based Bookies and Exchanges that I'm personally using with some allowing anonymous betting with no KYC or personal restrictions...

---