Preparing for Riftwatchers

Welcome back my fellow battlemages, today I will be discussing my purchasing strategy for Riftwatchers and the steps I'm taking to get ready for the Riftwatchers presale happening in under a week.

Here's the basic outline:

1. Review the set details
2. Understand presale information
3. Decide my purchase strategy
4. Plan my crypto asset allocations

Set Details

The set is called Riftwacthers, but the pack name is Rift Gems, hence the Gems tab in the Splinterlands official in-game shop.

The Presale Launch Date is Sept. 15, 2022 at 2:00p ET. The ESTIMATED date that Riftwatchers packs can be opened and used in gameplay is Sept. 27, 2022, which I assume would take place after the Tuesday tech support upgrade is completed.

There will be a total of 3 million packs, and therefore 15 million cards. There are 43 unique cards in total, with a rarity breakdown of 13 commons, 12 rares, 6 epics summoners and 12 legendaries, which includes 5 legendary airdrops for every 500,000 packs sold but does NOT include the limited edition promo card Oshuur Constantia). Doing some quick math, it will require just about 7,000 cards for a completely maxed set of Riftwatchers. (13 * 400) + (12 * 115) + (6 * 46) + (12 * 11) = 6,988 to be exact, or roughly 1,400 packs.

The cost of each pack is $5.00 USD worth of SPS at market price at time of purchase + 1 VOUCHER. The interesting part about the Riftwacther sale is that every pack purchased requires one voucher, regardless of presale of regular sale. This has already had a very strong upward effect on the price of vouchers, driving it up over 100% already from around .45c to .96c at the time of writing. The same bulk bonus from Chaos Legion applies to Riftwatchers as well - packs in a single transaction will be eligible for bonus packs for a cost of 1 VOUCHER per bonus pack:

• 100+ packs = 10% bonus packs
• 500+ packs = 15% bonus packs
• 2000+ packs = 20% bonus packs

Presale Information

Well would you take a look at that legendary promo card Oshuur Constantia! At max level it has tank heal, resurrect and reflection shield with 3 magic attack, 2 speed and 6 health. The only way to get this card is to participate in the presale and the presale applies to the first 500,000 packs sold from the total 3 million. All presale packs purchased have a 2% chance of receiving this promo that will not be in the actual packs, and a promo is guaranteed for every 50 packs purchased. Each promo has a 4% chance of being a gold foil instead of regular. For every 1,000 presale packs purchased, a gold foil promo is guaranteed as well as the in-game title of "The Watcher."

Also note that only the presale packs will be eligible for the first legendary airdrop card, but that airdrop legendary card will be available through pack opening after the first 500,000 have been sold. The other four legendary airdrop cards will become available for each subsequent block of 500,000 packs sold. This leaves the last block of 500,000 packs not tied to any airdrop at all, but able to open up any of the 12 legendaries from the set.

The important time is the presale launch date of Thursday, Sept. 15 at 2p ET. This is the day and time Riftwatchers will become available for purchase and the presale starts with the first 500,000 packs sold. Once those first 500,000 packs are sold, the presale is over. Also keep in mind that the Riftwatcher packs won't be able to be opened and used in battle until the tentatively set date of Sept. 27.

Purchase Strategy

When I consider my purchasing strategy, there are two things I look to take advantage of - the launch promo and the bonus packs. For Riftwatchers, I really want to be able to play with one max level legendary of the promo and the subsequent airdrops, so I would need at least 11 promos of each, meaning 550 packs (11 * 50).

However, at 500 packs one is able to claim a 15% purchase bonus and redeem a single voucher for a pack without spending any additional SPS, so at 500 packs one can receive up to 75 bonus packs without spending SPS. But this would leave me at 575 packs, halfway between the next guaranteed promo and airdrop. Thus, to make for an even number of 12 airdrops, which would still allow for a single max level copy if one of my lucky airdrops happens to be a gold foil, I would need to purchase 600 packs.

With the way the bonus packs are set at a 15% purchase bonus, 522 presale packs means 78 bonus packs for a total of 600. Therefore, I would need 600 total vouchers and $2,610 worth of SPS at the time of purchase. Let's hope there is a nice steady price rise for SPS leading up to the presale!

Asset Allocation

Ever since the end of the SPS airdrop, I've been utilizing the various liquidity pools (LPs) provided by Splinterlands to earn additional SPS and DEC without the same lockup rules tied to staking SPS through the game client. As a reminder, one can stake SPS in-game to receive a proportional share of the daily 20,000 vouchers and roughly 250,000 SPS relative to all the staked SPS in the system. For all the number crunchers out there, I got to the roughly 250,000 SPS per day by using the 7.5 million SPS per month from the whitepaper and dividing by a 30-day month.

The LPs I'm most heavily invested in are the VOUCHER:HIVE, SPS:DEC, SPS:BNB and SPS:HIVE pools. The first LP is because I own two nodes and wanted to earn yield on the vouchers I'm getting each day from being a node holder. The other three pools I use to take advantage of all the extra SPS I had been stockpiling at prices around .05c in advance of the Riftwatchers sale which I knew would require SPS for purchase.

The first thing I did was to close out my position in the voucher LP, since the more vouchers move to the upside, the more I risk having less vouchers in my pool when the presale day comes. Then I figured with my daily drop rate of about 14 vouchers from nodes and staked SPS, I would be about 152 vouchers short of the 600 needed next week. So before the voucher price got any higher, I used some of the hive from that LP to purchase those 152 vouchers I need to get to the 600 mark for presale.

The next thing I did was review my rewards and staked SPS on my main account and my two alt accounts. I will still keep 50,000 SPS staked on my main, but anything above that will get unstaked, as well as the full balance from my two alts. With about seven-and-a-half days before the presale, I claimed all my outstanding SPS rewards and then reset my unstake function so that the next chunk of unstaked SPS would hit my account in the 12 hours leading up to the presale. This will allow me to claim the greatest amount of unstaked SPS to use for the presale. I plan on leaving the BNB LP untouched but will likely liquidate the SPS:HIVE and SPS:DEC LPs to provide myself the appropriate amount of SPS to make the purchase.

I will also require 3,000 of each potion to open the 600 packs. With potions also receiving a 15% bonus for purchases over 2,500 potions, I will need to buy 2,609 potions plus an additional 391 bonus potions to reach the 3,000 threshold. Also accounting for the 10% store discount from a soon-to-be max level guild lodge, it should cost me around 212,000 DEC to purchase all the potions I need. I will use some of the extra DEC from the LP to buy potions and then put the rest of the extra DEC and HIVE into the DEC:HIVE LP while the Riftwacthers sale plays out. I suspect the price of SPS to remain somewhat volatile, so I will likely keep it out of the LPs and only hold it as staked SPS in the short term.

I hope that was an enjoyable, insightful read through one battlemage's strategy on how I will handle the Riftwacthers presale. Keep in mind this is only what I will be doing and is not financial advice - please do your own research.

I will likely collect fully maxed versions of the six summoners as well as the other seven non-airdropped legendaries, and we'll have to see about the commons and rares. Will I buy more packs or just fill on the singles market? It is too early to tell without all the stats!

So what is your plan for the Riftwatchers presale? Tell me what you think and share your plan in the comments below. Thanks for reading!