Speculating for Land Workers

Welcome back Splinterlands battlemages for some different kind of coverage regarding my favorite Web3 strategy #TCG. I can't do brawl reviews all the time, so today I decided to post one of my little wins from last week's monster speculation. Remember, there's really two sides to Splinterlands - the gameplay and the economy - and today I'm turning the focus to the card market.

While I'm not a huge land baron, I do have 5 plots that I am excited to get to use in the near future. With that in mind, and the release of the Land 1.5 paper scheduled for last Friday, March 17, last Thursday I tried to find some deals by looking at underpriced cards in the market based on what I thought their working potential could be.

Of course, we now have an official term for a monster's working potential - Production Points (PP). Moreover, card markets like @peakmonsters have already released a powerful compare function to sort cards by their PP/$ ratio to allow shoppers to get the best bang for their buck when making those buying decisions.

There's also more to consider than just the simple PP/$ ratio, as that only tells part of the story. There is also the matter of maximizing the amount of PP per monster and PP per plot (5 monsters) on the land. To that end, it should make sense that as one considers monsters with higher PP values, the ratio of PP/$ goes down. Finding the right balance of PP and PP/$ is actually quite tricky and something all landowners should carefully consider when investing in monsters to work their land.

But rewind to March 16 and there was nothing. No PP charts, no PP sorting tools, and just barely enough time to speculate. While I had a hunch that PP rates would generally align with CP rates, I knew it would not be an even ratio. I figured that with the new set distinctions for Alpha, Beta, Untamed, and Chaos Legion, the land designers would prefer to make PP align with sets instead of messing with different base sets, promo cards, and reward sets.

So I started by looking at the relative cost for max regular foil legendaries from each set. For Chaos Legion, it was pretty cheap and I have plenty to choose from, so I eliminated investing in RF CL early on. Untamed had a few legendary dragons from the core set maxed for only $60, not bad at all. Alpha, on the other hand, had very few options for legendaries available and the couple I looked at were between $400-$500 when combined for a max copy.

However, when I looked at Beta, there were quite a few legendary reward monsters that were priced much lower than any legendaries from the base set. I think it was Frost Giant that had the lowest core set legendary max price at $143. However, one could bulk buy a max Zalran Efreet for ~$80 and there was a max Fallen Specter under $100 as well. Less than twice the cost of the cheapest Untamed legendary and less than a quarter of the price of a comparable alpha card, this seemed like exactly the value I was looking for.

Of course, one can disregard the Gold Foil Quix in this purchase - that was the 3rd to last card I needed to complete my CL GF silver league set. Thursday night I also bought up a bunch of Gold Foil rare rewards from CL around $20-$25, but those only produce about half the PP as the max legendary beta monsters. Let's look at the numbers and ratios now that we have the land info available:

Max Zalran Efreet @ $74 has 7500 PP = 101 PP/$
Max Fallen Specter @ $100 has 7500 PP = 75 PP/$

A quick search on Peakmonsters currently shows the highest PP/$ ratio to be about 200 - that's for a level 2 rare Vampiric Blossom that only has 48 PP. For a monster that yields over 1000 PP, the ratio of 190 PP/$ is actually pretty good, and one can buy a max rare Vulguine for about $6. But as I mentioned before, as the PP values of monsters increase, then the PP/$ ratios decrease.

For a monster that yields 4000 PP, the best PP/$ rate is close to 90, which means about $45 for likely a maxed GF CL rewards rare. But when we look at the high PP yield from these max beta legendaries, the ratio of PP/$ is much lower since the supply of these higher PP cards is much lower. Searching Peakmonsters for the best PP/$ ratio on cards with PP of 7500 or higher, the best one can do currently is only 54 PP/$, and that is another max Fallen Specter now priced at $139.

For those looking at picking up monsters that yield 10000 PP or more, the best bet are max GF legendaries from Chaos Legion. Last Thursday, there were still a few reward GFLs selling for $120-$150 as maxed copies, which equates to a range of 83 - 66 PP/$. However, currently, the cheapest max GFLs are sitting at a minimum of $210 for a PP/$ value of around 47. Sooner than later, landowners will need to come to grips with their budget and the PP they want on each of their plots.

Hopefully, you all gained something from all my stats talk and thanks for giving me an opportunity to show off one time my speculation actually panned out. And to think, all that copy without a single PP joke... now it's time for a drink. See you in the Splinterlands!