Market Crash? - Analysis on Card Prices & Future of the Market

Last week Chaos Legion arrived into Splinterlands and as its name suggested it brought Chaos to all the aspects of the game, ranging from the Gameplay to the Market.

As for the gameplay, the starter cards have been changed, removing the Beta card and including the new Common and Rare cards from Chaos Legion. This has been crazy for the game since all of the strategies, using the previous cards have to be reworked. With this, most players, especially in lower leagues have to learn to adapt to using new cards.

However, in this post, I want to focus on the effect it has had on the market.

Chaos Legion Cards

Last week, on the release of the Chaos Legion, I wrote this post where I talked about what I thought were the best cards to own from this new set. Apart from the quality and usability of the card, I took into consideration the prices of the card, to choose the most affordable cards I could find.

Now, after a week of using them, I still think they are one of the best cards right now. However, if you decided to buy them after reading my post you'd have quite a loss today.

As an example, I recommended the Wave Brood and Tusk the Wide, both epic cards with a price of around $10 as of last week. As you can see above, their prices dropped massively, and this doesn't just include these two cards, but the whole card market, in general, has seen a drop in prices.

But why could that be?

Hype vs Stability

On the day of release, everyone was excited and wanted to play with the new cards. This impressive hype around the new cards is what drove their prices high. As you can see in the graph below, provided by peakmonsters, on December 8th, there was a huge spike in the number of transactions and volume of USD spent in the market. Everyone wanted the new cards and they wanted them now!!!

Now that a week has passed, things have calmed down a little, and as people open more and more packs and the buying pressure dwindles, the prices are expected to decrease.

Saturated Market

Market saturation happens when the products are no longer in demand. This can happen for various reasons, two of them being: an actual decrease in demand for that product, or by flooding the market, which is when suppliers suddenly offer large quantities for sale.

Do you want to guess which is happening right now? Of course, flooding the market! With the release of 1 million packs (meaning 5 million cards), the market quickly became saturated and this is what drove the prices down. And even though prices all across the board have decreased, the market cap has remained somewhat constant during this time and that's thanks to, once again, the huge increase in offer, having a lot more cards in the market.

Future of Chaos Legion

Remember what I just said about the market being flooded? Well, multiply that by 15 and that's what the future holds. Now, I don't want you to panic, but this is something that you should keep in mind when choosing to buy cards right now.

There will be a total of 15 million Chaos Legion packs (75 million cards), and at the time of writing, there have only been sold a little more than 1 million. So few packs have been sold thanks to the voucher system implemented in the game, however, once the general sale starts, on January 17th, vouchers will not be needed to buy packs.

This means that a lot more people will buy cards and increase drastically the number of cards in the market. Even compared to right now! This could bring an even lower price for all cards, so you could wait a month to try and buy cards when the prices are lower.

However, this comes at a risk of the prices not increasing. Since I'm not certain about the future of the market, with all of this only being speculation.

So, what if you don't want to take the risk of waiting till January?

Bargain Hunting

Right now you could increase your Collection Power, or buy some solid cards that will be useful for your deck.

As for the Collection Power, you can see that you can get almost 70 CP per USD spent, in contrast to a few weeks ago in which the best prices had a 30 CP/USD ratio. With this, you could get 15,000 CP and get to Silver III for around $220!

So, even if the prices could drop in the future, the thing you must ask yourself is if you'd be at peace with yourself if you buy cards right now and in the future, they lower in price. Because, remember, in one or two years, they'll probably be valued much higher, because of their nature of deflationary assets.

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To end this post I want to say that I personally will probably wait for the general sale to do my main shopping of cards, however, during this month, I'll be buying certain cards that I find add value to my collection.

But what about you? I'd love to read your plans for the future and if you have any other advice, let me know!

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