RE: How to Manipulate the DEC Market 101

I don't think there is a way to stop the manipulation other than calling it out. After this post went up, the listing stopped moving around the next day and then disappeared. Since then the price has more or less stabilized, albeit lower. It definitely started with the crypto market falling but was pushed down much harder by this and possibly other similar listings.

The card market is a different story. That is just a story of immense oversupply coming from absolutely everywhere. It just doesn't take nearly this many cards to run this game at current player counts. And that says something since we now have 235k daily active accounts and most of the cards in circulation were printed when that number was under 5k daily actives.

There was so much inventory that whale accounts were just sitting on. So many of them had 500+ copies of almost every card as well as several that were maxed out. There are also a bunch of cards that were in old abandoned accounts. During the initial frenzy of buying, most of that stayed dormant, but after splinterlands got more news and people realized they were sitting on cards that were now worth something, they came in to sell or rent their cards.

As the supply started hitting it was initially bought up but then it started coming in faster than it could be bought up. At the same time whales, who'd initially sat back to not smother the rental markets when they first opened with their mountains of supply started dropping their inventory on the rental markets after the last end of season rental bonanza (which btw doesn't seem to be happening this season as we are two days away and there's been very little ramp up so far) which meant suddenly those markets are drowning in supply too.

Rentals are stagnant because rewards are down (which is partially because DEC got knocked down meaning they started paying out less dec per win, people start playing 10 bot accounts so more games were being played which drained the pool more and the dec you did still win is worth less to boot. The reward cards ran out, and suddenly everyone had to spend 750 dec for quest potions which weren't paying out enough to cover the cost so renting players stopped renting and started just playing the daily quest) and this all means its suddenly far less lucrative to rent out cards as the amount of rentals are stagnant even as the number of (bot) players rise and there's multiples of inventory more than before. So people who were renting are now selling.

There's more oversupply coming in with the impending Chaos Legion drop which is going to saturate everything even more so some people are selling cards in anticipation of that supply lowering prices and others are selling to raise funds for buying CL packs while at the same time, buyers who were buying the dips keep seeing it dip below where they bought so they've stepped back.

So inventory is coming from absolutely everywhere and buyers have stepped back to reassess and so impatient sellers are undercutting each other trying to be the cheapest because nothing is selling and that has sent prices into a tailspin.

It doesn't help that when they released the stats for the newest reward cards, the devs basically showed that they believe they need to massively increase the card counts to deal with the growth so now everyone knows we are about to get buried by CL.

All I can say is I hope this land thing blows the roof off the joint and they can work out these rewards because they are teetering and it might just be happening at a time when the devs are feeling invincible.

We will see.