Splinterlands Market Analysis #1: The Auto-Rental Fail

When PeakMonsters announced that they were working on the auto-rental feature, hype was plentiful. Renters felt they were finally going to have a fair shake at some amazing deals. Well I am here to say that rental prices will never be higher and the renter is to blame.

I buy and sell trading cards IRL (in real life) and have spent a good amount of time studying markets as they pertain to trading cards. Let me make this really clear; what we have witnessed here is not the fault of PeakMonsters. They created a tool that is exactly what the market needs and fit the true demand of the renter with allowing them to fill collection power orders. What renters have done with that tool is drive demand so far through the roof that they will never be able to afford to rent.

The tool they created was set up to where a renter could set a limit to the max amount of CP/DEC they want to pay in order to rent cards. The orders that are to be filled first are the lowest bid rate (CP/DEC). This tool gave the power to the people who wanted to rent cards. As bids rolled in I noticed they started about 400 to 300 CP/DEC which is a fantastic bench mark for letting a bot go find you deals. At this rate it would cost:

• 12.5 to 16.67 DEC/Day for 5K CP (Bronze I)
• 37.5 to 50 DEC/Day for 15K CP (Silver III)
• 250 to 333 DEC/Day for 100K CP (Gold III)

The season that we are in right now (ending tonight) is only the second season I have been playing this game in and rented up to Silver III for the entire season in this range (400 to 300 CP/DEC) and this was all manual and not hard. This is where the renters should of held the line because any price level less than this is easy to do manually; but they didn't.

The image I have snipped for you above is the current bid orders for collection power (taken at about 10am EST). What this says is that people put in collection power orders to have the bots go get them any cards above 28 CP/DEC. At this rate it would cost:

• 178.6 DEC/Day 5K CP (Bronze I)
• 535.7 DEC/Day 15K CP (Silver III)
• 3571 DEC/Day for 100K CP (Gold III)

I understand that these orders are just getting put in to be first on the list and that not every card purchased will be at the min. I would personally love to see a completed order like this to fully understand the cost of putting a bid like this out. Even if this order evens out with the good and the bad to be around 100 DEC/Day my point is that you could of done that manually with ease and it all could of been anonymous.

By using this tool for convenience instead of holding a line for deals, renters have telegraphed to the market an unquenchable demand. Putting in an order for 10 dec/day is literally telling every seller "I don't care about price, just give me the card".

The people with the money set the demand and they didn't hold the line so now let me give you some cool ideas on how I will be taking advantage of this as a seller.

1. List your extra copies of reward commons.

Looking at PeakMonsters, I believe they have a minimum DEC/Day listing of 0.1 which on a BCX 1 reward common means 50 CP/DEC. There is a box on the automatic order submission that makes you fill in a "Min per card:" CP rating which defaults at 50. I believe that most players will try to avoid common reward cards so they may set this min to a 10 or leave it as is. So what I did was combine all my extra copies into pairs (BCX 2 CP 10) so that way my 0.1 DEC rental will be scooped up in all 100 CP/DEC or less orders and will not be filtered out from a reward rare.

2. Check open orders before listing your rentals

In my loot chests this morning I pulled a gold foil Venari Heatsmith. I went to the open bids and listed the card for the #3 bid CP/DEC (in this case it was 39). It was rented in minutes. This is the live world example of the bid system setting the value of the cards, and the renters have not put themselves in a good spot.

A word of hope; this can reversed. Do not submit automatic bid orders for something you could easily go find manually. If the bids held their ground at 400 or above then the people with the cards would be incentivized to decrease their prices. An asset that is being rented 98% of the time is better than an asset being rented 20% of the time at 4x the price. YOU HAVE THE POWER, stop giving it away.

I hope you are enjoying my perspective. I encourage you to follow me on this adventure and contribute in the comments below so we learn and grow together (steel sharpens steel). Let me know what your experience has been with this tool so far and where you see it going.

Much Love,

Rogue