The Final Countdown! $156,000+ to Make The Top 6 on Splinterlands Chaos Legion Pre-sale Leaderboard!

As of this post there is only 36 hours remaining to secure your share of the Chaos Legion pre-sale packs! Originally, I was not planning to partake in the pre-sale if VOUCHER token prices remained elevated, well I changed strategy, or suffer from FOMO and bought some for myself.

For those of you who aren't aware, the first 1 million Chaos Legion packs being sold by @Splinterlands require the use of a VOUCHER token to purchase. These VOUCHER tokens have traded on Hive-Engine at prices that I couldn't have even dreamed as possible, staying steady between $17-20 USD each. That means the cheapest Chaos Legion pre-sale pack will cost you $17 for the VOUCHER and $3.60 for the pack (with SPS payment discount) for a total of over $20. Only those who purchase a pre-sale pack will be eligible to receive the Doctor Blight airdrop card. A guaranteed Doctor Blight airdrop requires 50 pre-sale packs, or over $1000 in purchase value. I sure hope that means the Doctor Blight card will be very valuable on either the sale or rental market.

Let's take a look at the current VOUCHER price and pre-sale leaderboard heading into the final day of the event!

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VOUCHER Prices

With 36 hours to go, VOUCHERs are still stubbornly high in price, sitting at $18.69 or about 15.45 HIVE each. It will be interesting to watch what happens to the price of VOUCHERs in the hours leading up to the end of the pre-sale event. Players who desperately need a few more VOUCHERs to make the top-6 on the leaderboard, or to receive certain purchase bonuses may cause a spike in prices as the supply dries up. Remember, no new VOUCHER tokens have been airdropped in about a week!

As you can see above, there have been 719,609 packs purchased out of a possible 1,000,000 total VOUCHERs that were airdropped. That means that there are (theoretically) 280,391 possible pre-sale pack purchases remaining. I say theoretically because that assumes every single partial VOUCHER token in people's accounts are sold and used... which is not going to happen. In fact, I think there will be a loss of at least 5-10% of total VOUCHERs due to this fractional token issue. Hopefully, none of these larger holders forgets to dispose of their VOUCHERs either by redeeming them or selling them since I expect the price of VOUCHERs to plummet once the pre-sale is over and the next 2 million packs will be sold without the Doctor Blight, Legionnaire title, or summoner design benefits.

Here are the top 20 holders of VOUCHER tokens within the Splinterlands game interface. Keep these names in mind as we look at the Top 10 leaderboard shortly. Right now, the top holder of VOUCHERs, @sl-hive, appears to be a Splinterlands corporate account, but I'm not sure. The next 4 players on the list are interesting because they all have exactly 6,577.228 tokens. Could this be a consortium waiting for the last moment to take a couple top spots with their combined 26,000+ vouchers? Will these top 20 VOUCHER holders be converting them to packs, or dumping them on Hive-Engine? I'm looking forward to watching to see what they do!

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Top 10 Leaderboard

Things are really heating up on the pre-sale leaderboard! In my last leaderboard update, it cost at least $90,000 to make the Top 6. Today, it costs at least $156,308 to acquire the 8,415 packs (assuming maximum 20% bonus packs and 10% SPS payment discount). If we hit a 10,000 pack threshold for the Top 6, that would be about $185,000! At the 13,000 pack mark for first place, the cost is just under a quarter of a million dollars!

The Top 6 spots are the most coveted as they include the right to design your very own Splinterlands card! With the current 6th place player, @cryptomancer, holding 8,415 pre-sale packs, will the minimum for Top 6 be pushed to 10,000+ packs in the final hours of the competition? Based on my observations of the Top 20 VOUCHER holder list, I think it will easily top 10,000 for a Top 6 finish. The 7th-10th place players all have between 7,794 and 8,402 packs so there's room for a lot of movement there too. Several of the players in 7th to 10th place appear to be sitting on a couple thousand more VOUCHERs each, just waiting for the chance to snipe a Top 6 position.

A word of advice to prospective snipers: If you are trying to disguise your sniping activity in any of the secondary tokens, it's best to place them in Hive Engine and put them all in a sell order with a ridiculously high price so they won't get sold. This way the number of tokens you have won't show up on the Splinterlands richlist, nor will it show up on the Hive-Engine richlist either. Sneaky sneaky :)

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My Strategy (went right out the window)

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, I did not expect to participate in the pre-sale with VOUCHER prices so high. I was really hoping for a $5 VOUCHER price so I could acquire 2,000 packs and get the Legionnaire status. Instead, VOUCHERs have stayed near $20 and I began the pre-sale with selling my VOUCHERs as I received them. I kept a spreadsheet of my daily sales and how much they went for.

I sold 26.49 VOUCHERs that I received in the airdrop for an average price of 21.92 HIVE each. By November 12th, I decided to stop selling my VOUCHERs and consider keeping them and buying more in order to take part in the pre-sale.

It remains to be seen whether this was a smart move financially, but I decided to purchase 98.31 VOUCHERs to bring my total to 100 and then buy that many pre-sale packs with the 10% bonus.

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After tallying everything up, I received 110 Chaos Legion pre-sale packs for a (today's) cost of:

VOUCHERs = 2000 HIVE ($2,400)
Packs = 792.734 SPS ($374)
*assumes today's HIVE/SPS price. Purchase was made on Nov. 16.

Price each = $25.22

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What's Next?

I've heard several people expecting that Chaos Legion will sell out of the 12 million packs, that will be released in the general sale, within one day. If that's the case, I'm sure Chaos Legion packs will sell for close to my acquisition price on Hive-Engine since there will be no more $4 packs available direct from Splinterlands, but I'll get to keep all the airdrop cards for myself. I may have succumbed to FOMO here, but everything seems to be pointing to absolutely massive demand for these Chaos Legion packs and a quick sellout.

If that's the case, I'm sure I'll look back on this purchase as a very shrewd investment.