Trying To Buy My Second Land Plot + Bought My First Gold Summoner

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(Edited)

After accumulating new liquid DeFi interest for the task, I placed a bid for my second Splinterlands Land Plot at 374 HIVE ($575) a few hours ago and have been waiting anxiously to celebrate.


I sat at the top of the buy orders for about 3 hours chanting "sell to me" until someone came in to outbid me for 2 Plots at 385 HIVE. Another came in at 386 just now. Damn.

Instead of chasing with the extra HIVE I had on Hive-Engine, I've chosen to let the chips fall where they may and sleep on it. I wanted this post to be after my purchase, but I pre-wrote it while waiting to fill, not expecting the market to be near dead all day. It was also sad to write a full celebratory post and delete it, so I reworked the entire thing to reflect that I'm still pending. Yep, totally jinxed myself.

Let's collectively knock on wood that this goes through, and also that it doesn't turn out to be a boring Plot that produces reams of paper for Spell Book production. (For the Office Space fans.)


Thought Process:

I'd been contemplating this buy for a few weeks, and was actually slightly deterred after learning that staked SPS will essentially be required to get the full benefit of the land. More spending after spending?

I'm observing that blockchain gaming generally continues to evolve from a noble play-to-earn model into "spend-to-earn anything meaningful," and I guess I'm not thrilled by that as a relatively late adopter.

*For those who don't have loads of airdropped SPS from early adoption, I now know that I'll need to shell out "TBD" more funds into staked-SPS to have the ability use land effectively. That's rather discouraging. I certainly understand that SPL is trying to maximize use case and demand for SPS, but it'd be helpful to know how much SPS stake would be needed per Plot. Perhaps I'll ask on Discord if it's not common knowledge I've missed, or not mentioned in a comment below.

For the larger accounts, this is fairly irrelevant. Well deserved. I missed my chance for that. However, those building from the ground floor typically need to plan for these things. Paraphrased advice to "get as much SPS as you can" is way too vague when money and risky crypto is involved. There are lots of other blockchain gaming options and tokens people are balancing, so helping people budget across their game plan can ensure that they invest enough to partake. Throw us a bone here will ya?


Next Steps:

With my second Plot potentially in the rear view mirror soon, the next Splinterlands decision will be whether I stay put at 2, or invest in the game in other ways. If I keep stacking land, I honestly don't see myself exceeding 5 unless prices drop more.

In the short term, is another $550-$675 worth being able to use this gif to symbolize 3 Plots next time?


Actually, yes. The next time you see this gif, it'll mean I'm celebrating OWNING it, not shopping. Sigh. They say that you're supposed to assume the close in sales, but this clearly doesn't work on marketplaces with super slow volume. Lesson learned. If I actually do buy more, it'll get increasingly harder to find Office gifs of only 4 and then 5 people dancing, but I'm up for the task.

In the meantime, I'll be trying to weigh out where else to start accumulating. Should it be gold cards, SPS, packs, and DEC, in that order? That's what I'm feeling right now.

With training wheels still on, I bought 4 gold foil cards for just under $7 total on PeakMonsters today using game-earned DEC. While DEC has been crushed lately, that feels like a strong deal for free cards, but CL supply will keep rising over the upcoming months for prices to probably drop more.

This is the first time I'd filled up a shopping cart of multiple cards for a quick and easy checkout. This was almost too easy since I've done all but one of my prior card purchases on Splinterlands' market. I went the PeakMonsters route this time since a few of the card were significantly cheaper there for some reason. Perhaps SPL's market site was delayed as it often can be. Who knows, but I grabbed the better deal.

Bought:

  • Gold L3 Radiated Scorcher
  • Gold L3 Hardy Stonefish
  • Gold L3 Pelacor Bandit
  • Gold L3 Gargoya Lion

Bring on Diamond League!!

Now these don't call for confetti, but they're cheap to use in battles. I also want to start working the DEC bonus angle by using as many golds as I can in battles. I'd like to get a gold summoner soon to help me use some of these gold cards more effectively in my lower leagues.

During this shopping trip, I was surprised but happy to see that my buy of 8 Chaos Legion packs a few weeks ago on Hive-Engine for 36.6 HIVE paid off with my gold L2 Forgotten One rising from ~$48 then to $125-$140 now. The packs were about $7 then, so I'm well into the green on those today.

Interestingly, these were the first packs I've ever bought. It was nearly all new to me, evidenced by realizing that potions apply to each card you open, not pack. For background, I only had one free pack from a contest years ago that yielded an Alric Stormbringer, which I've held on to after cluelessly opening it way back when. Alric was tempting to sell when it reached ~$250, but it's been a good hold in hindsight since the Spell Book pack dropped him for the Chaos Legion roster.

For the near term, I'm probably going to slowly accumulate SPS with my HBD payouts. I'd rather buy in-game assets to grow that for me, but should grab some for insurance. I'm not trying to be a Splinterlands millionaire here. I just want to have fun and make some modest yield over time.


Complications When Hive Isn't On Your Exchange:

It was a pain to get Hive for this Plot purchase. I had the liquid DeFi interest to use (I prefer to manage my risk on NFTs by using new earnings), but wasn't feeling confident about recent price action. All planning was thrown out the window when I saw the price drop significantly earlier this week. I knew it was the time to strike and swapped some tokens into ATOM to start the swap>swap>swap>swap process (sigh), but as soon as my tokens hit my on-chain ATOM address, I noticed one exchange having an odd glitch on their ATOM deposit page to prevent me from sending it over. I then tried sending it to another exchange, but the transactions failed. WTF?! The Plot price was at a nice local bottom and I had plenty to cover, but my ATOM was stuck. I finally realized that the Cosmos network was partially down for a rare planned network upgrade. You've got to be kidding me.

I figured it'd take a few hours, so I eagerly waited for the roadblock to be lifted, afraid to send my ATOM back where it came from over IBC. In that time, and to my dismay, the cheap Plots got gobbled up. I suppose that I could've had these swaps done in advance, but I wasn't sure if I wanted another Plot yet in lieu of other options I was holding those funds for. I only jumped on the chance when I saw the price steeply drop, but it was bad luck that ATOM was an early part of the route I needed to take.

Unfortunately, days later, the Cosmos upgrade is still ongoing and/or exchanges/wallets aren't allowing transactions yet until it's fully tested. I eventually did a test send back over IBC and it worked, so I shot it all back and waited to scout the Plot price action. During this time, I actually gained a few bucks in purchasing power as ATOM had a nice day on the market up about 10%. This helped offset some of the Plot savings I missed if I was able to buy 2 days earlier.

Anyway, after evaluating my limited options on this DEX and brainstorming , I realized that Luna was unaffected by the Cosmos upgrade (despite being integrated). I quickly made the swap, shipped to an exchange, swapped, swapped, sent, sent/swapped, sent, and then placed my buy order. I ate some fees along the way, but that's the nature of not having access to an exchange that support Hive.


After all of this, this is the simple result.

  • I bought 4 Gold common cards while waiting.
  • I wrote this post while waiting.
  • I had to rework this post after accepting the fact that my buy isn't going through for a bit.
  • I bought 1 CL pack and opened it with full potions to get this gigantic dud haul:

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  • I then opened two season rewards chests to try to make myself feel better with hope a bit rekindled:

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^ Well that didn't work.

  • I then decided to take control of the situation and buy one more gold card to execute at least something productive today. Here she is: a L2 Tarsa Fire Summoner. This is my first L2 summoner to FINALLY allow me to use my gold cards more effectively and have more abilities. I have a few gold Fire cards, including my epic Forgotten One, so I'll be able to get a nice DEC boost... once I get back into... bronze again... sigh...

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Small wins. Small wins.


That's all for now. Plot sales have been stuck for hours now and I'll just be ignorant and hope for the best overnight. Of course I could save the hassle and buy at the ASK, but my plan was to shop lower. I only made this move because of the dip and probably would've used these funds elsewhere for the time being. And, I'm stubborn and want patience to prevail as it did with my first Plot so I can really celebrate.

Thanks for reading and your interest/feedback.

@steemmatt



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4 comments
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Don't forget to move your new plots off of hive engine into your splinterlands account so that they will start earning you sps daily.

Just by increasing your assets it will start to stack up quickly.

Holding Dec is a good way to get sps airdrops as well. About 10x better than holding the cards.

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The airdrop points summary on my Splinterlands account shows the 1 Plot for 10,000 points already. Are you saying that I'm not getting full airdrop benefits with the Plot on Hive-Engine? It seemed like it was being factored in as is, but I'll ship it over if not.

I just saw that the person who kept outbidding me by fractions of a Hive just got filled 0.02 Hive higher than me while I was trying to sleep. They couldn't bid higher to be classy about it, just kept raising my bid by decimals throughout the night. So frustrating. I'm still hovering at the top of the market bids, but need the price to fall just a little since I'm tapped out on Hive for at least a day until my next post pays out. It's just too complicated to buy Hive externally otherwise to want to top off for a few bucks since I spent my extra on the gold Tarsa not expecting this liquidity to be so slow as SPS and DEC are upticking.

I'm keen on the DEC for airdrop points, but the value has been dropping a lot that I wasn't sure if it was more economical to buy SPS directly than a depreciating DEC which may not have any use after the airdrop concludes to be unable to sell for much.

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I did get a couple filled at 303 hive a few days ago. There is a decent bit of action in the market if you let them ride a few days. Even though that was a drastic drop when there were about 20 sales in a row.

It seemed like it was being factored in as is, but I'll ship it over if not.
I have a couple of plots sitting for sale that don't show up for SPS but if they are just in the wallet then it looks like you are ok. Mine don't show up for the airdrop but it's obvious when they do as they are 10k points each.

It's just my personal strategy at the moment to keep buying DEC and holding as there are a lot of airdrop points for it and then use the SPS to buy more SPs. I will sell it all at near the end as prices will probably drop when the airdrop is over.

But i do think that it is fairly tied to the price of SPs and will rise if SPS rises.

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Thanks for the tip and nice grab! It pays to have funds prepped and ready. I got filled at 375.5 so I can move on to DEC/SPS. The land was recognized in my airdrop points within the SPL website under my account, but no matter where I look, I'm not sure how to transfer my land into my SPL account from Hive-Engine. I can't withdraw. Do I Transfer them on Hive-Engine to my user name with any memo? Seems like a leap of faith that they'd go into my account, but that looks to be the only way. Don't see any way to do this on my SPL account.

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