From Playing to Renting: The Many Streams of Income in Splinterlands

Splinterlands is exploding, Splintertalk has a fresh new front-end, and the SPT token may just be the most lucrative coin in the Splinterverse. All in all a great reason to write an update on where I am in and around that game.

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A New Kind of Daily Quest

How long has it been since I stopped playing daily quests? Two years at least, possibly with 2-3 extra months. Certainly before the first untamed cards came out. It was fun and all, but in the end I got tired of it, life got in the way, and eventually I just settled for renting out my cards. Back then, this meant I spent an afternoon looking at the market, deciding on what I thought was "a competitive rate" and then forgot about them for weeks on end. Occasionally I'd check in on them, and spend my slowly accumulating money on a new card or two. All in all it was not something I'd do very seriously, as I was lucky to rent out a third of my deck, and even then the money they brought in was hardly more than peanuts.

With the new rental system all this has changed completely. Today I like to visit Peakmonsters at least once daily, just to check on how my rentals are doing. With the new compare your rentals function I can get an instant idea on how much (or how little) the competition is charging for each card, at each level. In fact, this has become my new daily quest: making sure all my cards are rented, while trying to get the best rates. Who cares about playing battles, if you can get 1000 DEC a day by playing the rental market? It's a far cry from passive income, however. You really have to be on top of things all the time, because the rental fee of a card can change drastically as the season progresses. Take my Frozen Soldier or Silvershield Paladin for example, both at level 3. Over the final days of last season they brought in about 20 DEC a day each. Since then I had to lower their fees to 10-14, but even that seems excessive by now, as the going rate is more around 1-2 DEC a day. But I'm not going to go that low. I'd been there before, and I had to cancel a year's rental contract to get in the higher fees at the end of the season.

Gathering Value in So Many Forms

But even in lower yield times I have managed to get a good 1000 DEC a day in rentals, compared to the 700 I started out with. This itself is something to be happy about, as it lets me get a nice daily airdrop (whenever the game happens to be running properly). I even put a nice amount (20,000 DEC) into my DEC-BUSD farm on CubFinance, simply because it's counted twice there. And yeah, there are some CUB rewards to be had too, but comparatively it's pretty negligible. In case you don't now, the daily airdrop of SPS depends on how much value you have in a number of categories. Card packs or Land plots don't apply for me, but my liquid DEC certainly does, and so does my DEC in the liquidity pool on CubFinance. And then there are all my cards, for which I'm not only getting rental fees, but a bit of SPS every day. Finally, my SPS can be staked, for which I get still more SPS in the daily airdrop. A very nice arrangement. But what's the best asset to put my Splinterlands value, especially in the long term?

At the moment it seems like I'm getting paid quite a bit for DEC. This realization is always clearest when I spent some on a new card. Sure, the new card increases the value of my entire deck, which is reflected in the SPS airdrop. But it isn't nearly as great as what I would get for the DEC I spent on that card. Even so, I don't think DEC has the same potential in the long run. It's a coin, after all, with its own volatility. Okay, the same thing can be said about the cards, but in my experience, they have only increased in value ever since I first started playing. And it makes sense: each card has unique features you can use in the game. And since my deck is almost entirely made up of beta cards, there is the additional rarity factor. I don't see them losing value... whereas the DEC, I simply don't know.

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As for my SPS, the loss of value can be seen every day: Whenever I claim the airdrop (after 11 a.m.) my overall SPS passes the $200 USD mark, which it will have gone under within a day again. I assume this won't be sustainable for very long. So instead of collecting DEC, I like to invest into more cards, or let's say rather leveling up the ones I already have.

Other Areas of Splinterlands

In the end, what started out as a silly game, has turned into a huge money-printer. Sure, the game is still around, and I have even thought about getting back into it. But since (almost) all of my cards are happily rented, and I'm not thinking about investing in the latest edition cards, I don't think that's going to happen. Plus, I am quite busy, and I'd rather spend time blogging than playing quests.

Talking about blogging, writing more regularly about Splinterlands topics may be an idea to generate SPT coins, which is also highly rewarded in the daily airdrop. And being a blogging platform, there are the usual enefits of posting and curating. (Yeah, that's what this post is about!) For a long time I have considered reiterating the obvious a waste of breath. But I'm starting to realize, in the case of Splinterlands it may be far from it. After all, this game has reached a complexity that may be beyond my scope of understanding. What's this land grab all about, which I may have been missing out? I think I just may have to look into it a little bit, if only to get material for my next Splintertalk post!