Speculating on Splinterlands - It's Official, I'm a Landowner!

As the pre-sale of the Chaos Legion Packs is coming to a close on #splinterlands, I have been doing a lot of thinking about which way to proceed. So far things have been going rather well: My 88 mid-level Beta cards I've been renting out have ensured me a steady income of just under a thousand DEC a day. Thanks to selling vouchers on LeoDex and buying Chaos Legion Packs for it, I've managed to accumulate 28 packs, twice as many as if I had gotten them from the game store. And together with all my saved DEC, including what I have in the liquidity pool on CubFinance, and the SPT tokens I have received for writing these posts, I have been getting 170,000 collection points a day. Not bad at all. But trying to see the big picture, I realized I really want to have some land...

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My Hopes About Being a Landlord

Looking at the nature of the trading card game, where you can assemble teams to battle each other, it's not immediately obvious how owning a virtual plot of land can be of any benefit in this game. In fact, at the moment there is no functionality of land whatsoever. However, there was a pre-sale, and people just snatched up every last one of the 150,000 plots, selling around $20 initially. Back then the entire pre-sale went over my head, and I bet even if I had paid attention to it, I doubt I would have invested even that little on something shrouded in obscurity. But now, things are finally starting to dawn on me that all those early landgrabbers were probably onto something. No wonder the price went up to around $750, which is how much I bought my plot for today.

Looking through the information on the Splinterlands page, taking to knowledgeable folks on their Discord server, and leafing through blogs on Splintertalk, you can piece together some info on how land is going to be eventually used. I personally enjoyed the videos by @cryptollamatv. Depending on the kind of land it is (which up to know we have no way of knowing), it may have various types of resources, which you'll be able to extract and convert into spells and/or items, helping your team in a battle. There may be keeps or castles on it, which I have no idea what they do. Each land card will be a unique NFT, just like monsters, with their own rarity, category, level, geographical features, types of terrain, magic (of course!), so I guess it's safe to say that not all plots will be equally valuable. Still, I believe even a piece of land with the worst attributes is probably better than not having any at all, including for those who may not be interested in fighting battles at all. The price increase so far, and the general record of the game should indicate that much.

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How I Got My Hands on a Plot

Well, guess what: I bought it! (Like there is another way.) However, staying true to my own previous tendency on Splinterlands, I really wanted to make sure not to spend any outside money on it. Just like all my previous in-game assets, I acquired from playing battles, renting cards, airdrops, and ... sure: those $50 worth of initial investment when the game first came out. In other words, I did not intend on spending any of my HIVE, BTC, let alone fiat money on this virtual land purchase. But I didn't need to! There was enough DEC and SPS lying around to complete this transaction today. It was pretty straight forward, the only thing that was not clear, was how to send the tokenized plot into the game. (Unlike transfering in DEC, SPS, or even Chaos Legion Packs, the plot has to be sent to @steemmonsters, which it will instantly recognize.)

Certainly, a week ago I would have gotten a much better price, but back then all my SPS was staked, and unstaking always takes some time. Still, I really don't mind spending 1.2k of my SPS and virtually all of my in-game DEC (50k to be precise) just on one plot of land. If it turns out to be only half as productive as I am hoping, it will be worthwhile. But even before land use is incorporated into the game, it will be really great for my daily SPS airdrop. One plot will ensure me 10,000 airdrop points! Considering that I had to give up 50,000 for it in form of my DEC, it may not look like that at first. But within a month or so I should have made up that much from my card rentals. This may especially be the case when I finally get to involve my newly acquired Chaos Legions as well. Opening day should be tomorrow, I think!