Land Vs Vouchers (Which has better ROI?)
Today is September 27th, 2021. Splinterlands, the #1 blockchain collectible card game in history, the current #1 Game on dappradar for amount of users, is only a few weeks from the Chaos Legion set release (pre-sale begins October 18th see Splinterlands AMA Recap for more details) and many people are once again asking, what is the best way to invest in Splinterlands today? Splinterlands has so many different assests to collect, earn or invest in, it can be really hard to know what is the best move to advance your collection, profit or have the most fun for the least amount of investment.
In my guild (shout out to Killuminati brethren) someone was asking this very specific question:
Land Plots Vs Choas Legion Pack Vouchers
If you had $500 today would you buy a land plot (selling for $450 each) or would you buy $450 worth of Pack Vouchers when they hit the market. If you had to sell these assests in 12 months, which do you think would appreciate the most? Let's look at some info on each and make a case.
Splinterland Land Plots
Land plots are currently worth $450 (on atomic marketplace) and earn holders 10,000 air drop points and therefore earn holders a little SPS daily for the next 303 days. There will only be a total of 150k land plots ever, so they are a limited resource. Keep in mind there are also more rare and more expensive Tracts and Regions as well. Lands originally sold for $20 and have already appreciated 22 times its original value. Land Plots are very big unknown as DEVs have consistently dropped information on their value within the game, but determining actual value is difficult. When I research lands I often visit Peak D Land Expansion for the announcement details and Splintercards Land website, because it has a great deal of up to date infomation about the utility of lands. All indications are that lands is an entirely new game within Splinterlands. Each plot can contain an upgradeable building and you put Monster and Summoner cards on the lands to mine for resources which can then be crafted into useable game items. The DEV team have consistently found a way to introduce new integrated items and content that is relevant and powerful and it seems land is going to be very important. If you believe in Splinterlands and its future, owning land sure seems like a good place to park your money and put yourself in a good position as the future phases of Splinterlands continues to roll out.
The downside of land ownership would be patience. Land sales happened on March 6th in 2021, and since then a lot of growth and new products have been discussed and released and lands continously gets kind of forgotten about. Even land owners seem to be patiently waiting and rarely does the land expansion even get discussed in the discord. The other risk is that the land expansion will come and the land itself will not generate enough value to make it worthwhile, or perhaps the items adding to the current gameplay will harm the gameplay and it gets scrapped or functionally changed altogether.
Chaos Legion Pack Vouchers
The real hype in Splinterlands right now is the new expansion set Chaos Legion(CL). Many players are stock piling resources to buy up packs, collect cards, and improve their collection. Chaos Legion pre-sale starts Monday, October 18th, 2021 with 1 million packs available for pre-sale out of the 15 million total packs available. Untamed was a wild success, and even the smaller dice sets and reward card batches have been really fun to collect and unopened packs went from $2 to 40+ dollars which much like land plots is about a 22x increase. We currently know that CL packs will be $4 USD per pack, and that pre-sale vouchers will be given to players proprotionately who have staked SPS (the math here is a little complicated to explain or predict). If you had $450 to buy pre-sale vouchers on October 18th, even this has multiple strategies to consider. First of all, you could just buy and stake $450 in SPS right now and almost have 1300 sps tokens earning you Voucher tokens when the pre-sale hits. Secondly, you could buy DEC (Dark Energy Crystals) and let those earn SPS, which you can stake and then you have DEC sitting there waiting to buy the vouchers. Or, you could just wait for others to earn vouchers and shop the market and buy up vouchers that way. Just guessing the best way to buy vouchers is a good enough question itself and proably worth its very own blog post. It is important to remember also, buying vouchers is just buying the opportunity to buy a pack for $4 in the pre-sale window. Therefore if you buy $450 worth of vouchers, you'd need $4 per voucher per pack you would want to buy. This means some of the money needs to stay liquid in order to use the vouchers to actually buy packs, and what you do with the packs opens up an entirely new set of questions. This is why the prospect of Pack Vouchers is so exciting, because investing in the vouchers and packs can allow you to join in the hype of a new set and potentially make huge gains, whether it would be flipping packs, vouchers or cards; or hanging on to these assets to let them grow in value over the year. The beauty of investing in packs and cards in Splinterlands is even if the cards do not hold secondary market value for some reason the cards have; functional value in the game, they are fun to collect and play with, they have burnable DEC value, they can be upgraded into more powerful cards, you could pull a really epnsive and rare gold foil card, they increase your Collection Power, they earn you SPS in airdrops and packs are just simply fun to open. Overall, it seems like only upside to invest in Chaos Legion.
The downside of putting our $450 into Chaos Legion is overextending in a set that will be heavily printed, much like the recent batch of rewards cards where the prices have saturated the market and the prices have fallen fast. It may also be easy to miss the opportunity to resell at the right time, and end up selling to low or too soon and devaluing the investment. Splinterland cards have historically done incredibly well over the long term and even the least expensive cards have turned incredibly gains, but the printing of cards needs to scale with the growth and at some point there will be too much supply out on the market. If everyone puts their resources into CL packs, we could all be making the same move and all be holding the same bag.
The Conclusion
Ahh, the best part....the answer. This is where I need your help. What would you do if you had $450 to invest today, and why do you think it would be the best move? Which one is more fun? How would the question change if you were thinking shorter term or longer term?
My answer today is to decide if you want to be a part of the Chaos Legoin hype and live and die by the new set, or if you want to play the longer game and invest in a Land Plot that probably will not roll out or show gains until 2022. Chaso Legion seems to be the fun answer, and probably also requires the most upfront work and constant checking of prices and markets and making moves, while the Land Plot feels like a set it and forget it until the Land Expansion arrives. It is also important to note that Splinterlands also has 50 additional resources to consider collecting or investing in and these are only two options, perhaps buying the undervalued reward card right now is a better move. Perhaps buying Beta and Alpha cards are best because their price has dropped due to rotating out of most formats, but still hold the best collection power points. Maybe it is best to invest in a good streamer set up to play Splinterlands on stream and earn some money making content. The list is so long and there are so many choices to be made.
However many likes I get **I will invest that much money in USD **in going after Pack Vouchers and if somehow we hit 450 likes on this blog post I will actually take my own challenge and invest $450 in one of these two options and I will follow my investments progress for the year.
Thanks for reading and I look forward to hearing your answer to the question.