Gone In 2 Minutes...Did You Got Your Waka??? What Lies Ahead For Splinterlands

Evening

So the Waka Spiritblade got sold out in a flash, just like we expected for a limited circulation summoner. I think the sale ended in under 2 minutes, making it the fastest sale of an item in the game history.

There were a several reasons why splinterlands folks went crazy after Waka Spiritblade. First is the stats, i.e. Waka Spiritblade giving all the friendlies the potent Poison ability, making it one of the summoner of its kind. There are only a few summoners buffs/perks that can never be fully countered e.g. Blast and Devine Shields. So Waka Spiritblade with its Poison ability joined the ranks of extremely revered Yodin Zaku and Lorna Shine.

Second reason is the limited supply of Waka Spiritblade. The summoner came pre-maxed and there will be only 960 normal foil and 40 gold foil Wakas in existence, meaning only a handful of the people are gonna get their hands on it. In order to stay competitive in top ranks, one need to have every option(summoner/card) at your disposal. So, this created a high fomo among the players which resulted in the immediate selling out.

Third reason is the price or the currency of sale. First phase price of Waka Spiritblade was 5000 SPS and 500 Vouchers(worth around $1.5K). For outsiders or newbies this may seem a lot, but old time SL whales already had access to the two required tokens(SPS and Vouchers), since they are getting continuously airdropped. It was like reinvesting game's airdrop money into it.

Did I Bought Waka?

I was a few of lucky ones to buy Waka when the sale started. And like many, I only used my airdropped tokens, so no external financing. Needless to say, Waka Spiritblade feels like an airdrop card. I have used Waka and I am enjoying it pretty much since my victory rate has improved significantly.

Currently, Waka's in game price is around $2,300(∼$210/BCX), which I think is reasonable considering the other legendary summoners with a similar circulating supply. I have a feel that the last phase Wax sale is going to decide the long term price. But If you missed out on Waka sale and are waiting for Wax sale, I recommend going for the secondary market because we don't know what the price figure is gonna get rolled out by SL team for Wax sale. I think that Wax launch price of Waka is gonna be greater than SL ingame market price, considering the success SL had during the first phase ingame sale.

Lets now talk about rentals. We know who can't afford them, usually rent them. So Waka rentals are pretty healthy as of now, as expected for a limited supply summoner. Currently normal foil Waka rent is 185 Dec/day($0.63), which is in par with many other legendary summoners.

What lies in the future, only time will tell. But with the recent aggressive marketing push, SL is getting a whole lot of exposure and I feel something big is on the horizon like listing of SL tokens on some big exchange. And with big exposure comes the bigger audience and even bigger investments.

NFT space is already experiencing unparalleled growth in recent times and Waka coming with wearable/AR artwork and functionality is certainly a hint not to be ignored. Who knows SL might have a metaverse future!

Recent partnership with Warner Music group is certainly helping the cause. I heard a gossip some time ago that Binance asked for a huge fees for listing SL tokens and SL team decided to walked away at that time. It looks like the strategy is to focus more on building a solid platform with a huge user base, rather than exchange listings and other optical stuff. Once the project is popular enough, the big exchanges are gonna come themselves, begging for the token listings.

Like always, I remain highly bullish on SL as a project and have a feel that all SL hodlers are gonna have a blast pretty soon.

Good Luck🤞🤞🤞