This topic is something that I hear about a lot lately. If you want to invest in the game but not playing it much, where you should put your money in?

Here I will go through the options and present some pro and cons and put some data as well.

Options for investing in Spliterlands

What are the options for investing in the game?

The main options are the follow ones:

• DEC
• Packs (Alpha, Beta, Untamed)
• Individual cards
  
  

Now let’s take a look in all of these with their past performance in therms of price and volume. What are the pro and cons on each option?

DEC

DEC is the in game currency of the game. Except for rewarding the players one of its main purpose is to provide liquidity.

Here is the chart for the DEC price in dollar value.

Starting from May 2019 when DEC was introduced, its price has been pretty stable. At the begging it traded just above 0.001 cents and afterwards it drop down just a bit and its trading mainly in the range 0.0008 to 0.0010 cents.

If you bought DEC in May 2019, now at end of the year you would have around the same amount in terms of dollar value. It is worth to note that STEEM in May 2019 was trading around the 0.4$ mark and these days it is around 0.13. Putting your STEEM in DEC would save you that drop, as DEC has acted as a stable coin in the past 7 months.

Clearly DEC provides stability, what about liquidity?

Here are the charts on DEC volumes by days and months.
First the daily chart.

We can notice some increase at the end of the year. In the past 30 days the average daily volume for DEC is around 1800 $, with some peak and lows in between.

Next the monthly chart.

Note that December is not over yet and these are not final numbers.

On the monthly chart we can clearly notice the increase in volume on DEC, especially in November. It has crossed the 50k $ mark for the first time.

What can be concluded from the above is that DEC is acting like a stablecoin and it can be a nice hedge against STEEM. It has some liquidity and a couple of hundreds dollars can be exchanged per days without any issues.

PACKS

Now let’s take a look how are the packs performing.

First the ALPHA packs

ALPHA packs were sold out somewhere in October 2018. Starting from March 2019 and the birth of Steem Engine they can be tokenized and traded on the exchange.

Here is the chart for the chart for the ALPHA packs in dollar value.

The chart above is quite poor with no data for each day. The ALPHA packs are not traded daily that’s why the wholes in the chart. But we can notice a clear increase in the price of the packs. Starting from around 2$ and finishing to above 6$. That is 300% increase in price in a period of 9 months.

What about liquidity?

Clearly ALPHA packs have increased in price a lot. Let’s see their volume. Here is the chart for monthly volume.

Not a lot of volume here, except for the last two months. As for the data above have in mind that December is not over yet. But overall the liquidity has been quite poor for ALPHA up until November. In November there is a massive spike. December is doing well, and it is probably going to end just above 40k $. If the volume keeps up ALPHA packs are really good investment with nice increase in price and nice liquidity as well. But from what happened before there is a risk for low liquidity.

BETA packs

Here is the chart for the chart for the BETA packs in dollar value.

Beta packs were sold out in October 2019. Up until then their price on the exchange was below the selling one of 2$. After they sold out their price jumped sharply reaching 2.7$ and then pull back a bit. In the last week there were some dumps as well, but currently they are traded around the 2.4$. That is 20% increase in value, just after two months of them being sold out.

Here is the volume of traded BETA packs.

We can notice a sharp decrease in volume from above 10k to around 1k in the last months. The BETA packs are sold out and now players are buying UNTAMED packs. The liquidity of BETA at the moment is low.

What can be seen here is that BETA packs are showing signs to grow in price, but also some instability. The low volume doesn’t provide a cleat sign that the prices are right. But if they follow the ALPHA example, they should do fine. But be prepared for a long grind and be patience.

Individual Cards

This is probably the most intriguing asset from the Splinterlands pallet. After all the game is played with cards, not packs or DEC. Also, unlike DEC, or packs, that doesn’t offer any type of passive income, cards can be rented out and provide some income.

Individual cards is where most of the trading in game happens. The daily volume of traded cards recently is around 5k, meaning on a monthly level there is 150k $ traded in cards.

This is a very rough estimate. But compared to the previous assets, DEC, ALPHA, BETA even UNTAMED that is currently for sale, individual cards have the highest trading volume.

This is if we are looking at them as one. The thing is there is a lot of them. When this volume gets distributed to each card, the volume of the single cards is low.

Which cards to invest in?

In my opinion these are the criteria that should be met for a card to be worth investing in:

• High prices
• Usability
• Sell Volume

The combination of the above guaranties that the card will be rented out easily and sold out easily as well. The high prices and usability means that players will want this card, as it will be useful for them, providing them more wins and rewards, but the high prices will mean that a lot of them will not be able to buy and they will rent it out. The sell volume of the cards means that it is liquid and can be sold easy.

Ruining these criteria to each card is a topic for a wider analysis. Here I will just mention some of the obvious choices.

• Legendary summoners
• Neutral Legendries
• Rare summoners
• Key cards for each element

I hope to find some time a do a more in dept analysis of the individual cards in the future.

Conclusion

What can be concludes from the above?
From the historical data presented we can see that DEC provides stability and some liquidity. Liquidity here is relative as couple of thousands of dollars per day is not a lot for some top crypto coins, but for a game it is just fine. It means that you can trade the token in hundreds of dollars per day, without putting too much pressure on the price.

The ALPHA packs have the largest increase in prices from all the Splinterlands assets. Their liquidity has been quite low until recently, but it is showing strength in the recent period. The BETA packs has started to increase in price, but there liquidity is at a low end at the moment. You may want to play the long game on them.

The individual cards are probably the most lucrative assets to invest in, but one should check the usability and liquidity on each individual card, meaning to have a greater understanding of the game. They can provide a passive income from renting, and the printed out will most liqly increase in value as well. A double win!

Disclaimer: Not a financial advice!

All the best
@dalz

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Posted via Steemleo | A Decentralized Community for Investors