I'm not a financial advisor and everything written below is my own opinion, not financial advise.
The new Splinterlands set of reward cards is out of the oven with some goddamn beautiful designs, new abilities, and maybe a promise for the future. I want to crunch some numbers and find out if the new reward cards have real potential to reach high prices in the future, or if the massive printing will kill their value overtime.
Splinterlands released a post with the supply numbers for the new reward cards in printing and it seems that the first chaos legion cards will have 20 times the supply of older versions, which in raw numbers means:
- Common: 8,000,000
- Rare: 2,000,000
- Epic: 800,000
- Legendary: 200,000
Using the peakmonsters explorer we can find how much those numbers really represent against the player base of Splinterlands right now.
Taking into consideration the number from 15th of September, we have that active players were ~270k. If you take the total supply numbers that we had presented previously and calculate how many maxed leveled cards you can make with that, you'll see this very interesting result:
| Card Rarity | Cards to Max | Number of Maxed Cards |
|---|---|---|
| Common | 400 | 20k |
| Rare | 115 | 17.391k |
| Epic | 46 | 17.391k |
| Legendary | 11 | 18.181k |
Following the table of information, we have that if all the cards are combined we will have only ~20k maxed cards, which represents in terms of active players ~7.4% right now. Although most people won't max their cards to play in the higher ranks, we have to put into perspective what those 7.4% really represents for us as investors and asset holders. If you take a step back in time, to 4 days before the 15th of September, we have that active players were ~235k, which would make our ~7% look a lot more like 8.5%. If we take two steps back, to the 4th of September, we'll have that active players were ~181k which would make our ~7% something around 11%. Looking a month back, more precisely to the 18th of August, we'll have that active players were the stupefying ~85k. That means more than a 3x in a month, and that is one of the most important factors when looking to this new reward cards. The ~7% of today is shrinking while you blink into less and less, and that does not show any signs of slowing down.
The massive growth in the player base of Splinterlands is astonishing.
What to expect in the future
As the player base grows and the supply of cards diminishes by the second, we should see the price and value of this reward cards go up a lot in my opinion. That should not happen for a while since during the printing period cards will be dumped into the market like there's no tomorrow, and there will be a lot of people liquidating cards into DEC in order to accumulate for the airdrop, or just to make some money in a simple manner. It should give long term investors a very extended period to buy them cheap at the market, and I pretend to enjoy this period as much as my budge allows it. I'll focus on the cards I believe to be stronger or undervalued according to market prices and stack them as I see fit.
If growth keeps up, and the community keeps growing stronger and healthier like it is right now, Splinterlands can be a very huge thing very quickly, and these cards have a very high potential of being worth a lot in the future. Just think about it, today we can have at most ~7% of the players with maxed versions of these reward cards, but if the raw growth numbers of this month can be replicated throughout the year, we would have in 12 months something around 2.430M active players, and that ~7% would look something like ~0.8%. Of course it is impossible to predict how the growth will be a year from now, and many variables stand between here and the future, but my only point here is that I believe that the Splinterlands community and player base is growing too fast, and that the supply of cards is too limited for the huge expansion of players that keep coming. What seems a lot today, can be very little tomorrow.
Uncertainty
As the Chaos Legion (CL) expansion packs are yet to come we don't know exactly how that will affect markets, and the price of reward cards can take a hit with the arrival of new packs. I'll certainly watch out for it, and market should stay volatile for a little while still. There's a lot of variables in play right now, with the release of CL, the airdrops, land expansion right around the corner and the absurd growth that has been a theme of Splinterlands for months, but that only adds to the excitement of playing such a wonderful game to me, and it shows the real potential behind all those beautiful NFT's, and the blockchain game and community.
Thanks for Reading!
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