Splinterlands: Unpacking Land. A deep dive...conclusion.

Yesterday I wrote 2000 words here about what the future Land implementation will hold in Splinterlands. It wasn't enough. This is the rest...

What good are Resources without Items & Spells?

One of the concerns that yabapmatt wanted to address is the fact that the Items & Spells part of the game is still a long way from being added. In fact, it's probably at least a year out yet if not two. So what will be the point of farming these resources in the game if you can't use them?

Titles

The answer was two-fold. First, there will be titles. Just as there are titles currently in the game for people who bought a certain number of packs or participated to certain levels in pre-sales, the plan is to add prefixes to your name as well. For example, right now you could be "dagger212 The Praetorian" (I'm not, but it's an example) or "The Legionnaire" or "The Watcher". In the future you will be able to compete to gain a title such as "Lord" or "Baron" or "Sir" or even possibly "King" or "Emperor". These will add, at this point, unknown benefits to your Land holdings. Maybe it's an increase in production or a shortening of the time it takes to do something. That part hasn't been figured out yet. But the titles will add value.

Upgrades

The thought is that since players won't be able to use their farmed resources to create Items or develop Spells, they will instead be able to use them to compete for titles. They will also be able to use them to upgrade certain buildings, like Arenas. So those resources won't simply sit in your account doing nothing. There will be uses for them between the time they are implemented and the time they can be used for crafting.

The Secret of Praetoria

Another area they may be able to be used is for the "Secret of Praetoria". What is that? The Secret of Praetoria is going to be a massive game within the game where entire territories of landholders (there are seven) compete against the other territories to try and uncover it first. The details are very broad at this point, but it sounds like landholders from each territory will need to work together to build something gigantic to uncover this "secret" which will benefit every landholder in the territory. The degree to which you benefit will be determined by the degree in which you participate in its uncovering. Whether it's sending resources, or DEC, or SPS, or whatever, landholders will work together to uncover the secret and the benefits it bestows.

From what they're hinting at, the benefits will not be exclusive to the first team to uncover it. All territories will eventually get it. But the benefits will include both the resource management aspect and the gameplay aspect of the game, so having it first could give you a decent advantage over other teams/players while you hold it alone. Also, this will NOT be a quick process. The idea is to have it being completed sometime around when Items & Spells are ready to be implemented as it will impact that as well. In other words, this should take months, if not years, to complete.

What does it all mean?

So, what does this all mean to me as a cardholder/landowner/player? Well, I think there a couple of things we can take out of this that should be primary areas of focus going forward.

First, lets do some math on cards. As much as people have complained about the card market having too many cards and prices dropping, the need and demand for cards once land is implemented is going to be massive. Consider there are 150,000 plots of land. If each of them needs five cards to maximize efficiency then that means there will need to be 750,000 maxed out cards in land.

According to Splintercards, there are roughly 120M BCX of common cards total in the game, Alpha thru Riftwatchers. That means if every card got combined to max level there would be roughly 300k max level commons. The number would actually be substantially less due to Alpha/Beta needing 505 to max and the fact that some got combined over max, etc. But let's just go with it. There are only 300k max level commons theoretically available to cover 750k max level slots in land. There could be another 320k maxed out rares. 150k epics. 170k legendary. These numbers are simply taking the total BCX printed and dividing it by the number needed to max out the card. In total, there is the potential to have 940k maxed out cards in the game.

So, a potential 940k maxed cards to fill 750k slots. That doesn't take into account cards that were burned, cards being played, cards in dead accounts, etc. This is just combining every card available. There is no way we get anywhere close to filling these slots with fully maxed cards with the current amount of cards in circulation. People are going to need to buy a LOT of cards if they want to maximize efficiency on land while at the same time still playing the game. How many thousands of cards are being controlled by bots right now? They probably won't be combining many of the cards they "own". The price of cards almost has to go up. The rental market should tighten up as well.

We're about to experience a supply chain shock. Just like prices skyrocketed in the real-world when they shut everything down for Covid, there aren't going to be enough cards for the demand, so prices will have to get to a point where things become too expensive for people to keep buying. Who knows where that will be? It will obviously be different for each card, but in my mind it will be substantially higher than where they are now. Throw a bull market into the mix and things could get crazy.

Stack Cards

In other words, it's probably not a bad idea to be stacking up on cheap cards right now. It doesn't sound like it will matter much which cheap cards you have, they just need to be maxed to get max potential. Whether its the Venari Heatsmith or the Failed Summoner, price won't matter, just rarity and level.

Fill Bags

The other thing to be doing is probably filling bags with DEC and SPS while it's cheap. yabatmatt said there will need to be "10s of billions" of DEC in the game in order to do everything that people are going to want to do. Right now there's what, 6 billion? There will be DEC sinks everywhere while also having many things which will require DEC to be staked. Even if that DEC doesn't get burned, it will still leave circulation while it's being used. There could very easily be a supply crunch here as well, just like cards.

One of the ways this can be alleviated is for people to burn SPS to convert it to DEC. This will obviously start cutting into the SPS out there, and while it may not make a huge difference early on in the game, eventually it will start putting upward pressure on the price of SPS.

Long Story Short

To wrap it up, cards are going to become more and more scarce as we get towards land being implemented. Combining them will become a priority which means the rental market should probably pick up as well. Second, massive amounts of DEC are going to be needed inside the land expansion. Third, SPS is going to be needed to provide enough DEC to work the land. In other words, demand should be going up on all of them.

This is in no way financial advice. Just my thoughts on some of the dynamics going into this game. Do your own research.

I'm sure I missed some things so feel free to add them to the comments below. Thanks for reading!

Hive is the Way.

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