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Let's turn it up to 11: Adding card levels in Splinterlands?

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@imno
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Turn it up to 11!

Soon land phase 1.5 will be here and the official shared line around the community is, "there aren't enough cards in the game to max out land!"

And to that, I say good, let's make cards scarce. But the thing is, it's not really going to matter that there aren't enough cards because most whales are not coming in ready to pack every plot.

What's likely about to happen is people with a thousand plots will concentrate on a few plots at a time using all the cheap rewards cards they can still get their hands on.

Most of the other land will be occupied by very low level cards or none at all. And, as rental card prices head north, some will pull back on cards for land to arb that opportunity. I think there's a good chance that land doesn't create the scarcity of cards that others expect.

And then there's Rebellion

And don't forget. The team has rebellion in their back pocket and their M.O. is that if there is any demand at all, they will fill it until it's dead.

God, I hope they learn from past mistakes here but FOMO aggy has never been a logical Aggy. (maybe the DAO can step in here?)

I hope I'm wrong but so far we have no real reason to believe much more than that will happen so I'm still looking for ways to knock a few more cards out of circulation. And for that I present:

Adding One Speed Level

It's simple. Give every card rarity a possible added level. No reason to fiddle too much with stats or add crazy abilities. Going up to the new max gives a +1 speed boost (or -1 in a reverse speed ruleset). You get that level by combining two max copies of any card.

The only exception is summoners. Those are already more rare than many other cards so those can probably be left out of this or we could do something smaller like adding just one BCX to your summoner in order to use the max level cards.

New maxed cards would look like this.

  • Common cards max level would go to level 10 to 11 and the max requirements would jump from 400bcx to 800bcx

  • Rare Cards max level would go to level 8 to 9 and the max requirements would jump from 115bcx to 230bcx

  • Epic cards max level would go to level 6 to 7 and the max requirements would jump from 46bcx to 92bcx

  • Legendary cards max level would go to level 4 to 5 and the max requirements would jump from 11bcx to 22bcx

These numbers can be fiddled with.

What would happen?

It wouldn't affect 99% of players.

Most players are not going to max their cards out ever just like they don't max them now, but for those players sitting on thousands of packs and multiple maxed copies of cards, this extra level to get an edge in champion might be something they find worth doing for a few key cards or some exceptionally cheap ones.

It would instantly cut the supply of rewards cards and some Chaos Legion by a significant amount and it would double the possible max card land could take.

And if no one wants to do it, then they don't have to. If just a few people decide to do it, those few will get an advantage on the cards they feel it's worth doing it with and maybe that starts an arms race.

New players coming in wouldn't know the difference and would just look at the new max as the normal max.

It would impede more players from getting to champion but that's OK because its "champion". And the brunt of the card reduction would fall on the whales if they want to keep their advantage.

A game of scarcity

For me, I'd like to see this be a game where most cards never get maxed out because there just aren't enough of them to do it. So even champion level players need to make a decision about which cards they want to put their resources into maxing so not every deck is just the same.

And it would be incredible if after we got to a point of scarcity in the current cards, they continued on that way by changing the tokenomics of future pack releases.

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