Splinterlands | The Printer Is About To Go Brrrrrr...

From what it looks like, the Card Printer in Splinterland will once again start running in overdrive while there is already a massive oversupply. These are some thoughts...

Future Sins Of The Past...

Splinterlands has a history oif making major mistakes that boosted sales and dev revenue in the short term which turned out to almost kill the game in the long run. Some of these are:

• Printing insane amounts of DEC out of nowhere
• Completely Neglection the Bot Issue
• Increasing the Pack Price x2 and the Print Rate x10 on Chaos Legion
• Cashing in on the Crypto Land Hype doing a pre-sale on Big promises
• Printing Way too much SPS
• ...

All of these took multiple years to correct and 'fix' at least to the point where it was possible. Right now at the point where things started to look a bit better, it feels like they fully falling in exactly the same trap again doing things that in the short-term might look beneficial as it creates some fake numbers, while over time the price will need to be paid one way or another.

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The Card Oversupply Situation

One of the main issues in Splinterlands is that new cards are printed all the time while the market for older cards has totally collapsed since they are being inflated and power creeped away like there is no tomorrow.

While the number of cards keeps going up and up and up, the total marketcap of cards isn't really moving which means that cards just systematically lose all of their value over time. This I would say is the main issue Splinterlands is facing as players do see cards as their main investment in the game. As new players that come in see the massive price gap between new and old cards, they quickly know that they are in for a trainwreck and become less willing to actually buy cards

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Printerlands...

Older Summoner Prices

Newer Underpowered Summoner Prices

As if things right now aren't worse enough with old Summoners going for as low as 0.07$ while the new underpowered Foundation Summoners going for 10x that price. Things are about to get a whole lot worse as the Card printer is set to be turned on like crazy

1. Foundation Card Printer: This is an entire set of 53 new 'underpowered' cards that came out of nowhere as a 'reset' to give new players a Free2Play mode where they are able to earn real tradable cards. The prices for sure will come down and trend to zero as the only reason that they are high now is because players believe they can get an early lead and earn more back than what they put in. I also don't think there is a limit to how many will be printed and likely, even more of them will be created as chapters are being added to the Campaign Mode.

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2. Upcomig New Reward Set: Soon, the newt reward card set should become available and there is talk of making these cards tradable again instead of Soulbound. The reasoning is that Frontiers Mode with Tradable Foundation Card Rewards are a success but this is a complete misconception. The only reason that Foundation cards now have value is because there are no bagholders who can earn a fair amount of them before first buying a bunch and leveling up. If the new reward set is going to be tradable, there will be many players who will just look to use their owned cards and dump every reward cards they earn while the ones who want them should have the tools to earn them. This could create a lot of supply from the start and little to no demand.

There is a reason why reward cards were made soulbound (not only the bot farms) and it feels like they have totally forgotten about that already.

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3. New Mini Set:While from what I understand, Conclave Arcana Packs aren't really selling, another proposal was made for the team to create another 40+ Cards Promo Set which to my surprise is getting a ton of support. While the team is able to create the Foundation cards & Reward cards just like that, for the mini set, the devs demand 1.2 Billion DEC from the DAO (1 Million Dollar+) as they need to keep the Google-like paychecks going. They are also pulling a trick to artificially pump the SPS Price by selling them at a price of 0.014$ SPS while the real price was 0.007$. This has got some speculators buying either to dump once it gets closer above 0.01$ or to buy the packs at the likely most favorable price.

The problem is that it doesn't do anything positive in the long term and might hurt the project more. The Team will have more DEC to dump, more cards will get in circulation taking value away from the already oversupply of existing ones. Some will make a profitable trade on SPS but it all will get dumped down again eventually. It's just a complete setup for a disaster.

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4. More Voucher Promo Cards: The moment DEC failed to hold up in price, they invented SPS which also quickly started collapsing which made they create Vouchers out of nowhere which also quickly saw their value decline so to fix that problem they did what they always do as the ultimate solution which is Print More Cards. So the promo cards were introduced which continue to print as vouchers need to keep being burned.

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5. Influencer Card through Twitch Drops: One of the issues also is that nobody is watching or caring about Splinterlands on Twitch so they created a card that you can earn by watching twitch. To he honest, this is the one card I don't really mind that much as it serves a good purpose and the requirements to get it are also insane in the you need 15 Hours of watchtime to get a single one. They should have made this one of the foundation cards though.

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6. Land Specific Cards: So Land originally was a cash grab to capitalize on the NFT Crypto Land hype of the moment with promises that owners would be able to mind the packs that include Spells & Items. 5 Years later there is pretty much none of that and land has gotten some nonsense use case to mint potions. While it was set out as something that gives older cards value, they now came up with the idea to print Land Specific cards that only can be used on Land completely bypassing the original vision.

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My Plan Of Action

As someone who has quite a large collection of cards mainly bought from the market, I'm kind of waiting for the next adoption phase to fully get out of Splinterlands as any temporary pump in price will almost surely follow by another total collapse. My collection now is worth around 5000$+ still which along with 328k SPS barely makes me 7$ a week from running a bot in wild along with some SPS Staking Rewards.

So Yeah, I'm more and more done with Splinterlands as I feel the entire ecosystem has just become a cash cow where everything is done with an eye mainly to keep the dev salaries coming in.

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Conclusion

While all the actions that are taken now might see Splinterlands get a small bump, the insane overprinting of more cards while there already is a massive oversupply will eventually devalue the older ones even more. What should be done instead is the complete opposite in fully halting the card printing and actually creating a new game mode which is fun and solves all the issues. See This Could Fix Everything. Splinterlands has turned into everything that is wrong with the system and why Bitcoin & crypto were created in the first place.