Hi everyone!
I know that we're at least 6 months away from the Rebellion Edition packs being available in the Splinterlands game... if not longer...
You can see in the roadmap above, that the Rebellion edition is only 5% complete and in SPS Proposal #15 the Splinterlands team said that Rebellion wouldn't be released until at least 3 months after the Chaos Legion edition was sold out.
Any packs still remaining on March 31st, 2023 would all be burned on that date.
Please note that we plan to wait at least three months after Chaos Legion sells out to release Rebellion so there will be a reasonable period of time between sets.
Not enough packs have been sold in the current EoY sale (so far) to have Chaos Legion burnt up before March 31st 2023 making July 1st the first possible date for the Rebellion Edition to be launched.
The really interesting thing about the chart above is that 20% of purchased packs are sitting unopened. I'm sure a good portion of those packs are waiting until Chaos Legion has sold out so that all the CL airdropped cards could be found in packs:
A character will only be available in card packs after it's been unlocked, so a good portion of those 3,098,848 unopened packs are waiting until the 14th million pack has been sold/burnt.
That said, I imagine there is also a portion of the 3,098,848 unopened packsthat are destined for resale on the secondary market. Traditionally patient pack holders have done quite well with past editions.
As you can see above, if anyone has been patient enough to hold onto any Alpha packs purchased for $2 USD in May 2018, you could sell them on the secondary market for $115. That's a, um, good investment.
So... the question I'm looking at today is... will the Rebellion Edition Splinterlands packs be a good investment?
The thing about the Alpha packs, Beta packs, Orbs, Untamed packs and Dice packs is that they were half the price of the Chaos Legion packs ($4) and Riftwatchers packs ($5). They were also much more rare (admittedly for a much smaller player base) - 300,000 Alpha packs were available in 2018, compared to 15,000,000 Chaos Legion packs.
I don't honestly think there was a miscalculation for Chaos Legion packs... you want packs to be available for new and old players for most of (if not all of) the year. You can't have a situtation where you're trying to bring new people into the game, and then don't have any card packs to sell them. Asking a brand new person to find packs on Hive-Engine is a horrible onboarding experience.
The Splinterlands company has a weird relationship with pack investors.
On one hand, you don't want a situation like Ticketmaster or Nike where the real fans cannot get product because scalpers vaccum it all up in seconds and instantly resell it for mega bucks. Ask any Swifty how they feel about that.
On the other hand, the airdropped summoner incentives are clearly designed for people buying way more packs than they need:
You need 11 cards to max out a Chaos Legion Summoner (you'll need a maxed card to be competitive in Diamond and Champion leagues). You'll get 1 card with every 675 Chaos Legion packs which means you'll need to have purchased 7,425 packs to get the cards you'd need.
7,425 packs will cost you around $29,700USD but to max out a Chaos Legion collection (from the 2nd hand market) you'd only need to spend 1/8th of that amount...
The incentives are there for people to buy way more packs than they need and then either sell surplus cards and/or packs.
I'm very sure Chaos Legion cards are about to get very cheap the day after the 14th million pack is purchased/burned.
The Splinterlands company benefits a lot from people buying more packs than they need in the hope to profit later... they get their money sooner, which they can spend on development/marketing sooner. Win win.
However, Chaos Legion packs might be the first time in Splinterlands history that pack investors are unable to make a profit. If CL pack investors cannot make a profit, you would imagine they'd be very hesitant to purchase Rebellion packs.
Say someone purchased 8,000 Chaos Legion packs after the presale to ensure they got maxed out airdropped cards. The investor would purchase 6667 packs and get 20% bonus packs (1333) to hit 8000 packs. Ignoring the whole voucher situation, that's $26,668 USD.
If you were to sell those on the Hive-Engine secondary market you'd get $1.42 per pack or...
... on the secondary market within Splinterlands you'd get $1.39 per pack.
To sell now would be to turn $26,668 into $11,360 assuming you didn't kill the market yourself by adding 8,000 packs on there. Of course, that doesn't include the value of the airdropped cards, but great as they are, you probably would have gotten $1000ish worth from the airdropped cards.
From memory, Chaos Legion was desperately needed because it was way too expensive for new players to get into the game, even just to buy the cheapest cards off the in-game second hand market. Chaos Legion also created expanded the strategy of the game significantly so you weren't seeing the same card deck builds over and over. Chaos Legion made the game more interesting, fun and affordable.
Unless there is a huge influx of new players, I'm not sure there is a huge need for the Rebellion pack edition. With Chaos Legion needing to be burned, and the current player base having very playable collections (which was not the case prior to Chaos Legion) I can't see a huge demand there.
Obviously there will be some demand... I'll get some packs myself for sure, there is always some excitement for the newest shiniest thing, especially if each new edition releases more and more powerful must-have cards... but the players won't need Rebellion packs to fill out their collection to be competitive, and therefore the investment opportunity to sell second hand Rebellion packs just won't be there.
This is worrying for the Splinterlands company as the editions are their main revenue source. The currently playerbase will buy packs, but with already competitive collections I don't think they'll buy as many as Chaos Legion packs were sold in those first couple of weeks.
Games like Clash of Clans & Fortnite make all their revenue off 1-5% of their playerbase... but those purchases are for consumables... so as long as those people keep playing, they'll keep spending. Splinterlands doesn't share that same business model... the more editions released actually hurts the top 1-5% because the value of their collections decrease as newer, cheaper, more powerful cards are introduced. Splinterlands instead needs to find more and more players.
They're doing a good job with tournaments and Twitch TV, but if there is only ever going to be about 3 months between pack editions and newer pack editions effectively replace older pack editions in terms of playability then those pack investors will disappear completely.
I'm super interested to see how Land Phase 2 affects card sales.
Card decks (1 summoner and 6 monsters) will work each land plot to produce resources to make items you'll be able to play in the game. The more leveled up the cards are, the more resources, and the older the cards are, the more resources they'll produce. A maxed out Legendary Gold foil Alpha edition monster will produce more resources than a Level 1 Common Regular Foil monster.
I have no idea how much more, and I have no idea how game-changing these items will be.
I do know there is definitely potential for a lot of players to want a lot more maxed out cards.
My current prediction is that Rebellion packs will not sell as quickly as Chaos Legion packs did, and that they won't be a great investment. Obviously my mind will change as new information comes to light, but that's my feeling for it at the moment.
What do you think? Agree or I'm off my rocker?
Thanks for reading so many words!
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As the year is coming near to a close, a lot of people will be tempted to sell their cards
Why do you think that's true? Do you think people are selling because they don't like the game? Or because they need money for holidays/Christmas?
I never really was into buying packs, I've been playing since the beta set and didn't get those or the untamed packs, instead always waiting for when the market was down to pick cards from the market cheap while earning reward cards. I did get tempted by the airdrop system to buy 610 Chaos Legion packs which turned out to be a pretty bad deal. In the end, more players always need to come in to keep the prices up and create a boom cycle. I'm hoping / anticipating there will be 1 more big adoption at some point which likely will be the time to just take profit.
I don't intend to buy any rebellion packs and they need to find one way or another for players to have incentives to buy them. The only really thing that works is to have a situation where earnings justify it. Last times they always just created a new token to have this happen, first DEC and once that crashed SPS with Vouchers which both also crashed. I assume they will introduce some crazy power creep with rebellion so players who want to win need these cards. There is no point for new players to buy expensive rebellion packs if there are cheap chaos legion packs and cards on the market. This makes me want to pick up some more cards at current prices on the market.
That being said, I still have quite some confidence things will improve as the game it good enough to at least attract more real players.
Me either honestly! The only packs that I've purchased and opened in the last couple of years are Gladius. For everything else I try to just buy the cards I need or wait for the airdrops.
Card packs are less likely than not to have cards of equal or greater value than the card pack itself (you can see the averages here), so I totally agree with your approach.
Did you end up opening your 610 CL packs? Or have you sold them? Or still holding onto them to hopefully sell for a profit?
I would suggest waiting until CL hits the 14M pack sold/burnt mark... I'd expect the second hand market to be absolutely flooded with cheap CL cards at that moment.
I agree, I'm really not sure how the team will try to motivate Rebellion pack sales. I'm curious to see how it all unfolds.
It's definitely more fun opening packs but buying specific card's seems a better strategy starting off. I get torn between increasing my hive power or buying card's.
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Oh, 100% - there will always be that thrill of anticipation when you open a pack. I love love love opening Gladius packs. Unfortunately, when you've paid $4 for a pack and get cards worth a total of $0.20, there is the opposite feeling of that thrill. I think before Chaos Legion you could be fairly confident that even if you got the cheapest cards, they'd most likely be worth more than the pack cost eventually... but with CL I'm not so sure.
Um, honestly at this point I'd guess increasing your Hive power. I think CL cards are going to get a lot lot cheaper once that 14th (last) CL airdrop is distributed. There are 3 million unopened packs waiting in the wings for that...
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