Yeah, I hope you're wrong too. lol Unfortunately, what you say makes sense. The giant cardholders will lowball everything and the regular humans will end up either not being able to rent or having to match them and make virtually nothing. I still don't know why they can't make a minimum of 1 DEC but...whatever. The only good news is that the team did stress that they will be monitoring the markets and will make changes as necessary. Hopefully that means that if what you fear does happen, there will be other measures that can be taken to fix it again. Who knows?
The idea is that with all these fees, it would become more economical for people to combine some cards and rent out 1 Level 2 and pay 1 DEC vs 5 Level 1's and pay 5 DEC. Or even better, one Level 4 Rare vs 25 Level 1's or 5 Level 2's. In that regard, it makes sense. But as you say, if everyone races to .01, then what will you gain by combining. Maybe what they should do is only charge the fee on cards listed for less than 1 DEC. Then you could keep your rentals at 1 and not have to pay. Anyone who wants to participate in your race would get dinged for the fee. Or maybe only charge the fee on one BCX cards and don't charge it on any combined cards. You could then keep your level 1's and rent them for whatever you want but you'd be reverse incentivized to combine.
Like I said, who knows? We'll find out how it works soon enough and then it's back to the drawing board. You always have to consider the "unintended consequences" of these actions and I don't think whoever is making these decisions is thinking them through very well. As much as this is a "community", the fact is there are people/businesses that are literally just in it for the money. Period. They will literally pack up and leave if it becomes unprofitable. Those are the people you have to focus on when you make these decisions. They add transactions and they buy and sell things, but they have absolutely no loyalty whatsoever to the game itself. It's just a means to an end: namely, making money.
Unfortunately this team has never really understood unintended consequences. But I will say, they eventually find their way. Or at least it seems like they are about to and then they detour into another pit like this one lol
I've been arguing for the 1 dec minimum for over a year and they always said that's price fixing. It's an argument that never made sense to me because until recently, .1 dec was the technical floor so how were they not already price fixing?
So many of these cards it doesn't even matter if you combine them. The CL rewards cards are the extreme example here. They will often have hundreds of unrented maxed level cards for 2-3 dec. They have no purpose because if you have a diamond/champion deck, you almost certain have those cards since they are the cheapest.
But even if a bunch of people rent their way to diamond/champion, they'd run out of other cards to make a viable deck and there would still be hundreds of copies of those reward cards on the market. No one is going to make it to diamond with just those cards so they are useless. Combining them at this point just further lowers the value on of those already maxed and doesn't make a dent in the bottom of the market.
Imbalances are catching up. Hopefully land is the sink for those cards they are saying it will be. I have my doubts about that too. We'll see.