The airdrop plan really doesn't work for the majority of players IMO.
I should start by saying I appreciate the devs trying to get around players cycling through packs to earn airdrop points. I never saw it as a problem (as it put a lot of packs into circulation, helping the devs' bottom line and making 3rd party packs cheaper), but I get the appeal.
But in practice, it feels like it causes more problems than it solves.
Previous airdrops haven't been capped (other than the number of packs which would qualify). So me buying 250 packs was exactly as good as a whale buying 250 packs.
Now, with a cap on airdrop BCX, it is no longer equal. Say I buy 2000 packs and a whale buys 20k packs. In the past, the whale would get 10x the airdrop. Now, my 2k packs likely need to go to my deck, so can't be staked, and the whale puts 2k of their packs to their deck and the rest to staking. Now the whale gets infinitely more BCX than me.
Moreover, the airdrops are now just yet another ROI comparison. Now I need to figure out whether I should 1) stake my packs on airdrops 2) stake those cards on plots 3) sell the cards and buy sps to up my reward points 4) sell the cards and buy SPS and put in a pool. At some point, the choices are no longer a fun complex system, but a needlessly overcomplicated system with so many bandaids over past bad decisions. To me, this feels like it's crossing that line.
I think you've missed a key piece of this - you can also stake the cards you get from opening your packs, and those cards can still be used in battles while they are staked in the airdrop conflicts. So if your 2k packs "go to your deck", you can still use them to participate in the airdrop conflict and earn airdrop rewards from that.
Additionally, the "whale" who buys 20k packs will have to purchase many more battle wagons than you to stake all of their packs, so they will have to spend more to earn their proportional rewards.
Oh fair, I missed that they could still be used in battles. Thanks for clarifying! That does somewhat alleviate my concerns about whales, as they won't have a built-in advantage from the way it's designed.
The wagons are sort of moot, as it's proportional to number of packs. A whale buying 20k packs will pay 10x more than someone buying 2k packs. So while it's more, it's not proportionally more. If the wagons were revamped so they were exponentially expensive or something, I'd agree to this point.
I'd really like exponential cost on the wagons, as even with the point above, I think whales have huge advantages in this. They can afford to buy a ton of packs in bulk for cheap and sit on them as long as they want. Of course that is their perogative, but there is nothing incentivizing packs/cards to be sold. One of the huge wins IMO of CL (oversupply issues aside) was that it made a good deck accessible to people without a ton of cash. This is not looking like the case for rebellion, and the way the system is designed, it feels like the vast majority of the rewards will be going to whales.
I missed this too.
Are they also rentable then?
No, locked to the account.
ok. So playable by staking account, but soulbound while staked?
Exactly, sir.