Good day everyone! I'm Initiate1. I have been in Splinterlands for around 3 years now. When I joined, the first card I ever bought was the king, Djinn Oshannus, 1 BCX, for around $50 USD. If you joined around the same time you probably know what I am talking about.
I am not an OG, but I can safely say I am a vet who has seen both sides of the Splinterlands market. Because of this, and who I am, I'd bet I know a lot more about the curent market than most OGs. And guess what? I'm still buying cards today.
One thing about me, I love numbers. Work, games, finance, it doesn't really matter. I enjoy analyzing things to find improvements or hidden gems. This shows with my MTG decks, but is far more useful when assessing a market. I never lost hope in SPL, I enjoy the game. So I learned HOW to become involved and invest with a bit more care.
This led me to @Peakmonsters. A blessing for the whole SPL community with quality of life features like bulk things and bids. Better yet, they offer a wide selection of free market analysis tools for people like me.
Shopping with stats from peakmonsters.com let me build out a buying strategy that has worked even through the bear market... and I have the receipts. This has let me recover from just wanting in at the start, but more importantly, it's the reason I still bring new money into the game with confidence.
I'm here to share this for anyone who cares. This is for the people who still want to bring in funds but are sick of the speculation game. This is a piece on the PRICE ABOVE BURN compare function from peakmonsters and my personal journey with it.
One thing you need to know here is every Splinterlands NFT card can be burned for a set amount of DEC. It's hard to remember them all as it varies with each set, but it's as true for a GF Alpha as it is a common chaos reward. This burn mechanic is an underlying safety net that often gets overlooked as it has no effect on 90+% of cards in the market. It is also a fundamental that we can use to build a safe portfolio around if we shop accordingly.
Another thing you need to know is cards you own can be rented out (or slave them on land?) for passive income. This gives us a use for extra cards and access to an improtant second fundamental.
I'm the dude who is less concerned with high returns and looks for safe, steady, and calculated moves. Using these 2 fundamental stats, we can now move into Peakmonsters, applying our knowledge and leveraging PKM tools.
The main function I'll talk about is COMPARE. It gives us the ability to quickly compare and rank cards from the entire market by market-related stats. Since I wanted to find what cards were closest to their burn value, and just how close, we use the compare function with PRICE ABOVE BURN.
This is a screenshot I just took tonight. Some say you can't call the floor, but I beg to differ. Lava Launcher has an ABSOLUTE floor of 100 DEC because of the burn mechanic. He costs about 112 DEC on the market, meaning the most you can ever lose (potential downside) is 12 DEC when buying this card.
With that in mind, we can start to look at what these cards actually rent out for. Knowing the potential downside we can calculate what kind of rental returns we want to see. The goal here is to generate at least your potential downside with passive income. If we can make back 13 DEC from this Lava Launcher, it would then cap our potential downside at a crisp 1 DEC profit. Keep in mind that is worse case scenario, burning the card just to get your DEC back.
Here we can see how it plays out after a year. With a cost of $0.095/BCX likely around 1.2x burn at the time with DEC price, our level 2 Djinn Renova has earned about 87.5 DEC in rental income. That would be 21.875 DEC/BCX, or better put, 21.875% of their burn value.
That means if I were to BURN this card right now, I would end up with slightly more DEC than I paid for it. This leaves the card in my possession, and now has 0 risk of EVER losing money from the initial buy.
We are not looking at upside, although that is the other side of the trade.What I'm proving here is a potential downside that is capped in-profit. I have rounded numbers down to stress-test this, and you can close the gap even further with bids and rental pricing.
Here I'm showing you how I am still doing this. Currently, some bids are so close that you can profit just by maxing them out for the 5% CP boost. This card was bought at about 1.04x burn value. I need to make back 4 DEC/BXC then we are once again in-profit capped.
Max boost is 5%, that would be 5 DEC/BCX right there. It also rents for a generous % return. At 0.25 DEC/day, this card earns the 16 DEC gap in 64 days.
This was even cooler before when DEC was below peg, adding to the nonsence when bringing in USD. Sometime I was able to scoop up overlooked reward cards that have gone 2x in USD over bearish 1 year, while also collecting a years worth of rentals as icecream DEC.
Random side note- Peakmonsters shows yROAsset for rentals. If you moved USD with discounted DEC, the yROInvestment is higher then yROA that shows.
This type of shopping can be applied to any card, but is best suited to floor cards.
You can remove DEC price volatility from the equasion if you just stick to using DEC.
Using Peakmonsters.com, we always know what the best options are!
I hope this helps someone out there. Cheers y'all and I'll see you in the next brawl! <3