Yaba's Pickle is the latest card for SPS stakers. For every 1000 SPS staked as of June 17th snapshot players can get a single card. Since this is a common rarity card it means that you have to have around four hundred thousand SPS staked in order to get 400 cards to make a maximum level Yaba's Pickle card.
Cost to Buy a Maxed Out Pickle on the Market
In the market right now you can buy 400 BCX of the pickle card and combine these cards for only $37.88! You can also buy a maxed out Yaba's Pickle card for $45, but it is totally worth the trouble to combine 157 cards to get a maxed out card and save yourself almost $9.
Another advantage of buying this card from the card market is that you can use credits and don't have to go through the jumps of getting fiat into the game buy buying ETH or LTC or Hive and transferring it into Hive Engine switching it into DEC and then getting it into the game.
Cost to Buy Pickle in the Store, or is it?
I have over half a million SPS staked so I can easily purchase the required 400+ cards. It costs 150 DEC to buy every pickle card for the total cost of 60,000 DEC or $60 at DEC peg value. But DEC is not at peg right now, it is about ten percent under peg at this moment. so the cost of maxed out card is $60 * 0.9 = $54
And obviously there is another easy option, but it is the most expensive and that is to simply go and buy 400 pickle cards for 60,000 credits or $60. This is the most expensive way to buy the Yaba's Pickle card:
The Real Cost of Pickle in the Splinterlands Store
So why would anyone spend $54 or $60 for the Yabanius's Pickle card when you can buy it on the market for $37.88 or $45? I guess the answer would be that you have a 2% chance of getting a gold foil card and a 0.025% chance to get a black foil card. So if you are buying 400 cards you would expect to get eight gold foil cards and about 10% chance of getting a black foil card!
And you can double your odds of landing a Gold Foil or Black Foil by using an Alchemy Potion or Midnight Potion, respectively. I have a lot of Alchemy potions so those are free for me I can easily spare four hundred Alchemy potions out of my 11,116 Alchemy potions inventory.
Midnight potions are a bit more expensive though they are worth it to double your chances of getting a black foil card to 20% when buying four hundred pickles.
So with potions you would expect to get 16 gold foil cards and for additional $8 you can get your chances of the black foil up to one in five or with 2,000 pickle cards purchased you should be able to expect to get one black foil at an additional cost of $44.
Now let's take a look at what those gold foil cards are worth in the market? I opened the Gold Foil sales and I see a maxed out Pickle card in a gold foil for $60! That seems like a great value! You can spend $54 in DEC or $60 in credits on a maxed out regular foil card or you can just buy one maxed out gold foil card on the market for $60!
But let's step back and see what your 16 expected gold foil cards would be worth on the market: $1.649 * 16 = $26.384
So if you spend $54 in DEC you should expect to be able to get $26+ in gold foil pickles which you can sell and reduce your cost of the pickle down to as low as $27! You would just buy 16 regular foil cards on the market for under ten cents each and your cost for the maxed out Yaba's Pickle card would be only $29 or less!
And that is why the cost of the pickle on the market is so low, because even at $38 per card you are still paying more than those who are buying it in the shop!
Black Foil Chasing
Now what would happen if one were to try to chase the black foil Pickle card? I would do this in 100 or 400 card increments, but let's take the expected scenario of 0.025% * 2 = 0.05% with Midnight Potions and 0.05% * 2,000 cards = 100%
Naturally you need 2,000,000 SPS staked as of the snapshot time to get 2,000 cards, but you might be able to get lucky and do even better than the expected value calculation.
So we need 2000 cards
2000 * 0.022 cents = $44 for potions
2000 * 150 dec = 300,000 DEC or $270 at DEC 90% of the Peg or $300 in credits
So total cost is going to be $314
Cheapest black foil is going to be $239
Expected Gold Cards Are: 2000 * 4% = 80 gold cards at $1.649 = $131.92
Regular foil cards: 1,839. Even at 9 cents that is $165.51
So by paying $314 your expected value is $536.43 or over $200 in profit!
Basically you can get a black foil Yaba's Pickle for around $90 if you sell the rest of the cards. Or you can keep a maxed out pickle card to play and pocket around $193!
Conclusion
Even though it doesn't seem that way, but the cheapest way to buy the pickle card is at the Splinterlands store and if you chase the Black Foil Pickle and get the expected odds with Midnight Potions you can keep a maxed out Pickle card and pocket almost $200!
Splinterlands is giving out free money to SPS stakers, did you do these calculations?
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