Why the Rebellion set will keep its value
Hello everyone, as the presale is ongoing for the Rebellion card set, I thought: let's talk about it. As I play Splinterlands mainly for the fun but ofcourse don't want to lose money while doing so, I'm always trying to see the pros and cons of the decisions I make related to Splinterlands. When we look at the past, we see that the card packs before Chaos Legion all kept and even rised quite a bit in value. Chaos Legion was released at the top of the previous bull market and maybe Splinterlands was a bit too enthousiast about the numbers of packs they could sell. This resulted in the prices of the packs and the individual cards to plumet down. Maybe in the future they will rebound, I definitely think so. But I don't expect them to reach the same levels as the older card sets just because there are soo many more cards printed.
That's it about the older packs, but what interests us now is, what will the Rebellion set do in term of value? Will it keep it value of will it skyrocket or sink like a pudding? Well, ofcourse it's always some guessing, so we'll see what will happen. But I guess on the short term, prices will go down as more cards start to circulate. Although on the long term I think rebellion will do way better than Chaos Legion, because of the following reasons.
New game elements
The official article with the information of the set is already very promising. There are four new abilities:
- Armored Strike - Any unit with this ability gains an ADDITIONAL Melee attack using its Armor stat. This allows characters to improvise with deadly force, using their gauntlets, shields, helmets, or perhaps physical attributes (spikes, hard shells, etc) as weapons!
- Corrosive Ward - When hit with a Melee attack, a unit with this ability does 2 damage to the attacker's Armor AND reduces the max Armor of the attacker by 2. This is the nemesis to the Repair ability. You can't Repair something that's been melted into acidic goo! Note that this only affects units with Armor.
- Flank - If the unit with this ability is in the first position, then the unit in the second position gains the Reach ability. Prepare to leverage positioning and the element of surprise. Now your first two units can work together to bring down the enemy tank!
- Lookout - A unit with this ability results in adjacent allies taking one less damage from attackers with Sneak, Snipe, and Opportunity. Give your team a heads-up when stalkers approach from the shadows. It's always a good idea to have a Lookout!
New abilities ofcourse translate in new strategies and new synergies. So it will be interesting to theorycraft which combo's will work out and what should be avoided. Ofcourse we'll need to know the details of the cards to theorycraft in more detail.
Besides the new abilities, there will be some other new strategic elements as well like multi-element summoners and Summoner tactics.
- The multi-element summoners are thus summoners who let the player use 2 types of monsters. You could for example utilize fire and earth monsters if a certain summoners supports these 2 elements. Together with the neutral monsters, this lets you use 3 types of monsters! I don't have to tell you that this will shake up the current meta.
- Summoner tactics means that after selecting your summoner and monsters there will be a new phase. When both you and the enemy player have selected their cards and are ready for the battle. There will be a phase in which you can choose which ability of your summoner you want to utilize while you can already see the opponent team. This is yet another aspect which will shake up the current combinations of cards being played.
These new elements on their own won't make that a sale will keep its value or not, but in my opinion it's a nice extra and I think it will definitely help to boost the sale numbers in this ongoing bear market.
Updated airdrop system
When you buy packs in the particular sale, you are eligible to receive some airdrop cards. In Chaos Legion, this worked in the following way: For every milion packs that were sold from the official website, a new card would be airdropped. Once you bought the packs, you could open, sell them or just hold them. That didn't really matter, you would still receive the airdrop card.
In the rebellion set, conflict will be used, which will be an updated airdrop system. Every month a conflict will be held. To participate you have to stake packs and or cards from the Rebellion set. The more you stake, the more points you gather for a leaderboard. At the end of the event, everyone who earned points will receive one or several airdropped cards in relation with his amount of points to the total amount of points which were collected.
Personally I think this is a better way of working compared to the old system and you encourage players to hold on their cards and packs instead of them being able to sell them off. So in theory this should help to reduce the selling of packs because the liquid supply should be lower. We'll see if it will work out in practice as well.
Rebellion sale
Probably the most interesting aspect why Rebellion could keep its value more than Chaos Legion is the way the sale is organized. There will be 9.5 million packs put for sale. This is quite a lot of packs if you would ask me, but already 5.5 million less than initially planned for the Chaos Legion set. So just this is already a step in the good direction.
Besides the total amount of cards, there will be a mechanic which will work as follows:
Every day, a script will check how many packs are sold. If the total amount of packs sold directly from the Splinterlands website is less than 25.000 packs, than the remainder of the packs, up to the amount of 25k will be removed from the sale pool. 90% of those packs will be burned, while 10% will be sent to the DAO for use in future promotions.
Conclusion
I think there are several elements which are definitely improved compared to the Chaos Legion sale. So kudos to the Splinterlands team to be able to listen to the feedback they received and to adapt. Ofcourse these elements won't make 100% sure that the price of Rebellion packs will skyrocket or keep up but I think they will definitely help to do so. In the end only the future will tell us what the Rebellion packs will be valued at.
Thanks for reading and feel free to elaborate why you think Rebellion packs could keep their value. :)
How did I begin to play Splinterlands?
It all began in December 2021, I was a bit bored and was looking for a new game to play on my laptop. After googling a bit, I saw the term play2earn in my google results. I didn't know it at that time but it seemed awesome, earning money while playing games instead of spending money on those games. Soon I learned that play2earn means that you can indeed earn some money to play the games. How does it work? While playing those games, you can earn NFT's of those games. These NFT's can be traded and sold for cryptocurrencies which could be swapped for fiat if you would like to. That's how I started.
Do you want to try out Splinterlands aswell?
Here is my referal link: https://splinterlands.com?ref=stekene
Disclaimer: The pictures I used are properly referenced, most of them came from the official article of Splinterlands.