Today I reached 1,001 SPS, slowly accumulating it since the beginning of the airdrop. Of course it's all staked! After all, I want to make some good use of it, and so far I haven't seen any other utility in keeping liquid SPS around, even though I'm sure there are plans. Then I came across this Chaos Legion Presale Info by @splinterlands. Of course there's going to be some use for this token! Right now it has to do with the pre-sale for the new deck coming out on October 18. So am I going to have to unstake all my SPS, which I staked meticulously in a daily exercise? By no means! Splinterlands wants us to keep them staked, and they incentivize it by another token: the Vouchers needed to participate in the pre-sale. --- At this point I should point out that it's a good idea to read this info post very carefully, because I'm not sure if I understood it correctly myself. After all, there are a good number of tokens in Splinterlands by now: Splintershards, Dark Energy Crystals, Credits, now there'll be these pre-sale Vouchers, plus of course the cards themselves.
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Is the New Deck Worth the Bother?
Given the recent explosion in value in all types of Splinterlands assets, it may seem like a no-brainer: Of course it's worth it investing in Chaos Legion! But this is the exact same question I asked myself in 2019, just before the Untamed deck was released. I figured, they could not gain much more in value, at least not like the Beta deck, which I expected to follow the example of Alpha. More importantly, since I was not playing battles any more, I figured it was a bit pointless anyway.
In the end I had to realize, that this game tends to surpass any expectations. I stopped kicking myself for missing out on Untamed, but now I am absolutely certain to get my hands on some Chaos Legion, even though I have no intention to play any daily battles (... though even that may change). For this reason I was quite excited to find out the details on the pre-sale, and got even more excited when I saw that unstaking my SPS won't be even necessary.
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How Much Can I Get?
I was trying to estimate how many packs will I be able to buy with the Vouchers I'll be getting for staking SPS. Since the pre-sale price for a pack is $4 USD, and my 1,001 SPS is worth $326 USD, it may be not too outrageous to assume that in three weeks my SPS will be worth $400 USD, or about a hundred packs. (Though who can know for sure, right?) What still throws me off, is how the pre-sale packs need to be paid with SPS (or DEC, Credits, other crypto, and even fiat, which this game is so good at) AS WELL AS the Vouchers. Oh yes, just to add to the complexity, we also get a 10% discount if we buy the packs with SPS. So will I have to unstake some SPS after all? But no, as I don't want to miss out on the Vouchers. In the end I may move some of my LEO or Hive into Splinterlands, or maybe even tap into my BTC...? We'll see.
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In any case, I think there are so many perks to this pre-sale that I'd be a fool to miss out on it: limited edition Promo Cards, a chance to receive all 13 new cards as they are airdropped over time, and of course the increased chance of these in case I buy more than 50 or 1,000 packs, respectively. I'm not sure if I'll go for the thousand packs (after all, my current collection is barely 100 cards), but the 50 packs are much more likely. Two hundred bucks isn't that much, after all, but certainly worth it! Sure, for twenty times that much they would make me a Legionnaire, but I think that's where I will pass this time.
Other Lucrative Uses of Splinterlands
As I keep mentioning, I have no intentions of actually playing daily quests. But there are tons of other things to keep me busy, and generate value, even though, as most crypto-related things, there is a factor of unpredictability there (which I consider healthy in any case, it keeps us on our toes). The rental market for one thing, is not what it used to be. Or let's say it's gradually moving back to exactly how it used to be, before it got overhauled into becoming a veritable money printer. For years I used the card rental system as a truly passive income, with barely enough return to level up an occasional card. Then, maybe a month ago, I started generating 700 DEC a day. A week later it had doubled to 1.5K DEC a day, as I kept adjusting the rental rates upwards. For the last week or two this trend has reversed, and I'm back to less than a grand a day, provided all my cards are rented (which rarely happens any more). This would make sense if there were more cards on the rental market, meaning tougher competition. But alas, the opposite seems to be the case, as I understood from @revisesociology's post.
It's all good though, playing with crypto I've learned not to complain, but see how I can adapt. And doing what I do anyway seems to be a great way to generate more value, in form of Splintertalk tokens (yet another token, specific for blogging about the game). My last Splinterlands post earned me 3K SPT (shared with the curators). The 1.5K I got I staked immediately, and then delegated it to @monster-curator. Since then I've been getting 1-2 SPT every day, which added to my staked and delegated amount, increases the SPS airdropped to me daily. (I believe the delegated SPT still counts, since I just got 426 airdrop points for my SPT, virtually all of which is delegated.) So in the end, I'm trying to utilize as many of Splinterland's many ways to generate income as I can... other than actually playing the game. But once I've got 50 packs of the most recent deck, I may even do that.
