You, like many others, may have just discovered Splinterlands recently. Maybe you're regretting not buying SPS when it was down to $0.22 a few weeks ago and you're thinking about buying some SPS stake so you can get vouchers to buy the new packs to get started with the game. Before you FOMO all-in, let's take a look at the math concerning your opporunity cost and a bit of speculation.
Note: I will be using the current SPS and DEC values at the time of writing pictured above.
This also considers you already understand the basics of the voucher drop, CL presale, and the ongoing SPS airdrop.
How Much SPS Do I Need Staked For 1 Voucher Every Day?
3125 SPS is currently the amount of SPS needed for one full voucher every day. This will increase substantially as more SPS becomes staked.
The Value Of Staking SPS
Disregarding tournaments and ranked SPS rewards (future) which require staking, the most obvious benefit is the daily APR reward. Currently we are getting 6.80 SPS per 3125 staked. This daily reward is likely to drastically decrease as the presale begins as more SPS becomes staked.
Opportunity Cost (SPS Airdrop)
At the time of writing, you can exchange one SPS for roughly 58.5 DEC. This DEC will give you daily SPS airdrops. Taking our theoretical number of staked SPS and converting it to 182,800 DEC (3125*58.5) gives us an airdrop of roughly 26 SPS per day.
Now without taking into account things like tournament requirements and such, you're looking at a difference of $10.75. On top of recieving less staking rewards as more SPS becomes staked, this difference is likely to skyrocket as the demand for SPS during the presale takes an upward turn as most believe it will.
Theoretical Cap
Before drawing our conclusion, we have to consider how much value a voucher actually gives us.
- Promo Card. It is said that the promo card for buying 50 packs is a Legendary Death Summoner. If we were to value it similarly to Mimosa ($200), you're looking at $4 per voucher. Or maybe we're looking at the "Llama" or "Yodin" of Death decks giving this an $11 value.
- More Airdrops. There's no good way of estimating this one but we can assume there is substantial value in this.
- Presale Competition. There will be mega-whales trying to buy up every voucher they can and win this competition to design their own card. Very difficult to peg a price.
- Title. For 1,000 packs purchased. Hard to put a value to this as well.
Now we'll look at this, compare it to our opporunity costs, and speculate.
Conclusion And Speculation
We're looking at a perfect storm that may very well spiral the price of vouchers through the roof. If they're not selling for at least $10, it'll do you alot better to simply sit on a pile of DEC and trade your daily SPS drops in for vouchers. Say the amount of SPS staked increases by 50%, the price nearly doubles up to $1 as many suspect it might. In that case we're looking at a cost (not value) of around $30 per voucher. Yes, an extreme scenario. But possible. There's no way I can see CL made to be as much as older packs though. As I can't really see SPS dropping much lower, I expect the majority of vouchers to come in through high-end players with tens or hundreds of thousands of SPS staked who are moreso doing so as their entry to tournaments. These guys likely understand the risks in holding large sums of DEC and that the market may not allow such a rediculous price and may end up selling their vouchers at far lower than their airdrop opportunity cost. After all, their real opportunity cost is here:
Or these players use all the drops they are given even when faced with such high offers. Who knows. But for the rest of us who can't afford $??,000+ decks, $20,000 collection power, $15,000 stakes, and aren't involved at that high level of play? Besides outright buying vouchers, when given the choice between holding DEC or staking SPS, I think I see a clear winner here barring some extreme market forces in demand of vouchers. My personal estimate? I'm thinking maybe somewhere around $10 - $15 per voucher. Hopefully I touched on all the major forces at play here to give you an idea on what to expect. What do you guys think? Am I missing something huge? Am I totally off-mark here? Let me know in the comments below! Be sure to like and subscri.. Oh wait wrong platform. Sorry. First post. :^P
Edit (10/5) Update: Upon more consideration, I'm narrowing my prediction to around $6-8/voucher. The upward forces for reasons I outlined will be tremendous, but I just can't see presale benefits outweighing more than buying 3x as many CL packs with no vouchers.
Note: Not financial advice. Always consider your risks short and long-term (such as DEC crashing now followed by the playerbase growth halting and SPS crashing near the end of the airdrop). The reward may be high, but so are the risks. DYOR