This is a continuation of a series detailing my experiences stepping into DAPPs, Hive, and Splinterland. You can read the rest of the series at my profile.
Today I want to tackle a crucial question as I continue to "invest" my $2/day into Splinterlands. If buying credits the cheapest way to get a pack? At first glance, as I mentioned in my last post, you get less than $2 worth of cards for a pack, even with potions, and you get no selection. So it seems that buying individual cards is much better, and I should stop buying credits.
Pack Prices
However, I noticed that one can buy packs with credits (pegged to USD) or with DEC. According to Hive-Engine, the price of DEC is currently $0.00086. 2000 DEC is therefore worth $1.72. This is still above the average value of the packs - even with potions, which cost some more but are likely received for free through daily quests - but it is at least closer. This leads me to believe that if I were to buy any packs it would be much better to buy them with DEC than with credits.
While on Hive-Engine, I also noticed that Untamed packs are trading for only $1.29! This is below the $1.47 number, and implies that one could profitably buy tokenized packs and open them, as long as you have both legendary and alchemy tokens to use. You could then sell the resulting cards on the market and earn a bit more money back. A legendary and alchemy portion combined costs 90 DEC, which at current market prices is $0.0774, so even with the potions price added we'd be at $1.36 or so. My guess is that this couldn't after work, probably due to transaction costs somewhere along the way, but let's find out! Today my $2 will be sent through the Hive Engine, and the hope is that I will end up w/ roughly $0.75 remaining in Hive tokens once I am done buying my pack.
First step is to figure out how to get Hive tokens or something else that I can use to buy the pack token. My first thought was to buy Hive directly and then trade it to Swap.Hive to trade for the pack. This plan ran into a problem when I couldn't find any way to buy the Hive. It seems that Binance allows for buying Hive directly with fiat or other crypto, but unfortunately Binance is not available in my jurisdiction (I live in New York). Unless I wanted to try to get around this using a VPN and fake address, Binance is out.
Binance States
My next thought was to try to by Hive directly on the Hive-Engine website. I have existing ether and bitcoin on Coinbase, so I should be able to send that crypto to Hive-Engine? I clicked deposit and found that Hive-Engine accepts bitcoin (but not ether for some reason), and so I sent $2 worth of Bitcoin from my Coinbase account to the address shown on Hive-Engine. Importantly, I am already signed into Hive-Engine using my Hive account name (via Hive Keychain).
I found that Coinbase has a minimum transaction amount of $0.0001 BTC, which equates to a bit over $3 at today's prices. So I ended up sending $4, which can be today's and tomorrow's deposit. Once I clicked send, I found that I had actually been debited $4.77 of BTC due to network fees This will obviously cut into any savings, but could probably be reduced with larger transactions at once. Coinbase didn't charge any transaction fee themselves. Now I need to wait for the BTC to arrive in my Hive account...
Coinbase
After 10 minutes or so my SWAP.BTC arrived at Hive-Engine. Next step is to attempt to trade this for the Untamed pack. Here I ran into another problem! It seems that there is not much liquidity for BTC on the Hive-Engine. The market price is currently pegged at $28,800, which is significantly below the true BTC price (currently $33,216). So I would be taking a pretty huge hit to sell my BTC at this price. This definitely puts a snag into my plan to get my pack for less! Nonetheless, I decided to go through with it to see what happens (luckily this is only for $4!). I do think that I would have been able to get my BTC back, minus the 1% commission both ways, if I had wanted to back out, since the SWAP.BTC can be traded for BTC. I was able to sell my $4 in SWAP.BTC for 34.87 SWAP.HIVE.
Finally, I was able to buy my Untamed Packs! I was happy to see that the packs were for sale for just under 11 SWAP.HIVE! This means that I could afford 3 of them, and still have 2.87 SWAP.HIVE to spare. This is great, since I only spent $4.70 of BTC, including Coinbase transaction fees, which would have only bought me 2.35 packs. So this is definitely better value! I decided to only buy 2 packs, so that I could use the rest of my SWAP.HIVE to experiment more with Hive-Engine later.
Last step - convert the Untamed Tokens for the Untamed Packs on Splinterlands. This was easily accomplished via the Open tab in-game.
Pack Conversion
I opened one so far and was rewarded with my first Legendary card! The Dragon Jumper is worth $3.07 or so, so this was definitely a profitable pack for me! And I was able to prove that buying packs via credits is a losing bet, and that if I do want to buy packs I should do it using the market.
Packs
Transaction Summary
Spent $4.77 in BTC on Coinbase
Sent $4.01 in BTC to Hive-Engine (including the transaction cost)
Received $4.01 Hive-Engine (in Swap.BTC)
Sold $4.10 in SWAP.BTC for 34.87 SWAP.HIVE.
Bought 2 Untamed Tokens for 22 SWAP.HIVE
Converted 2 Untamed Tokens for 2 Untamed Packs.
Conclusion
Thanks for reading! Let me know if there are any questions that you'd like me to dive into in the comments. And if you are interested in signing up for Splinterland, please do so using my Referral Link
Note - this blog post was originally published last week at PublishOx.com. There are 6 posts so far, and the series continues every Wednesday and Sunday. I will be re-publishing one post per day on LEO until I catch up w/ where I am on PublishOx (later this week). After that the posts will come out at the same time on both platforms*