This is the 6th installment in my twice-weekly Splinterlands blog - covering my first foray into the game. In this addition I explore which cards to buy that will simultaneously increase my power to get me into Bronze I league while also being a good investment. At the end of the post I also introduce a tracker listing my funds into the account vs my total account value on the market.
Card Investments
As I mentioned in the last post, my rating is high enough to qualify for the next league (Bronze I), but my power is not. I had a few thousand DEC of funds remaining from last Sunday's transfer via Hive-Engine, so I went on a search to figure out the best cards to invest in that would solve my power problem but hopefully also increase in value.
To help figure this out I wanted to find out how many cards are left from each set. My theory is that cards that have already stopped being produced should be more expensive, so I wouldn't get enough bang for my buck in terms of power/DEC (and the value won't have any room to increase). Alpha and Beta cards fall into this category.
Cards with many months still to go before being sold out should be cheap, which is helpful for the power/DEC ratio, but I would have a long wait until they increase. All of the Untamed cards fall into this category, since we aren't very close to those packs being exhausted.
Cards that are currently being printed but that will soon be sold out offer the best of both worlds - cheap now, but maybe expensive later (at least according to my theory). I did a bit of searching and found hivedata - a site that pulls the Splinterlands metadata off of the chain to show various useful statistics. Using this site, I found that a few of the Rewards cards are nearly sold out (3rd to last column in the image below is number printed (column after that is the percentage burned).
Hive Data
Armed with this information, I cross-checked the markets to find the cards that seemed cheap and decided to build a position in Baby Unicorns, Gelatinous Cubes, Ettin Spearman (vultures are more expensive for some reason), and Fire Spitters, and 1 Spirit Shaman. In total, I bought 49 cards for a total of $2.05 USD (slightly more than a day's allowance). This boosted my power significantly, though still not quite enough for Bronze I. And I am hoping that the value will spike once the cards stop being printed. Will keep you posted how that goes!
Ettin Spearman
Jan 9th Investments
Overall Investment
I am going to being tracking money into the game vs the estimated value of the portfolio. I am in a bit of a hole right now, mainly due to the $10 spellbook and the initial packs that I bought with credits, which I later learned was not optimal. The hope is that the deck value begins to equal and eventually surpass the investment value. The DEC won for daily battles, the rewards, and hopefully card appreciation value should all help to even things out.
Dollars In
Conclusion
Thanks for reading! See you again on Wednesday. Don't forget to check out the previous posts in the series, and me know in the comments if there are any questions that you'd like me to dive into.