It's getting more and more disheartening to be a landlord in Praetoria.
I listened to the latest town hall, where Matt also disclosed a bit more... numbers about land.
The number that drew my attention the most was the amount of DEC necessary to block per card staked, to make it work the land.
The number is for a maxed-level card, and the number would be lower for a lower-level one. Note that the amount of DEC needed is not influenced by the rarity, foil, or edition of the card.
And that number is 10000 DEC per slot. This means that if you have 1 plot, you need to block (a sort of staking) 50000 DEC on it to benefit from staking max-level cards on your plot. That's not selling the DEC, but still, you need to have that DEC and you can't use it anywhere else while it is blocked on land (which is likely forever unless you decide to sell your land or maybe rent it out - we don't have these details).
For a tract, the numbers become quite prohibitive. That's 5 million DEC needed for a tract. And for a region, 50 million DEC is needed! Good luck with that.
Let's have a look at the top holders of DEC-B and DEC:
These amounts don't account for DEC held in liquidity pools, but they are relevant nonetheless.
For DEC-B, the top holder has 25 million DEC-B, and outside the top 12, the numbers are well below 10 mil. For DEC, the first holders are Splinterlands-related accounts plus null, so the first real top holder should be in the 10th place, with 19.5 mil DEC. None of the accounts which show up in top places for DEC-B also show up in top places for DEC, so you can't add them.
So, currently, no investor has enough DEC and DEC-B (according to PeakM's ranking) to match the necessary DEC for a region. And there are players with more than one region.
Personally, I have a tract, as I've said a number of times. I've never seen how 5 mil DEC looks like, all at once. Yes, I know, they are currently 3.75k USD. But that's a cost added to other costs, to maintenance and everything else.
Currently, a plot is sold for something like 150 USD, and a tract for something like 11-12k. That's a 30% additional investment in DEC needed for a tract, just for this part.
Didn't count in the investment in maxed-level cards. Let's say they are purchased at a 5 USD average price (very optimistic!). That's 2500 USD. Or another 20%. Didn't count in the investment in survey boosters. Let's say you only take the build-in-a-box option. That's another million DEC. Or another 6.25%. Double that if you want two options.
And here's the really bad part. Yeah, I haven't gotten there yet. From what I understood from what Matt said, to make a max-level card work on land you need to block 10k DEC. If you don't have 10k DEC to block, tough luck, you have the max card for nothing, you can't use it on land. And then you would have invested in useless maxed reward cards for nothing.
Sorry, I needed to vent a little bit. But so far land is presented as a black hole and I don't see anything solid to suggest the investments will pay off down the road big time.