I noticed on the most excellent liquidity vision that I was only down 2000 DEC from the swaps, so I decided now was a good time to pull my stake.
Up until this point I've been down around 20K DEC, and I don't actually want more ETH, I want/ need more DEC.
This is because the Splinterlands team are evil and of course they've designed LAND to be a huge ongoing DEC sink.
In order to make each plot of land work to its peak efficiency, guess what: you're going to have to assign a gold alpha legendary monster to it and probably PUMP even more DEC into it to maintain whatever processes are going on!
NB I know this thanks to this excellent post from @flauwy - basically the higher the DEC value of the monster you assign to a plot of land, then the higher the chance of producing higher quality artefacts.
Alpha cards and promo cards have the highest DEC value, and YES you're right, the Splinterlands team have pandered to the early investors again - like 20% extra DEC isn't enough for them for playing their gold alpha legendaries, here's another way to make sure they get EVEN MORE MONEY out of the game, rather than newbies.
Oh, and it was flauwy who kicked off the Rusty Android Run BTW - good man!
So I figured that given that what's going to happen soon is a massive run on old cards, pumping them up in value, probably more than the value of the land I'll get for staking DEC, so I think taking my DEC and buying a few cards NOW is a good move!
Remember Rusty! 8 times overnight
Now I've got 900 000 DEC, I need 850 000 for a tract, which is 100 plots of land, that leaves me with 50 000 DEC to buy a few cards to level up my monsters to work the land.
ATM some of them are still cheap, but I doubt they will be for very much longer, so it's time to go and buy a few monsters. Thankfully I've got quite a few spares of decent cards that I've bought along the way, so I'm in a reasonable position to be able to make my plots work for me!
I can't afford gold alpha legendaries, so I'll probably just buy up whatever else looks cheap.
NB - I don't intend to work 100 plots of land, I'm buying my tract mostly as long term speculation to sell on, but I'll keep at least 10-20 back for myself. Maybe more than that!
I added flauwy as a beneficiary, he gave me lots of good info!
Oh and by unstaking 10 days rather than 1 day before the Land Sale starts, I'm not losing out on that much LAND anyways, and the way the ETH network crawls some days, it feels good to have it early!