Yesterday, I was surprised by a Splinterlands mid week Ask Me Anything. In case you missed it, @aggroed already uploaded it on his Youtube channel. I was lucky to be around in Discord when it started, so I only missed the first few seconds. As always, there were many different questions asked and a lot of them once more focused on the upcoming land expansion. While a lot of the information was already somewhat known to me, there was one small fact that I had not heard of before and that will have huge implications for the game's economy.
Before I get into any more detail, please be aware that everything I discuss below is my personal opinion and I could obviously be totally wrong on everything I conclude here. Also, keep in mind that all information given is from an early work in progress state, so things could very well change substantially up until the actual release.
So what's the big news? Well, so far we've already had some information on what land will do for us. You gather different resources from your plots which will be used with other plots to refine these resources and finally craft new spells and items for the game. We also already knew that we'd be able to stake several monsters with each plot to give it a bonus in productivity. There was one piece to the formula I was not aware of, though: Every plot of land will also need a Summoner!
This summoner acts as some kind of foreman, so ideally, each of your plots will have one summoner and several monsters staked to it. So why is that such a big news you might ask? Well, because summoners are a lot rarer and consequently a lot more expensive than your average monster. Not only that, most people usually own a lot more (different) monsters than they own summoners.
Now keep in mind that summoners and monsters staked to a plot of land will be unavailable for battling your opponents. So this little bit of information is going to change the demand of summoners significantly. There are a lot of players even in Champion League that only own one or two max level summoners of each splinter. It's usually a lot more profitable to level up more and different monsters once you have your first maxed summoner for a splinter.
Now let's do some math! There will be 150,000 plots of land sold. We already know that there will be more land which can be conquered and defended by players, so in the end we'll have even more plots. For now, though, let's roll with the plots sold. To work these lands, people will need a total of 150,000 Summoners. Ideally, each of this summoner would be at max level to get the highest bonus but that's obviously out of the question. Even with all level 1 summoners, though, 150,000 copies is quite the number!
Even the cheapest summoner there is in Splinterlands, Delwyn Dragonscale, is traded at ~0.1$ per BCX. And that's only if you shell out the 48$ to buy a max level one. If you want to buy level 1 singles, you'd have to pay about 0.2$ per copy. So even if everybody would just go with Delwyn Dragonscale, we'd still be talking about 30,000$ worth of summoners. But wait! That's not even possible. The 256 in the top left corner is the number of copies available right now. That's... quite a bit away from the 150,000 copies we'd need.
So how much summoners are there in actual supply? Not nearly enough for everybody! Again, Delwyn Dragonscale is the summoner with the most copies in existence by a lot, but even he is only available 59,483 times. Things are not getting much better from there, either. If we add up all summoners that you can buy for less than 1$ right now, we end up with a total of 131.930 copies. That's still not enough for all plots of land available.
So let's dig even deeper! In grand total, there are 239.903 summoners in existence in the whole Splinterlands right now. This includes every summoner of both normal and gold foil and of all levels. So it also includes those guys:
You are not going to buy these in order to stake them, are you? As I mentioned above, summoners won't be usable in combat while they are staked to a plot of land. So all these numbers all point to one simple truth: There are not nearly enough Summoners in existence for everybody! Me personally, I own a somewhat average Champion Level deck that still could (and needs to) be improved in many ways. Still, I own 9 different max level summoners that I use on a regular basis. Basically anybody hoping to get any higher than Bronze League will at least need half a dozen summoners with a higher level.
This should really only point so a single thing: Eventually, we'll see a lot of FOMO in the summoner market. As people realize the number of summoners they'll need for their crafting endeavors, the demand and thus the price for them should skyrocket quite a bit. I especially expect to see a huge spike in the price for the currently cheapest summoners as people will try to at least acquire a base level summoner for each of their plots.
Me personally, I've bought a whole region, so I would need 1000 summoners to work my land. This is going to be... challenging. Now before you charge off to Monstermarket or Peakmonsters, please keep in mind that things might still be changed quite a bit and that there's no guarantee at all that prices are actually going to move up from where they are. But me? I'll be buying these next weeks. I don't think I'll even get enough for myself, but to anybody up for some flipping, now might be a great time to stock up on (cheap) summoners!
And that's all from me today! I'm still pretty excited about the course Splinterlands is heading right now. There are certainly still a lot of issues that need to be figured out. Top decks farming lower level leagues, on-boarding of new players, we still have a long way to go. But still, it feels like the game is getting better and better every week and I certainly enjoy being part of it's journey. Thank you all for reading and see you next time!