Let's start by defining what a supply crunch is:

"A period during which the supply of a particular product is lower than the demand for it, leading to higher prices."
Source

SPS supply:

There are currently 240,000,000 SPS tokens minted. These are all the tokens in existence at the present moment. In the future, the team will be minting a lot more tokens.

Of the 240M in existence 126M are already staked with 28 days unlocking period so they won't be liquid by the 18th of October when there will be increased pressure on the demand. The team will be offering a discount on all purchases made with SPS so naturally everyone will be taking advantage of it. Buying SPS on the market to use on packs, thus increasing the price of SPS and draining the liquidity from the pools.

There are 114M liquid tokens, but they're not really liquid since the team is holding and distributing them on the daily airdrop. Furthermore, the staked amount is growing by nearly 1M per day. I didn't find a way to figure out how many liquid tokens are in existence at the present moment so the next best thing is to look at the SPS liquidity pool on Pancake Swap.

Liquidity pools:

This graph represents the SPS token balance on the Pancake Swap liquidity pool (SPS-BNB). As we can see the token balance has been decreasing since the 20th of september and it has been stable lately.
There are a lot of players accumulating SPS so that they can earn more Vouchers and use SPS to pay for packs on the Pre-sale. Many of these tokens won't be entering the market again anytime soon.

Draining the pool:

Let's assume that 30K packs will be purchased per day using SPS as a payment method. Each pack costs $4, with the SPS discount it costs $3.60.
$3.60 / Current price of SPS = 6 SPS per pack.
30K * 6 = 180,000 SPS drained per day ONLY for purchases.
This amount will decrease as the price goes up.

The team mentioned on the AMA that they won't be dumping the SPS they receive from the sale right away so we can assume that SPS is Illiquid.

Hive engine:

The sell orders side is very weak at the moment, and that 10,000 SPS order is be swallowed pretty fast as we approach the pre-sale day. After the 0.75 mark, there is nothing between SPS and the Moon.

Conclusion:

Low liquidity, staked amount increasing by the minute, the hype around the new collection, bullish players that already made 250x or more with the game ready to keep throwing their money at it and hold their SPS.

I only see one direction for the future price of SPS. Taking into account all I mention above I think the price movement for SPS will be pretty violent. I'm expecting a very conservative %100+ increase in price.

There will be people taking the opportunity to realize some gains, but the Splinterland whales are very excited about the new release and they have deep pockets that will more than compensate the sellout.

Also forgot to mention that Splinterlands players tend to be extremely loyal to the game and very few people walk away from the game. That's why we saw collection prices rocket over the past few months.