Once you start playing Splinterlands you will get familiar with the different kind of assets that are available within the Splinterlands ecosystem.
New players usually start by picking up cards from the more recent collections which are currently Rebellion and Chaos. With these cards you can start playing in the Modern format where the older collections can’t be used. This condition helps in creating demand for new card collections and also protects the newbies from being at a major disadvantage from the old timers who will have big stocks of older collections.
Putting further tax on older players for playing Wild format is a topic I will not be covering in this post as that is a quite complicated topic which requires a separate post.
As you know that all crypto assets go under bullish and bearish cycles so does Splinterlands collectibles. Sometimes it may correlate with the overall markets driven by BTC performance and sometimes it may create a cycle of its own.
Outlook for Card Collections!
Most players buy cards with two main objectives of improving their gameplay and also to have some assets that can be sold for profit if the price surges during the next bull run.
Though it is possible that we may see a surge in card prices which could be driven by several factors like:
New User On-boarding- This is one aspect that the team is actively focusing on through the renewed Ambassador program to help new players joining the game.
New Utilities for the Cards- Recent example of utilities boosting card prices is the land expansion when Gold prices made your farm more productive which saw a major jump in the card prices specially the Gold foil ones.
Overall Improvement in NFT Market Sentiment- Once the overall demand for NFT based gaming recovers Splinterlands will see a major comeback as it is one the OG NFT based games.
Despite these possibilities I don’t think there will be a major price boost in most of the card collections. As you can see that the prices for Gold foil legendaries in the Untamed collection used to be over $500 at a time not too far back. Now you can see most of them listed in the market for under $100. Not sure how much they will be boosted in the next bull run.
Outlook for Land Prices!
Sometime back there was a major craze for land based NFT games which was triggered by the sudden surge in demand for Wolf game land. This spilled over to many games who started their own land based gameplay and even Splinterlands decided to go that way.
When the land plots were released there was a lot of excitement amongst the users and I remember seeing the plots being sold for over $200.
Now you can easily get a land for $15 and if you are patient for a bargain you will see some people throw away their plots for as low as $10 to $12.
This is happening as to make a land productive you need to invest a lot of resources that includes staking high end cards that then can’t be used in the game. Further you need to purchase Time Crystal and Dark Energy to start working a land.
This made the land plot unusable for small players and they started throwing away their land plots at dirt cheap rates which they still continue to do.
Due to this I don’t expect the Land prices to make a major comeback anytime soon.
What is a RUNI?
Now let me come to a very unique Asset type within the Splinterlands ecosystem which I think most of the new players would not have heard of and maybe many of the old timers would have never used.
RUNI is a special class of card that is stored on Ethereum blockchain unlike other Splinterlands assets running on HIVE. It could be used in battles as a Legendary Neutral card. It also makes your lands extra productive that is why you will not see any player use it for battles as it will most probably be deployed in his farm as a Core.
Another factor that makes it very rare is that there are only 3521 of them available and this number can not be increased as it is a limited mint. In fact it was supposed to be a 6,500 piece collection but only 3,521 of that 6,500 limit got minted as at 0.38 ETH mint price not many users were willing to mint it.
Currently it is held by just 1,129 wallets and assuming some users might have multiple wallets I suspect less than 1,000 players actually own a RUNI. You can also see that less than 1% of the RUNIs are ever listed on the market as people who hold them are not really keen to sell them away.
Despite the overall slump in NFT markets the RUNI is holding strong it’s floor over 0.1 ETH and once more use cases come out I won’t be surprised if that floor jumps over 1 ETH as it has done that in the past and can surely go even higher in the coming bull run.
Therefore this is one Splinterland asset class that I am most bullish on and trying to accumulate as many as I possibly can with my current liquidity crunch.
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Cheers,
Sam