When Splinterlands started Steem was closer to $1.50, shoved up to $4, and has been slowly falling for the last two years. I may be an idiot, but I'm an optomist on the price of Steem. We're undervalued relative to what this community and chain are capable of, but that's not the point of this post.
I've been hard at work trying to design the crafting expansion of the game, so I've been a little out of the loop as I'm totally in my head these days. But while scrolling through Splinterlands Discord I saw a discussion about prices of alpha cards. My favorite comment was from a post.
So, I said, "huh" to myself and went to check alpha prices, something I also haven't done for a little bit.
HOLY FUCKING SHIT!!!
No wonder my collection keeps going up... these alphas are going for crazy prices, and my guess a year from now we'll all look back and say "I should bought them when they were just $1-$25."
Malric over a $1 each! FUCKING TYRUS at $7!!! That's INSANE!
If I could go back a year, sell all my crypto and buy Tyrus instead of being down 95% on most of my alts I'd be up 700%...
Combining Cards
This has to be the single most powerful economic addition Matt and I baked into the game (his idea, not mine). Taking duplicates and combining them into more powerful cards and requiring lots of them to reach max level is frankly nothing short of genius. It's genius because the economic impact is amazing, but also because it doesn't happen anywhere else in trading card games. We invented it!
Look what it's doing. We only have 3000 people that interact routinely, and we have a marketcap of over $3M! People trust that these will continue rising in price. I'm no economist, but I'm betting that's because the number of people playing increases, and the number of cards available decreases. So unlike fiat which is being printed at whim on a new round of "quantitative easing" or cryptos which mint new tokens every day, this game is massively deflationary.
While on the surface there's a ton of cards... like in the beta there were 4.5M total cards, it's actually only enough for a few hundred people to have max level cards of any given type. So even if we don't have 30,000 players trying to get them, that's ok, cause there's only enough for 1/10th of the player base to get a max card.
There's not enough for everyone... Please push and shove...
Betas
This game has weathered one of longest, shittiest droughts in the history of the alt coin space. Not only have we been surviving but we've been growing. It's like growing a business in the middle of the great depression, but in the grand scheme of things the great depression is a little bitch compared to a 90% drop in alt coin prices. We have something pretty amazing to be able to pull that off. We have a fantastic community, a TEAM of great devs, and a project roadmap that's killer that we're working to materialize every day.
Anyway, these are selling out. Not quite as fast as they were before the market took a 20% hit, but these are going. If you're looking for a place to park some cash in crypto I personally feel better about my cards every day.
UNTAMED
Oh, after Betas come Untamed! Should be fun and you're gonna want to keep your eyes open for that!