Plus or Minus depends on Ownership

My approach for this season was to aim to play just the Wild Format, which is what I have been doing, but it hasn't been easy! With the rewards so high in Champion Leagues, there are a lot of people clambering to reach it and getting streaks has been very, very, very difficult for me.

I have been near here before, and then I got pushed all the way down to nearly dropping into Gold 1, and then have had to slowly work my way up from there - again. It is frustrating, but what is good is that there is a very high incentive for people to get into Champion now, as I have seen SPS win rewards nearing 100 SPS for some people, which is around about $7 a win.

While I am struggling to get there, considering there is only five days left in the season, there is still less than 80 accounts that have made it into Champions at all, and only 64 of them are still there by points, with quite a few who have been knocked back down the rankings after moving up, with some 400 points in the negative now.

What is interesting with the high rewards in Champions, is that there is far more incentive to be there, than place there for the DEC rewards, as while first spot takes 200K DEC which is worth about $130 at the end of the season, that is around about 20 decent wins in Champions, not to mention the Focus and Chest rewards earned are of significantly higher chances of being valuable too.

Last season, which was about two weeks long, there were some accounts that earned well over $1000 in rewards, with some lucky ones getting opening some very large SPS rewards in chests. Because of this incentive in Diamond and Champions, the rental market for maxed cards is looking very healthy in comparison to what it was a month or two ago, as while there is about 10x reward in Champions, the Diamond rewards are nothing to sneeze at either. With wins getting between 2 and 5 SPS, depending on ECR - mine are the very low end, as my ECR is hovering around 50% constantly.

But, what this has changed for the rounds is that people seem to have become far more competitive for earnings, whereas before it felt that many of the top players were maximizing for position, not value. And of course, once there is value on the table, there are always going to be those who will compete the best they can for it. This is a good thing.

What will be interesting in the coming months is that LAND should be close to release and producing on it is going to soak up a lot of the cards, especially the maxed ones by quality, as it will affect production. This means that the top-end of the rental market might be thin and, the card values will likely go up too, as people look to max-out their cards to stake. This sets up a scarcity dynamic, as well as an incentive dynamic between playing and staking, which should positively affect the values, but also make it more expensive to be competitive at that top end.

This might be balanced through the rewards, but I assume the cost to earnings ratio will be narrower. But, no matter what way you look at it, it should be pretty good earnings for owners of assets, but of course this is going to be adjusted by the price paid for those assets, with those who got in early to build their stack, having a massive cost-averaging advantage.

The end of the year is going to be interesting for Splinterlands and I think it will be a good indication of what might happen in a bullrun, as if people can settle into an earnings groove now, it will likely get them pretty excited when things really get moving. Though, I am not going to predict when there would be a decent run through crypto, as there is so much going on in the total economy and we are still just getting started on the run down. However, due to the way things work these days, it might not be that long until there is a significant turnaround, though it might be more toward the end of 2023.

Update: I played a couple rounds, now I am 60 points away from Champions again...

Perhaps I am not cutout for this level of competition.

I wonder how many of those who have cards and land will decide to stop playing, if they don't have enough cards to do both? It will be interesting to see, as I know that even though I only have 10 plots, I don't have many maxed or maxable cards spare, especially summoners. So, I would have to raid my playing deck to make up for it and I am guessing I am not the only one who would have to do this.

As said, it will be interesting and in many ways, as once land finally gets released, I think that the dynamic of the playing environment is going to be heavily affected too, as so many cards are going to be shifted off the rental markets with a lot of key cards being completely unavailable most of the time. This scarcity will change-up the dynamics a lot, as people will have to adjust their gameplay to suit.

After piling so much into the game over the last year and a bit I have been involved, I am of course hoping that at some point, the ROI will be in the positive. How long I will have to wait or if that will ever happen is still to be seen. At least though, there is a chance and, it isn't just hoping for a market pump and dump, which means that there is a chance that once it goes up, it will stay up higher than the averages, falling back less through the bear cycles. Though, this is very much speculation -

Like it always is.

In the short-term though, there are five days left of my experiment of aiming for Wild only, so let's see what that yields in comparison to last season.

As soon as my ECR recovers a bit.

Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]