I must be getting really old to the game because I remember when The Splinterlands first announced a few years back that common reward cards would be printed to a limit of 400,000 and thinking "It's going to take 10 years to distribute these out to the current player base." Things have of course grown geometrically since then and now there is a definite need to adjust this scale.
Of course the game is already front running the potential problem in re-configuring the reward system, which was a much further out potential issue when the devs first brought it up, and now since the parabolic daily growth in the player base it has become mandatory and a relatively pressing issue to come in the not so distant future.
Part of the smashing success and the game's ability to sustain this growth is the friendly position in relation to the brand new player and their ability to earn at a smaller scale and grow from the lowest possible level of a starter deck all the way to a stalwart Champion Level deck. The game I believe will certainly keep this in mind with the eventual release down the road of a two-tiered daily reward system versus the current single-tiered system, or pure "Wildcard Format" of "all cards welcome," as opposed to the "Modern Edition" (of Untamed and Chaos Legion skin cards) released later in the year.
This brings a current participant to ponder the relative rarity of the current reward card system in relation to what is perhaps to come.
There are some assumptions that can be tried but aren't necessarily certain because we don't know the coming changes the game devs have in mind, so this is certainly a shot in the dark based on what the public knows at the moment. So take this with a grain of salt, it could be completely off as in predicting how everything will shake out makes weather forecasters look like Nostradamus. The devs are working on a much higher level in on going views of the game from a much higher distance than the rest of us in the metaphorical "forest and the trees."
Doing the simple math with two-tiers of daily quests that each pay out daily quests and season rewards as is the current system the game immediately would increase the card print extinction times by two times, if my early elementary grade school math is correct.
Yabaptmatt is not a giant fan of having to recreate, perfectly balance and then anticipate what effect these rewards are on the game. It's a labor of love I am sure, but I can only imagine how hard it is in simply doing the current release of the booster pack editions with air drops and partnering agreements, let alone adding in reward cards (in at the very least) 2x the current speed they are being printed and going into retirement.
My best guess is that based on current player growth, the viability now of purchasing quest potions (for all players at the moment) there is no question the math has to be stretched substantially for reward card print totals--again, if the current setup is maintained as we know it as of today.
If it were me and my personal sanity on the line in creating fun, relevant, and enriching cards to the game's ecosystem in Reward Card form, I would consider a 5-10X print total across the board of every reward card. --cryptkeeper17... just now
Yes, as much as ten times the previous maximum print totals of previous reward cards to this point. Yes, 2,000,000-4,000,000 print maximums of common reward cards may be in the cards (pun intended). So what happens to the value of reward cards that you are earning today? They become older, shorter print cards of a by-gone era of the game prior to it becoming more and more mainstream by the day.
Which brings me back to my previous point of the empathy shown to newer players. Some would think this would dilute the value of the reward cards new players are earning. Perhaps. But, in that same vein it offers an easier entry point for new players to level up a small portion of the game more cheaply (in currency value terms) and in a more care-free way. Leveling up a card to level 2 is no longer a horrifying question if you think this card may 4-10X in value and not even mathematically be available to all players in the game at a level 1 if growth continues like this for another few more months. Let that sink in.
Another few months of growth like this there will be players that may never own, or own more than one of the current reward cards before they reach their print limit (I will give players that have been around since the beginning a moment to re-attach their exploded mind lying all over the place).
So in conclusion the new realities of the game are very tough to make sense of at the moment but this is one of the many "New Splinterlands phenomena" that we need to start getting used to.