Hi all! This will serve a sort of combo introductory post to myself as well as a PSA as we start the CL pre-sale.
Who am I?
I'm Badrag, and have played TCGs for a long time, and am most familiar with Magic the Gathering. I am also fairly familiar with crypto, having been in the space for the last four years or so. I dabbled in dapps back in 2018 or so, investing heavily in Cryptocities, realizing it was just a bag holding exercise, and got out before it imploded. Lesson learned.
Coming to Splinterlands, I was really excited to see a use case for NFTs with actual gameplay, that was, amazingly, fun! I just joined up a few weeks ago, but am decently invested in the space now. It seems to have a much lower floor start up cost than other dapp games like Axies, which is going to be important for growth.
Chaos Legends Pre-sale
Now onto the current pre-release and my philosophy for CL.
I was really fortunate to jump into SL a few weeks before CL hit. I grabbed some SPS back in the good old days when it was ~$0.35. Seeing again, a use case for SPS in the form of vouchers meant it was likely to spike, so I invested and staked a good chunk as quickly as I could.
I have since seen the details of the pre-release and what you get for buying now vs buying later, and in my mind, there is no way vouchers are worth anything like $20. To get a guaranteed promo, you'd need to spend/have $1000 worth of vouchers. But does anyone expect the promo to be worth $1000?
Buy singles, not packs
Which leads me to my PSA. Coming from MtG, there is an adage that everyone knows and few follow: buy singles, not packs. The chances of getting a card you want are very low, whereas you could just buy it for it's market price. It feels worse, since you aren't getting a dope pull, but it makes better financial sense.
And even though everyone knows this, people still buy packs. Because opening packs is fun. But it's bad financial sense.
I think what is driving the price of vouchers is FOMO rather than a real analysis of the expected value of vouchers and the promo and other airdrops. If people were trying to figure out the likely prices of those, I think vouchers should be valued much lower, like around $5.
So what should you do?
I'll tell you what I did. I sold all my vouchers. And I'll keep doing it as long as they are as expensive as they are now. If they drop in price, I'll buy some. If they don't drop, I'll wait a few months and use the money I made selling them to buy singles, the promo included. Sure, I'll miss out on SPS airdrops from the packs in the meantime, but that's drops in the bucket relative to voucher value right now.
So 1) sell vouchers. 2) Buy singles with voucher proceeds.
Nuh-uh! SL is way different than MtG!
You're right hypothetical straw man! There are some differences that might make the above adage less right in SL than MtG.
CP is needed to move up in rank, and CP comes from cards. So there is no such thing as a worthless card here, whereas MtG players can have boxes and boxes of worthless chaff. Again though, buying singles is the better play. On average, a CL pack will have like 50 CP in it. For $4 at minimum. Instead, wait for the cards to come out then buy the cheapest CP/$ cards, and it'll almost certainly be a better value.
Packs are limited, unlike in MtG. This is where I am a little worried. When the pack itself is potentially rare (as are out of print MtG packs), the pack itself can be valuable. And holding it is likely to be a financial boon. Although so will holding good cards. Plus you can play with the cards. And they increase your CP. In MtG part of the value of holding packs is to do drafts. There are (as far as I know) 0 plans to do drafts in SL, so this doesn't hold true in SL. So packs go back to the NFT useless case of Cryptocities, where the pack is just a bag. It's only once you open it that it actually has useful and fun cards inside.