I know I’m late to the party but I’ve caught the bug now. I started out a few days ago with a Splinterlands Experiment for Entry Level Land and since I’ve been Deep Diving the new functionality to see how it works the penny has dropped on a few things. Firstly I think that the market for land possibly bottomed out recently around $25 USD per plot to now be around $40 USD so not only is Land no longer Vaporware but it could be on the rebound too.
There is more to it than that raw speculation though. Rather than just being a purely speculative play I now understand that using Land properly is a good way to generate value from the older monsters in my collection that no longer get much action on the battlefield. I could rent them out for pennies on the dollar but since they’re older cards they are potentially good value to be put on Land to generate better Rewards....so that’s what I’m doing.
I’m now up to 5 plots and I’m organising my cards to try and maximise their utility whether they be used for Battles or as Workers. I’m confident I can maintain the competitiveness of my collection overall for Ranked Play and Brawls while still powering 5 (or even more) plots of Land. It makes sense to me why this is a smart strategic development for the Splinterlands ecosystem as the Land effectively puts a Floor under the prices of Monsters which are fading out of the Meta. Thus it goes some way to protecting the investments of early adopters and long term supporters of the game.
If there is a flip side to it, it signals that the newer card edition releases will likely continue to make older cards redundant and maybe with this Land functionality in place that trend will accelerate. I can also see that for the current 1.5 version release the profitability of Land is going to be highly dependent on the price of Grain which I have currently valued at about 0.07 per DEC.
As more Land starts producing it’s possible that there will soon be a glut of Grain being Supplied with very little Demand for it until version 2.0 comes out. That’s likely to be bad for the Grain price and that in turn could drag Land values back down. Therefore I think it’s wise to do a Dollar-Cost-Average Accumulation here and keep an eye on things. A lot could depend on how long it takes the developers to get version 2.0 out.
It certainly is an interesting development though. Kudos to the Splinterlands team. With any luck this Land Functionality will all come together nicely to ride the next Bull Market in Crypto and NFTs.