I'm getting increasingly frustrated by some of the decisions the Splinterlands team have made trying to fix the economy for the last 5 years instead of improving the game. I believe that the current Soulbound Unlock Mechanics are another big mistake that will make things worse for these reasons...
The Current Unlock Mechanics & Reasoning
The main narrative to 'fix the economy' is to have players burn DEC for everything in the game which reduces the supply and restores the peg so people will have to go and buy SPS to create more DEC which pushes the SPS price up. This would increase the rewards and make new players enter the game buying up cards on the market to get the prices up again.
The Unlocking idea is to have a cost of 10x the DEC burn value of a card to unlock it with the price going up over to encourage early speculation and have the prices of these cards hold their value. The benefit of having cards unlocked is that it's possible to sell/rent/use on land. Players that keep cards locked will still be able to play and earn with them in the game similar to unlocked cards.
The reasoning behind this is that they want cards to be more expensive and hold their value over time while making them also available to new players. Since players have to pay up big time to unlock, the supply likely won't be that high and it might be possible to make a profit on them since there is no point in selling them for less assuming there will be some demand.
At a price of 1$ for 1000 DEC (which at some point it should eventually get back at), this means that
| Soulbound Card Set | Price | Total | Price All |
|---|---|---|---|
| Max Level Common Card | 20$ | 12 | 240$ |
| Max Level Rare Card | 23$ | 12 | 276$ |
| Max Level Epic Card | 46$ | 7 | 322$ |
| Max Level Legendary Card | 50$ | 12 | 600$ |
| Total | - | 43 | 1438$ |
To put this in perspective, Chaos Legion which players paid a lot of money for and has 103 cards in it, at max level is currently selling for under 600$
Many of these and the older reward cards also are trading at under 2$ for a Max common, under 2$ for a Max Rare, under 3.5$ for Max Epic, under 4.5$ for a Max Legendary.
Who Would Unlock Soulbound Cards?
Out of the current player base, the ones I can see unlocking the Soulbound Rewards cards are:
- Whales who play for fun and just want to have cards unlocked to complete their collection
- Players that are still missing certain meta cards and want them at higher level.
- Players who in the short term want to sell to those above at marginal profit as they will undercut each other
- Players that speculate in the long term that there will be more demand with these cards ending up as rare and more valuable.
How Unlocks Will Make Things Worse!
I believe most (including myself) will just opt to keep their Soulbound cards locked as the price is crazy high while the benefits are minimal and the gamble just not worth it. Paying to unlock them feels like picking up pennies in front of a freight train. If it ever would get to a point where people are willing to pay 3x the price for these cards, the current available cards will very likely have gone up way more than that.
What this will do is totally bypass the purpose of having a lot of DEC burned to get us back on track leaving the economy still crippled with an even bigger overall supply of cards. While the prices of these cards might hold for a while as nobody is going to be willing to dump at a loss, all players that own them soulbound will just be able to continue using these 'expensive cards' while new players will be left at a very disadvantaged frustrating situation.
I doubt there will be many buyers once they get dumped into Wild as everyone already playing/botting there already owns them Soulbound. New players also are not going to be willing to get into Modern since bought cards from packs are sure to lose nearly all of their value once they get dumped into Wild and they are less likely to be competitive given that that previous soulbound cards are crazy expensive compared to the others.
All of this will make for an even bigger card supply and a worse overall experience for new players coming into the game while most existing players are left behind frustrated. A lot of bots will almost exclusively use the the old soulbound reward cards as they include summoners and keep extracting what they can at the higher levels.
The Core Problem Of Splinterlands
More than SPS being low in value or DEC not being at Peg, I would say that cards having a negative value expectation is the one core issue of the Splinterlands ecosystem. Like it or not, nearly all players in the game see their card collection as the main investment in the game which they at least like to see maintained in value somehow.
Over the years, the card supply continued to be inflated while after the crazy peak during the big adoption prices have just continued to plummet. The main reason why Chaos Legion initially sold a lot was because players actually had the belief that their cards eventually would go up in value after seeing what Untamed and older cards/packs did.
So right now the way the game is set up, it makes no sense whatsoever for anyone who doesn't want to lose a lot of money to buy into the new packs. This leaves the economy with very few sales and no incentive/hype for new players to come in as they aren't stupid and see what is about to happen to their card values as time passes and they get dumped into wild.
I would go as far to say that unless the card value decline issue is fixed somehow, Splinterlands is dead. It's not the other way around that trying to bring in new players will fix this issue as nobody is going to want to enter knowing the values of their cards will trend to zero eventually.
Burn Cards To Unlock Soulbound Cards Solution
The Solution I can think off to at least partially fix the oversupply in cards exists in 3 parts
The 1st part is to require a similar type of card to be burned along with 1x or 2x the DEC Burn value to unlock a soulbound card (while keeping the 10x DEC Burn Value available). This would make it so that from here on out, not a single reward card will ever inflate the supply more while things get back to an equilibrium removing the overprinted useless cards from the ecosystem.
Examples
 | Burn 11 copies of > |  |
|---|
So in order to unlock your a max Level Iziar, 11 Copies of other Life Legendary cards need to be burned. Currently at current prices of the 4 cheapest ones only 174 including some max levels are on the market at prices who average x1.5 the DEC Burn Price. This means that demand for once would be a lot bigger than the supply meaning prices will go up getting the sell prices closer to what is the 10x DEC Burn value.
 | Burn 115 copies of > |  |
|---|
For a Rare Summoner, another Rare Summoner would need to be burned which also would make the prices trend more toward the 10x DEC burn value.
Doing it this way will even out the demand for different cards and not just the absolute cheapest ones while making it more expensive to unlock summoners which they should always be.
With the current setup, there is almost zero incentive to unlock since the cost and the risks are way too big compared to the benefits. Everyone will just keep their cards Soulbound and if a measure is taken afterward that devalues locked soulbound cards it will be another mass exodus event making everyone furious.
What I would do instead of penalizing players that use Locked Soulbound cards is to reward players with a bonus % of their wins who don't or use less soulbound cards.This can be done gradually over time each month decreasing the base earnings a bit while increasing the bonus % for not using Locked Soulbound Cards in your line-up. This to the point where it's a considerable difference which actually gives a proper incentive for players to want to unlock their cards.
The 3rd part would be to allow enough time without any penalties to make players do the unlocks. One of the fun parts of the game is to slowly but surely grow your collection of cards over time. The mechanic of increasing the price over time just has the opposite effect as very few have the money to unlock on day 1 getting the best price and it really feels like you get punished later on if you need to pay more. This to the point where it discourages people (including myself) enough to not unlock at all. I would put a timeframe of the lify cycle of the next reward set before it is impossible to still unlock the current soulbound reward cards. This would also give the card market time to slowly but surely adjust and the ability for players to hunt for possible discount sales.
I would also allow early unlocks of the new soulbound reward cards at a premium price so everyone that wants can actually be on a level playing field instead of being stuck having to gamble Glints to get specific cards without any guarantee.
Positive Sentiment Change!
This would either have players burn some of their existing or duplicate cards to unlock soulbound cards or head to the market to buy them there which pushes the prices up. Initially, I assume many will just try to scoop up everything that is available at current prices to list and at higher prices instantly. With card prices up, it would also for the first time since long create a positive sentiment around the game as players would be happy. If this is set as the way it's done for future reward sets, there will automatically be demand that support the cheapest cards giving some insurance that new sets will get some price support in the future making players more willing to buy.
Conclusion!
Players will always see their card collection as the main investment in the game and as long as there is nothing in place to keep them from falling, no new players will ever come in. The current way of Unlocking Soulbound reward cards is set out to become another disaster inflating the supply even more while it could be used to actually start fixing it is a requirement was set to burn a card to unlock a card and if there were proper incentives to actually do so.
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