...but they can!
Foreword
Splinterlands is an amazing game that we all want to see succeed, but it can’t succeed if it betrays the ideology behind NFTs, so let’s talk about that.
The value of an NFT
In the emerging world of NFTs there’s a lot that is still unknown and untested. We’re all gambling on what we know in theory is a huge advancement to online-asset-ownership. The problem lies in figuring out when situations pop up involving NFTs that take away from the online community’s confidence in these asserted values.
This is incredibly relevant in Splinterlands where EVERY CARD is an NFT. Each and every exchange that happens between players buying, selling, or even renting cards is more than just a redistribution of pixels; it’s an exchange of a unique token with an understood and self-regulated real-world value attached to it.
With this in mind it becomes essential to maintain the perceived worth of that token. This isn’t to be confused with the monetary value. As with every real-world asset, monetary value fluctuates with supply/demand as well as the general market. Maintaining that perceived worth entails respecting that the purchase of a card goes beyond the artwork and also extends to the specific attributes (stats and affects) attached to that token. More so, the token’s worth is in how those attributes allow it to interact with the gameplay and rules of Splinterlands in a permanent and unchanging way.
No nerfs allowed!
You can’t change a card’s stats. Once a card is created and assigned an owner, that owner now holds claim to that NFT and everything that it represents within the game of Splinterlands at the time of creation. They can’t claim that it has more/less stats anymore than someone purchasing NFT artwork can claim the Goofy png they bought is the Mona Lisa. The same is true for the artist who sold that Goofy png, and as well for the seller of the aforementioned card: Splinterlands. An attempt to change an already-sold NFT by the seller is especially problematic because it risks betraying the confidence of any future buyer in that they won’t also face the same unexpected changes.
With that being said, cards are hard to perfectly balance the first time. This is especially true as you add more cards to the pool. This same situation has already existed and been solved outside of NFTs in the world of physical TCG. Take for example: Magic The Gathering. At the end of the day an NFT in Splinterlands is just a way to make digital cards as real and meaningful as the physical cards in Magic The Gathering. A specific number of cards are made, distributed, retired, and stay unchanging for as long as they’re around.
Unchanging cards makes balance impossible if every card is expected to interact with all past & future cards. Pair that with a) an inability to enforce rewriting every copy of a card or b) trying to impose a word-of-mouth ruling in order to apply balance changes, and you end up in an impossible situation. That’s where MTG fixed this issue with set rotations and Standard.
The Solution
We see this issue potentially being acknowledged and respected with the upcoming introduction of that same solution: Standard.
Much like in MTG, with the inability to fix past cards it becomes necessary to allow for gameplay to evolve past older cards without destroying or changing them. Rotating the cards out of Standard allows the balance of the active set to be carefully and meticulously worked around only the cards in that set. The old cards still have a place in competitive play, there are tournaments and matches that bring in older sets, but people approach these with the understanding that things can get weird and unfair.
When a card is BUSTED we see an even more extreme approach to this card filtering, with an outright ban in tournaments and matches that are normally intended to allow cards from the set it belongs to. Once again we’re met with the compromise between the necessity of respecting the worth (the stats and affects) of the card by not altering it while also attempting to maintain a balance in gameplay. The card becomes mostly unplayable, but due to it being a unique collectable item with a now-notorious history it retains (and frequently even gains) monetary value.
Thus far this has mostly been a retelling of why and how NFTS and Splinterlands DO work, but what about the clickbait title? That’s where combing comes into play.
You can’t shred NFT cards!
If you aren’t familiar with combing in Splinterlands, it’s when you take multiple NFT cards of the same creature and level and combine them together in order to create a new NFT card for that creature but of a higher level. These low level NFTs used in the combing don’t get redistributed into circulation, they don’t change ownership, they’re just gone. Splinterlands decides the low level NFTs no longer exist (effectively shredding the cards) and mints you a new card.
This is where NFTs and Splinterlands stop working.
You can’t shred NFT cards, and trying to do so betrays the ideology behind NFTs. An NFT is a digital token that lives on an immutable blockchain. It simply can't be destroyed. The closest you can get is to send it to a burn address, removing the ability for it to have an owner, but the NFT still exists. So all of those cards you combined to get your level 4 Yodin still exist, it’s just a matter of whether you or Splinterlands are currently the owners of them (and why they magically stop existing in circulation) since a clear purchase/sale was never established.
But how do we fix this?
It’s simple. Stop complicating things with the shred and mint. Let all of the cards in combining continue to exist after you’ve combined them and just have the “combined” stronger representation of them be a collection of their card-ids. Now instead of selling a level 3 Chicken created some time after they were supposed to have been retired you’re simply selling the original NFTs used to represent the level 3 Chicken. This simplifies yet another issue:
Your level 1s are going extinct!
Whether it’s burnt or destroyed doesn’t even matter for this. Every combine involving a level 1 means one less level 1 card for that creature. Forever. This is an especially weird situation because it inevitably means the rarest (and subsequently most valuable) version of every card, given enough time, is going to be a 1 star.
But what if you’re never losing those level 1s? What if you can confidently point to your new-stronger card and say, “this is a combination of the following NFTs”? Now all of a sudden we live in a world where it’s justifiable to UN-combine. The stronger card isn’t an NFT, just a collection of level 1 NFTs you own, and can easily be broken back down into those single NFTs at any given time.
You’re no longer working with a) weird destroyed-not-destroyed cards and b) cards created after they’ve been retired, and are instead back to handling transparently purchased and owned NFTs!
Postface
It’s a weird world in crypto and NFT, but in some ways it has clear direction and ideas. For our own sakes, we really want to ensure the game we all love follows closely with those directions and ideas when they’re present.