Last week I showed some recent Splinterlands card acquisitions including a maxed Kelp Innitiate, maxed Silvershield Assassin, maxed Demented Shark, and several maxed gold foil, regular foil Diemon Sharks, and a few maxed xenith monks.
This week I went on another buying spree, including buying up almost the entire market of a particular Alpha Epic card that was way underpriced compared to the rest. Let's go through them.
The cards I picked up I bought for various reasons. Some were missing in my Chaos Legion deck (which is alost maxed now), some I wanted to play with and was sick of renting, some are for rentals, and some I think will be highly sought after on land and are too cheap right now.
Let's take a look.
Maxed Nerissa Tridawn
This is a powerful, staple on the water team. It has no abilities at all but 5 magic damage with 11 health is brutal. It's one of the few epics CL cards I didn't have my own maxed copy of. In fact I looked recently and realized I was renting mine from genepool for enough that he decided not to cancel it and bail. So I did him a favor and canceled the rental and bought my own so he could keep dumping.
A few months ago I wanted this card maxed but it was $70. So when I saw it at $29, I snapped it up.
Maxed Silvershield Sheriff
I've been using a lot of life teams lately. Silversield sheriff is an Untamed Reward card that, like Nerissa Tridawn, hits hard and has a lot of health. Not only does it hit for 5 ranged damage and have 9 health, but it also gives everyone on the team two armor (which on a life team with lots of repair or void shield is insane) and has snipe so it can destroy a backline with ease.
These untamed reward cards aren't super rare but at some point, my guess it they will be veyr hard to come across at maxed level, which is why I've targeted several of them.
One of the biggest reasons I picked up this card now though was that a whale was dumping enough copies between 1 and 14 bcx to max it out for between 40 and 50 cents per BCX. So I bought this card for about $45 but once I bought mine, the new sloor was over 70cents per BCX. So this card was instantly valued at $83.
And now I can stop renting it.
Maxed Pyromancer
When Jacek came out, I saw all the whales run in and maxed this Untamed Epic Reward card out. You couldn't find 1 BCX for under $4 (or $184 for maxed). I also wanted one but wasn't going to spend that. Well, with this recent dump, I found a maxed copy for $26. I don't know about you, but I find Blast to be the most fun ability in the game, especially when its just shot randomly onto the backline.
Maxed Captain's Ghost
Continuing on with the Untamed reward cards, I also picked 115 BCX of Captain's Ghost and maxed it out for a little under $40. Why is this card so good? Well, 4 magic damage is nothing to sneeze at but its two abilities make it a fantastic card to hold on your back line. In Diamond/Champ, its all about the heal. No attack cards are also used more and more frequently.
WIth both afliction, which makes it so a card can't heal anymore, and Oppress (which does double damage damage to monsters with no attack) this card is perfect for the current meta. And that's double magic damage which mean shields don't matter. This card can easily destroy a lot of strategies in higher levels. And again, while this card has 25k copies, if the player base picks up, good luck finding these maxed.
Merdaali Guardian 2 Max Copies
This card is absolutely overpowered when it gets ranked up. For 3 mana you get tank heal, (armor) Repair, and Strengthen. This takes an already very strong water team into a new level of brutal. Paired with possibilus your team now has +3 health to start with, which makes that heal even stronger. Good luck killing a maxed Baakjira who not starts with a 20 health and is double healed +has void.
With my recent acquisition of Kelp innitiate who has triage (heals the back line) and cleanse (removes negative effects from the fron't line) my opponents now can't. poison Baakjira or stop the heal. So while most of my opponents team tires themselves out on baakjira, anyone in my back line who does get hit gets healed by Kelp Innitiate. Its a beast of a team since I with possibilus, anyone in the second posiiton can attack still.
Anyway, I already had this card but I decided to buy two more at under $20 just for renting out. There are a lot of these but they should still be a $60 card maxed.
Alpha Fire Demon 32 BCX
In the last run up, I collected a lot of these Alpha Epic cards. At one point, the floor on all of these cards was $90 and you actually couldn't find a Mischievous Mermaid for under $300. TImes have changed. The Alpha Epics usually sit around $10 per BCX now.
However, I decided to go take a look at how the floor was doing and I noticed this Fire Demon had one seller of 32 copies for $6 each. I bought them all. If you're not aware, Alpha Epics require 32 BCX to max the card out. While I'm not sure what I'm going to do with these yet, one possibility is to max them out to work on land.
This card would be worth 12,500 PP. There aren't a lot of cards out there with that kind of value.
Another possibility is to resell them for $10 each. Maybe while DEC is low so I can increase the value even more when DEC hits peg. Most likely though, I will sit on them and see if their rental value goes back up when land comes out. With only 1000 of these circulating, I now own 3% of them. That doesn't suck.
Miscellaneous buys
I have been buying other cards as well for various reasons. Here's a smattering below.
Truthspeaker 45 BCX -eventually want to max them but the floor is now double what I bought these at. This card is an insane support card for the life team when maxed.
Torrent Fiend 5 BCX-never maxed his guy and had extra credits. Still need 3 more BCX to max it. Also though, I think these cards are way too cheap. I realy want to sweep all these 0 mana monsters while they are under $3.
Maxed Weirdling Warrior-I don't really use death so I forgot that I never maxed this guy. He was cheap so I bought it. I'm probably 95% maxed on chaos now. I need to finish maxing a few legendaries and I need one or two epics.
Maxed Xenith Archers- There was a time when I could rent out a 1 bcx very of this card for 30 DEC. That means they were selling for over 50 cents or $55 for a maxed copy. I bought a few of these for $7. It's a solid 2 mana card you can throw in the back that will do some damage. $7 is far too cheap so I bought some.
Card Musings
The card market is absolutely in the toilet right now but it's showing signs of life. WIth several huge whales bailing at once, including Genepools whole rental account, card prices got smashed, but it really only took a few weeks to absorb almost all of it and now we're creeping back up again. I say creeping up by really its up about 10% in ten days.
The interesting thing might be what this actually does to land. It's coming in August (most likely). The team said its done and they are just squashing bugs now. I was thinking before that land would only have about 20% utilization but what's interesting is that with these prices dropping again, A lot of people have been quietly snapping cards up like me to put on their land. That could mean we get closer to 25% utilization.
Will that happen? I don't know. But a 5% boost would be an extra 37.k maxed cards off the market + 375 million DEC.
Will it make a dent? I'm not sure. Honestly, I really still think we need a way to burn cards on land. I still love the idea of a card graveyard which gives a PP bonus to a plot for burning cards.
What I do think land staking will do is clear some of the glut out of the rental market. So even if it doesn't skyrocket rental prices (and therefore card prices), what it likely will do is make sure that if you put up a cheap card for rent, it will actually get rented instead of falling off after 30 days.
What are baout you? Are you buying cards here? Are you ready for land? Are there certain cards you have your eye on right now?
Or if you believe Splex