Welcome to the first installment of Splinterlands Stock Watch!
In this series I will discuss my picks for hot and cold cards in the market.
I work as a gaming analyst and have a lot of experience in CCGs and virtual economies.
I am not that experienced in Crypto or NFT games.
I'm doing this series to gather my thoughts, refine my analysis, and exchange ideas. It'll be fun to look back one day and see how right or wrong I was 😜
Overall Macro Economy Predictions
Take these with a grain of salt. Just using logic but don't have experience with what happened in the Untamed/Dice releases.
- Don't buy new stuff. New card hype drives up prices right now. But the supply will continually increase. So it'll be best to buy during the final drop and for some time after. Kind of like the reward cards right now.
- Buy non Chaos cards if you know what you're doing. The focus on new card hype should drive the demand for old cards down. You have to predict the meta though. Which leads me to..
The Splinterlands Meta
As part of my goal to reach Champion League, I record a lot of tournament lineups and follow a lot of top players. In the past the best tournament player, 
Side note: The winrates of the baby 2 mana "neutral" summoners gives some indication of the card power levels of each splinter.
Fire- 47%
Water- 46%
Earth (Xander)- 56%
Light (Kiara)- 46%
Dark- 52%
There's a few interesting findings from jace's data:
- The rarer summoners with multiple stat boosts (ex: Yodin) are incredibly powerful.
- The best vanillas (Alric) remain competitive through Diamond and then fall off a cliff in CL.
- Aggressive/proactive stats (+1 offense gains) perform better than defensive/reactive stats.
How Chaos Legion Might Impact each Splinter
disclaimer: The Chaos Legion supply will continue increasing so cards should theoretically get cheaper. I do not recommend buying cards unless you know what you're doing.
Fire: Malric (3/+1 ATK) and Pyre are not competitive. Yodin dominates Fire.
#2 is Plado (5/+1 ATK/+1 SPD/-1 HP). Plado breaks even at Champion League WR which means he's strong. You can almost back engineer the point where Plado becomes playable vs Malric.
Prediction: The new summoner Tarsa (4/+1 ATK/+1 HP) will have a big impact on the meta, especially at lower leagues. She comes in exactly in between Plado (strong) and Malric (weak). +1 HP is better for Fire than -1 HP. Tarsa, along with the new 6 drop Tusk with Inspire, should perform strong all the way up to Champions League.
Few reasons I'm bullish here. 1) Mylor is single handedly suppressing the Fire winrate. I suspect Fire does much better against non Earth splinter. 2) Plado is very expensive. Getting a card of slightly weaker power level for a fraction of the price will be big as the masses start spamming Tarsa.
Recommendation: Again, I'm not sure how the prices of the cards move after a new set release. But all things being equal, I recommend investing in Fire melee cards. I think some of the recent reward cards, in particular, are good spots to speculate.
Water: Dominated by +1 MAG strategies here. Val is very expensive and Alric will be rotating out. The anti-MAG strategies have much worse winrates. I don't think much changes with Water here. I haven't really studied their cards yet though since I play at Silver/Gold.
Prediction: Water strategies won't change much.
Recommendation (weak): I suspect Lir is undervalued but I don't have top flight experience.
Earth: Earth cardpool is very strong and 3 diverse strategies reflect this:
Mylor (anti-melee), Llama (cheese), and Prince (range). The +1 Mag Summoner won't disrupt this and might be planted by the designers to weaken Earth comparatively.
Prediction: Earth will stay mostly the same.
Recommendation: Buy a Mylor as soon as possible. He's incredibly powerful for his cost/rarity and he should hold up very well in value. If Fire takes off he will be even more valuable.
Life & Death: Interesting splinters. They are both reactive strategies and the top players use very different lineups with them, often in the same tournament. I suspect they see the ruleset, predict what their opponent will use, and then pick from the toolbox of each to counter.
Winrates across summoners are pretty balanced for both. I don't like either of the new summoners. But Chanseus, Mimosa, Owster Rotwell, and Lorna should all hold value. I actually invested in Lorna as my first summoner a while ago she's a very neutral solid pick and undervalued.
Recommendation: There are no dominant OP summoners or dominant single cards. Just focus on collecting them all and countering your opponent like the pros do!
Dragon/Neutral: Dragon cards are pretty busted so the splinter winrate is quite high. But this is noisy since Dragon always mixes with splinters. Still expect Kitty to be the best but all of the Dragon champs have good winrates even in Champion League.
I haven't studied the Neutral cards I'm sure some will be good 😋
Recommendation: Brighton is quite underrated.
That does it for this post. I'm doing giveaways with every Road to CHAMPION update so please like and follow if you enjoy my content.
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