As land staking is creeping up upon us, I figured I finally need to sit down and do some concrete planning. The details was relased a good while ago, and I probably should have started sooner, but it's been a hectic past 6 months to put it lightly. But with vacation time finally here (and not too grand plans for the time being), time for things like this suddenly becomes available.
Edit: Damnit, forgot to add the thumbnail. Oh well xD
Edit 2: So this post turned out a real proper belly splash. As pointed out in the comments, I'd misunderstood how Production points were calculated. This is a perfect example of a situation where you think you know what's correct (actually you know) regardless of how wrong it is. Therefore this post has been heavily edited to present proper numbers and accurate comments.
Key Factors
First, a quick summary of the key bullet points for myself and for the framing of this post. Source: Secret of Praetoria - Phase 1.5
Card & DEC staking
Up to 5 cards can be staked per plot. If the card is a max level card, 10k DEC must be staked on the plot to make the card work at maximum efficiency. That means that if a plot is populated by 5 max level cards, 50k DEC needs to be staked on that plot. That's no small amount..
However, if the card is not max level, the amount of DEC that needs to be staked for the card to do its job will be proportionally less.
Production points
Each card rarity and foil have specific production points (PP). In addition, cards from older editions will receive multipliers based on their age. The following table outlines how it will work;
To take a concrete example, this means my two GF Talias from the Beta series should provide 600 PP * 5x = 3k PP each. So how much DEC would I need to stake to make these cards work then? To max out a Gold Foil Epic in the Beta series, you need 10 BCX. If I understand the DEC staking requirements correctly, that should require only a tenth of the DEC required for a MAX level card, i.e. 1k DEC instead of 10k.
Okay, so what do we have and what do we need?
I got 60 plots in total - 43 Canyons, 6 deserts, 6 calderas and 5 rivers. Looking at the table for which splinters goes best on which land types, we can see that I mostly need Fire, Death and Dragon cards.
60 plots * 5 cards on each = 300 cards. And if all those cards were to be MAX level, that would require 3,000,000 DEC to stake on them, 50k DEC per plot. Now, I currently only have about 300k liquid so it's a relief that there's no way I'll be able to occupy all my plots with MAX level cards :)
Counting cards
Given that I still want to actually play the game (particulary participate in brawls) I cannot simply use any card in my collection and stake on land. So when selecting cards to stake on land, I can only use cards that won't be used for actual playing.
I ended up dividing the count into two categories. Category 1 is number of owned max level cards. These cards are mostly modern reward cards that I've been trying to scoop up whenever I've had some spare cash for the past year or so. Category 2 are any cards that have at least 1000 collection power PP, but isn't maxed out. I decided 1k PP is a good minimum threshold
Category 1
As we can see, I currently have 61 max level cards ready to be staked on land. Those 61 card will require 610,000 DEC to work, so I realize I'm already have some way to go when it comes to stacking DEC.
Category 2
To qualify for this list, the card needs to have at least 1k PP. This table shows the BCX requirements for GF cards in Beta and Untamed.
Okay, only 23 cards in this category. That's.. a lot less than my original numbers said. Now that's what I call a reality check. With that said, I have quite a few gold foils just under the 1000 PP threshold, so perhaps I'll have to lower my requirement of at least 1000 PP per worker. I'll need to think about this in light of the new numbers and what I have vs what I need.
So where are we?
The numbers from the tables above show that I have about 93 of 300 qualified workers. We certainly have a way to go. The exact amount of DEC we're gonna need is not 100% clear, as I won't be going THAT deep into all the details before land drops. I'd say I need at least 1,500,000 more DEC to cover my bases, probably a bit more.
Unless.. I were to sell some plots of course. That would certainly make things a bit easier. If I were to sell say 10 of my common plots for let's say $60 a piece. Yep, that's probably what I need to do. If I only had had this idea when they were selling at around $600 a piece :D Well, you live and you learn. Next bullrun I guarantee I won't be holding on so damn hard.
If you made it all the way to the bottom here, thank you for reading! Hope you found this useful or at least somewhat interesting. If you have any thoughts, reflections or other on this topic, feel free to share them in the comments section.
If you're new to Splinterlands, here's my referral link if you'd like to check it out. Further information: What is Splinterlands? ---- What is Hive?