I'm finding myself rather annoyed this morning with all the whiners posting "Don't buy packs" or "Packs have no value" or "the value of cards in my pack was less than what I paid for it". As I read through the Splinterlands community post I found my blood pressure slowly rising until I finally had to deal with this.
I started playing while Untamed packs were still being sold in the Splinterlands store, those packs were selling for $2 USD each. I remember looking at the cards and checking their value. Many of the common cards at that time were selling for just 2 or 3 cents each! Rares were .10 to maybe .65 cents, epics .50 to $2 and legendary $10 to $20 USD. Sound kind of familiar?
I remember pulling my first legendary from a pack, Kron the Undying (image above). The list price was $22.00 then, as of the time of this post (just 7 months later) Kron's list price is $265 USD! I'd say that was a great return on investment.
"Oh, but I didn't pull any legendarys!" I hear the whiners howling.
Ok, let's take a look at commons from Untamed first.
So at the time of writing the cheapest common in the Splinterlands market was Biceratops at .29 cents USD (above left). The most expensive common was the Serpentine Spy at $3.85 USD! (above right) I remember both of these cards selling for less than .15 cents each just 7 months ago! WOW!
Let's look at the Untamed rares now.
Dark Astronomer (above left) list at .84 cents and Unicorn Mustang (above right) is at $11.11 USD. I remember paying .69 cents for a Unicorn Mustang!
Epics are much higher priced as well ranging from the cheapest at $6.24 to the highest being $20.99!
I know at the time I was buying packs and individual cards that buying individual cards seemed like the smarter thing to do. Now looking back I am not so sure. It seems that all the cards had a dramatic increase in overall value in a short 7 month period. Buying 100 Serpentine Spys for $15 USD back then and just HODLing for 7 months and reselling at $3.85 each would be a return of $370.00 USD!!!
Some people are skeptical Chaos legions cards will attain this kind of value, I am not, and here is why. Even though Chaos Legions will have a whopping 15 million packs for sale vs the much smaller offering of Untamed, the player base of Splinterlands has grown incredibly. There will again not be enough packs to go around for long. Less than 24 hours into the general sale over 6 million packs have already been sold. I think that the remainder will sell out well before the Riftwatcher packs are released. When Untamed packs were sold out from the Splinterlands store it wasn't long before card values began to rise. I think we will see a repeat of this.
The added factor that will keep Chaos Legion prices in the future on par with Untamed is the price per pack. At $4 USD per pack, their future price increase is almost guaranteed to rise comparatively. They are already holding prices comparative to Untamed prices shortly after it was released.
Another factor that will drive card prices up is Splinterlands' continued growth. They are only just now launching an organized ad campaign. Up until now a huge amount of growth came from word of mouth, was community spread, or bloggers, etc. Yeah, you haven't even seen blowout yet, wait till people start onboarding like crazy to play the hottest new P2E crypto game with the coolest NFT's!!!
A side note on those who buy 1 or 2 packs and act disgusted with not pulling a legendary. Trading card games, like Magic the Gather, have 36 packs in a box. Out of a box only 3-5 packs (depending on the series) will contain a rare (what we call a legendary), and only one pack per box would contain a mythic card (that may have changed in recent years). Splinterlands' card pulls are similar, you can't honestly expect to pull a legendary from every pack, their rarity is the reason for their value! But don't complain about those commons and here is why.
I have common cards from the Alpha, Beta and Limited series of Magic the Gathering (a trading card game that started in the 1990s and enjoys a huge player base today), those commons are worth a small fortune by today's prices. I am confident that in 5-10 years my common Splinterlands cards from Chaos Legion will be worth a pretty penny too!
So I hope all the whiners feel better about what the future holds for them, if you don't however, and plan on quitting just send those worthless commons to 
For everyone else, hang on to your britches, it is going to be a wild ride!
Rights for all images contained in this post are owned by Splinterlands
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