I would never have thought to say something like that about a game! But let's be honest, Splinterlands is far more than a game. I spend much more time managing my investment in Splinterlands these days than playing the game itself.
I may be missing a few of the ways one can make a profit or earn through Splinterlands, but I'll try to make a list as complete as possible here:
- buy packs, hold, and sell after they are sold out
- buy cards cheap, and sell them when they are in high demand at a higher price, usually after their packs are sold out or they are out of print (for the reward cards)
- flip cards for profit or use case
- burn cards for their DEC value, if their market price is below that (unlikely)
- make a profit trading or investing short-term in SPS, DEC, or VOUCHER on the secondary markets
- Burn SPS for DEC if the price of DEC goes above 0.001, to arbitrage
- arbitrage between the various markets where the Splinterlands tokens are listed
Playing To Earn
- buy packs and open them or single cards, build a deck, and play the game to earn
- rent cards and play to earn a profit in ranked games, tournaments, and brawls
- while building your deck
- without building your own deck
- become a scholar: use someone else's deck to play it for rewards and split rewards with that person
Investing
- invest in a deck (to play it, rent it out, sell account)
- rent out entire decks, usually to a scholar, and split rewards
- rent cards out
- rent all your cards out
- rent your excess cards out, the ones you don't play with
- stake SPS for rewards (including GLX airdrop) and governance voting
- earn rewards for providing liquidity to certain Splinterlands-related pools on Hive-Engine, BSC, or Ethereum
- own land, for its benefits, current, and future
- own SPS node validator licenses for their benefits
- become an SPS node validator, when that will be publicly released
- own Tower Defense packs for their current benefits and future use case
- buy any kind of pack from Splinterlands to participate in their card airdrops at certain milestones of packs sold
- stake GLX for an impressive APR or sell it when the price meets your target
- own GLG packs for future GLX rewards
- own SPS node validator licenses for an airdrop of GLS node validator licenses (? Matt mentioned it in a Town Hall some time ago)
- invest in projects that offer 3rd party services for Splinterlands
- invest in projects that invest in Splinterlands and share dividends
- pool funds together for better benefits in presales
- mega-guilds - invest a lot upfront for the best benefits, usually use a scholarship system to split rewards with those playing the accounts they control
As you can see from the above list, Investing is the largest category, and many of them are not related to the game itself.
The latest rage in the Splinterlands realm is probably the GLX airdrop, which is performing much better than many expected.
Here's my daily passive income from SPS and GLX at this time, and after I sold a good portion of my GLX for stables which now earn their own APR:
And that doesn't include any rewards from playing the game, renting out cards, land rewards, TD rewards, LP rewards, or anything else I might be missing from this enumeration. For example, GLX staking gives both GLX rewards and GLGT rewards, but currently, GLGT (the correspondent of VOUCHER on GLS) doesn't have any market value. They will have one at some point, but in the meantime, they accumulate.