Splinterlands has printed too many damn cards and they aren't stopping any time soon.
They recently announced that they saw no reason to lower the run size of the next rewards cards. Now I'll remind you that the reason we had that run size before was because they expected the incredible player growth from that summer to continue so those cards could be absorbed. We didn't get that growth. To this day we don't have any more active accounts than we did then.
But even though that reason didn't pan out and we're drowning in literally millions of some of these cards with half the run left to go, they see no reason not to do it again.
On top fo that we probably have 10 million Chaos Legion packs unopened still since many people buy and hold them and there are 7 million still unsold.
Add to that Rift Watchers which is going to 10x Dice and further that they've already said they'd have Rebellion ready to go by the end of the year even if CL doesn't sell out by then. Who knows what that release will be but you know it will be at least another CL. That's a lot more cards to come into a game in the next 7 months that already drowning in supply.
So how many cards will land have to absorb to make a dent? I don't know but its a lot more than playing absorbs. 50 or 100 millions cards maybe? A few million CP per plot for max production?
And then what? What about the 2023 releases and the 2024? How will we deal with that?
Well, I think I have a way.
No cap on the amount workers/summoners staked on land.
The production level of the land is dependent on your ranking of CP staked on your plot vs all other plots.
You could do it at a percentage. Top 10% of plots with CP staked are full production. 11-20% are at 90% production. 21-30% are at 80% production, etc.
That could lead to some products/materials having a lot less production than others and do some cool things in the market.
Most importantly though, it would mean no matter how many cards get put into the economy, there's somewhere for them to go.
Of course this assumes what comes out of the land is valuable enough stake a lot of cards to it. WHo knows if that's true or not but if cards got really cheap, there would be more incentive to pick them up and stake them which could help buoy prices.
My personal preference is that we just stop printing so many cards but since that seems like an impossibility with this team for some reason, at least this would give the market a fighting chance to not drown in all this craziness.
I'd love to hear what everyone thinks of this. Can you poke a hole in the idea? I'll admit its not my most thought out idea so it's possible I'm missing something but it seems like its a pretty decent way to get things in better balance and keep it that way through all the future releases.
In the next few days I'll write up my idea for the next pack release and how they can do it better. I've talked about it before but it's always buried inside larger posts.