Supply and Demand
I haven't written anything for more than a week. This is not taking a break, but I was a bit under the weather and busy at the same time. Plus, language learning a taking a heavy toll on my personal time. Yet, it is time to write about a few land items regarding Splinterlands real quick, otherwise I will forget the timeline. A couple of month back wood went parabolic, due to the launch of the land cards, and the Kinbound Druid can be minted using just Cinder and Wood alone, wood prices went through the roof, due to both high demand and low supply. Soon after, as the increased wood production hit Praetoria, the excess supply clogged the price. I predicted the net supply will reach new high on Jan 20, 2026. I think I was a couple of weeks early, and we hit the new net supply high on Feb 06, 2026. Since then we are making new highs on net supply every single day.
What do you think excess supply does to the price?
Price goes down!
From Dec 09, 2025 high of 1000 wood = 150 DEC to todays price of 33 DEC, it is a 78% drop in price! Ouch! I hope you didn't buy wood at those inflated prices. Congratulations to you, if you were a seller at those prices. Well seller for cash that is :)
Big Picture
Here is the big picture. To run the entire operation in Praetoria (if the active plots stay stable) we need about 12M wood/day (demand). That number is not volatile at all, look at the chart to the lower left, and pay attention to the Y-axis. It varies between 11-13 M/day. Yet, we used to produce about 18M/day (supply), 6M above the organic demand (not counting supply shock events like a new land card). So prices were soft late during September-November last year, until we created the supply shock in December.
As soon as the supply shock was over in late December, now with better and more powerful cards, we started to produce 24M wood/day (+). That is double of our organic demand of 12M wood/day. Well, market is self regulating, the price obviously collapsed. As everyone started selling at any price.
Now that we have reached bottom prices, it is no longer profitable to harvest wood for most people. So, you can look at the bottom right panel above, that we couldn't break the 25M/day supply threshold and now finally we are dropping the supply. People are simply turning off the wood plots because these low prices are simply not profitable. It takes more grain to produce wood in DEC if you have to buy grain.
What did I do?
Nothing. I bought my allocated cards, and then some. I am just building stockpile. I am not the second largest holder of wood in Praetoria. Considering that I am 13th largest land holder in terms of plot, I say being in second position is fairly good. I am happy about it. Also today is the first day, I pulled a land card from the labor's luck process. It is a GF Tolling Ox. A stone card, that I need a lot of.
So, what can you do if you are a land owner? Try not to get caught in the price action and having to buy resources when they are expensive. Keep trading to a minimum and stockpile, and you will do well. Now is a good time to buy wood, if you need them. I am very happy with my land position, overall, at the bottom of the bear market, I can say, my land positions are making money daily.
