With the Chaos Legion pre-sale coming to a close the last week of November, I've been collaborating with fellow wizards in the Crypto-Gaming Guild on plans for bulk purchasing CL packs. We've been trying to answer questions like "How many packs should we buy," "Do we maximize bulk discounts or accounts getting airdrops," and of course "How many of these packs can we crack on day 1?!"
One of the questions that's formed in my mind is how long CL packs will be available before they inevitably sell out. The Untamed set minted 1,500,000 packs, sold for $2 USD, and were on sale 2019-2021. The impressive growth in player count in 2021 led to a fervor in claiming the final 50,000 Untamed packs in a 48-hour window. In retrospect, Untamed packs were available for an extended period of time, but supply quickly dwindled as players ramped up. The remaining 76K unopened packs are now trading on Hive for a staggering $72 USD each. This is a huge return for a $2 investment. I'd expect to see CL packs going for $20 USD after they sell out, appealing to crypto investors even without the utility of cards used in-game.
What's different in Chaos Legion? Packs are $4 USD and the developers are minting 10x as many for 15M packs available. I estimate that players on a limited budget have been struggling to grow their collections without packs being available and the surge in card values we've seen since the spring. This is also why rentals have been so key in the game's growth and why the recent launch of rental bids on PeakMonsters has been massive! I predict newer players will be buying packs in droves to improve their collections and total power for moving up the ladder.
Here's the difference for Chaos Legion that inspires a hypothesis that packs will sell out by end of the year. We are coming up on the 1/3 point of a year-long airdrop of the Splinterlands Splintershards (SPS) token. As of this writing, there is a total supply of 311M SPS valued at $160M USD market cap. CL packs can be purchased with SPS. If we limit the SPS pool to just what is liquid, there is $73M USD ready to go towards packs. The community would only need $60M USD (15M*$4) to buy up the entire set as soon as the pre-sale is over (or when vouchers are no longer required). That's available in liquid SPS today. There will only be more SPS dropped before the launch of CL. Splinterlands has already dropped to the community enough funds to buy up all of CL at launch. Between SPS, DEC, and credits, there is more than enough funding available.
Adding to the hypothesis is that 225K CL packs have already been claimed in the pre-sale, which goes another 17 days and will surely see a spike in sales as players want to maximize airdrops of Doctor Blight. I think it is conservative to assume we'll see close to 500K packs sold as half of the 1M voucher pool is held onto for future events. That's equivalent to 1/3 of the entire Untamed pool just in this set's pre-sale.
Am I missing anything here, C/Splinterlands? I don't want to spark Chaos Legion FOMO, but from these factors, it seems entirely plausible for packs to sell out this year, if not sooner.