What if... Certainly one of my favorite sentence starters of all time. Curiosity is what supposedly killed the cat but also makes some animals higher on the food chain than others over time. This will be no exception to that concept and I will explain the best I can why I think this would be a literal game changer to The Splinterlands over time if it could ever be implemented.
First off I want to salute the creators and developers that are doing marvels of which most of us cannot comprehend. As "open sourced" as it gets within a community, unlike any game out there that I know of, otherwise I would be out in that crypto space likely touting it instead of The Splinterlands. But I do think the vision needs to tilt a bit more upward.
You can approach problematic behavior in a few different ways. You can directly sanction it, which is intended well to stop it or at least slow it down. But, in my humble opinion is to make bad behavior less consequential, which is what is happening, but it's smashing the little guy... to a point.
I would personally love to see something on the side of "lifting the ceiling" a bit for max earners within the game to get your desired result much more so. Which would include greater accumulation of cards, increased value of cards, and increased urgency to own these cards. I have said it so many times on here The Splinterlands being in an early stage of development and adoption of its base "...The return on card value, scarcity, and demand will be your ultimate advertisement early on." Gimmicks don't make anything necessarily sustainable, I do certainly give you that, but it doesn't hurt to get more people rushing in. People do not necessarily care about anything that is a game, they need an arm-twisting to get into it. When you tell someone "I am playing this really cool game blah blah blah" is what the vast majority of people hear when you start talking about it to a stranger to the game. But, if say "This thing I am doing has doubled in value like 2x in the past 6 months and is still growing," then the buying signals within the mind start to register. Such as "Is it legit? Is it still able to keep going up? What are they buying within this that keeps going up?" Versus blah blah blah which is of course a non-starter. The above is the beginning stage of diagnosing a move on the new person to the game versus totally of course ignoring the thought and chasing the next shiny object in sight.
There are dynamics that are happening that will at some point in the future whether artificially manufactured by the game or by massive adoption, or default will happen to some of the economics of the game. First, gold cards will not stay as relatively cheap as they are if the game takes off. Not possible. They currently act as stores of DEC or a chance to play in an occasional tournament to win a prize that the market has shown is of no consequence compared to the daily value of having base cards leveled up versus gold cards that are likewise leveled up to the same ability. I think this could and should change at some point and there is a wild dynamic that could make this happen. Buckle your safety straps, this is going to get nuts and to the point (as best I can).
The game needs a "return of the gold eye," "Alchemists Revenge," something along that story line for those that get caught up in the lore of all of that. Outside of pure speculation of the game taking off at some point you are essentially buying long term bonds of the game's future upside in purchasing or simply holding gold cards. If that is not your thinking then unfortunately you are a sucker, or one of the few people that win virtually every single gold tournament.
In this idea there are a few facets that would bring about a drastic change to that operating theory, along with possibly upping the ante as making gold cards the official "divider of worlds" so to speak in the game. First, there needs to be a "double max" gold card that is built into the game. That meaning it has a hidden buff that interacts with gameplay. As in a single buff for each gold card that may or may not happen depending on the RNG factors of each feature of a given card. For illustration purposes, if you have a default RNG model of a card having a 50% chance of adding a stat buff. Meaning, there are odds that a buff may not even happen. Or the card gets a +1 buff in their highest attribute in attack (due to multiple attack cards), health, armor, or speed. A simple way to present this would be a 1/8 chance of a buff of one of the above mentioned stats (attack 1, health, speed, armor), and a 4/8=1/2 chance of absolutely nothing happening. This would only be applicable to cards that are gold double maxed, meaning two max versions of gold cards would only experience this potential buff. But that would not be where it stops.
Double Maxed gold cards would also receive a buff when played in daily quests. They would get a 220% total of what a single, regular gold cards receives in DEC currently. They would also receive a total of 3x burn value in DEC of what they currently receive also. Yeah, nutty as can be, but it keeps getting crazier...
Double maxed regular cards, again meaning two fully maxed out cards, would have an option to be converted to a given BCX level that would turn them to gold based on the level of the card being common to legendary. Common cards would be 10% the bcx of it's gold counterpart if they are double maxed, meaning two maxed out level 10's combined into a single "double maxed card." So doing the math, 20 maxed regular cards would equal a single, maxed gold version of the given card. Sounds crazy, less than 20 maxed cards, that's way less than the current 50:1 ratio prior to using any alchemy potions?
But, to do this you need 8,000 cards. Yes, that makes 2% of the entire total ever printed currently for any given actively printed reward card. Meaning, good luck trying to endeavor as the second person to succeed with all regular cards, let alone the 3rd, 4th, or 10th person. Each card would carry a scarcity that make market purchases much more difficult for bulk building of decks moving forward. It would also mean if you have 799 you have nothing more than a maxed out card that is getting you an extra 5% in burn value with it being maxed out, but nothing else. If you combine one more card you then would have a max total you can combine regular cards within one card-and an option to convert this to gold, 1/10 the bcx of a max gold, which at the moment would be 3.8 bcx for a gold common. So to move this card to a gold you would need a massive amount of cards to even consider it of course which would raise the thinking in many players minds' "How far can I go- Or how far do I want to go above a maxed card?"
The double maxed regular card would carry a 2.25x (accounting for the two cards + a 25% bonus) DEC burn value, so there would be a benefit in that alone if you didn't care to convert to gold but wanted to pick up additional DEC to burn the card. But unlike its gold counterpart the double maxed regular card would carry no additional reward in daily quests, or buffs in battle. It simply would be a conversion option to a single gold card with additional burn value if the holder were to choose to burn the card for DEC to de-populate the universe of 10k DEC burning and the 800 cards of the given common(10 DEC X 800 X 1.25=10k, because you are burning a single card at a 25% bonus rate).
The other higher level cards would get much more interesting. They go up 50% each level in gold conversion rarity, meaning a rare level, double stacked card would be 1/15 of a card card, an epic 1/22, a legendary 1/33. So it would only take 363 legendary cards to eventually turn it into a gold single max, and 726X to do this-which would put a nice check on the floor of base/regular legendary cards I would think.
Now the most fun part of all, intended game theory consequences... First, there would be a boon to those that are holding more than one maxed out regular card, they would have an option to turn it to gold, or even burn it to DEC if they were unsatisfied with the returns on the card say in the lease market or when putting them up for sale. Players would be driven incredibly more so to use alchemy potions as much as possible.
Scarcity would be created based on model we have yet to see. FOMO would be instant, people wouldn't know what to do if they wanted to raise their expectations of what they can do with their decks if they wanted to pursue this with as much of their deck as they could. That would be the great thing, each person that has one of these gold double maxed cards would surely deserve them at that point.
This would be staggering on the levels of daily DEC burning to pull better reward cards, opening new packs, and have a radical effect on consolidating cards to the existing audience. Rental markets would be quite nice to those that had the ability and fortitude to double max a gold card, that is without question. Those that would want to do it would hit some roadblocks in available quantity. We very likely could hit an arbitrage opportunity of buying packs and some whales would definitely want to control certain levels of quantity to maintain their stranglehold. Those that didn't like it would simply sell out to those that wish to take it further if they like. The fanatics would definitely be rewarded, and the "day trippers" (to steal the British term and Beatles song for those that are camp followers-google it, not a pleasant connotation to the word in historical military definitions).
And to those that would want to bot their double maxed cards I invite you to do so. If you are holding even a single double maxed gold deck you deserve it.
Feel free to leave your comments, whines, wimpers, full blown tantrums or maybe even hateful tirades below, lol, but keep it clean, this is a family post-hence me not using the literal definition of campfollower earlier on.