Although card rentals have been around for quite some time, typically through PeakMonsters.com, the recent direct rental integration with Splinterlands coupled with the skyrocketing card values has caused the rental market to flourish.
If you have extra cards that you don't need and there is a market for them, why not put them up on the market for some passive income? Particularly at the end of the season, when players are scrambling to reach the next tier, an epic gold can be rented for up to 1,000DEC/day.
Despite this fact I have been surprised to see some strange pricing strategies by card owners that I would like to touch on.
As a case study lets consider Spirit Miner.
Use, Sell, or Rent?...
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We are going to assume that you have exactly 11 of these bad boys floating around. What should you do? Do you combine them or leave them separate? Do you use them in battle, sell them or rent them?
First step: Check the market...
The first thing we notice is that the cheapest single card is going for about $240, so one option is to just put all 11 on the market as singles for around this amount and walk out with a cool $2640 one time profit. This might work, but it could take a long time to sell all 11. As an alternative lets see how we would do if we combined our singles into a max level card and sold it...
As expected the $/BCX price decreases. This makes sense because if anyone tried to charge significantly more $/BCX for a high level card, everyone would just buy a bunch of singles and level them up on their own. So we see a "bulk discount" on the $/BCX, which allows the seller to unload multiple cards in one shot. Personally I think you could set the $/BCX even higher, say $150-$170/BCX here and still be fine. So in this case you would walk away with approximately $1760 if you you sold a combined card. This would be less, but may sell a bit more quickly.
Renting
The problem lies with carrying this same logic over to renting. It is very common to see cards with a high BCX renting at a "discounted" bulk rate, but why? Rented cards can't be combined, so if it cost more per BCX for a high level card, those looking to rent a level 4 would have to pay this extra amount. Here the card owner has more control.
We see the daily rental rates for a single card is around 38-43 DEC/day.
But a max level Spirit Miner can be had for only 175 DEC/day or 15.91 DEC/BCX.
You would make more per day renting them out individually, assuming at least 4 or 5 out of 11 get rented. So in this case combining them has lowered the $/BCX rate for selling and also the DEC/BCX rate when renting.
Conclusion
The observation that should be made is that high level cards should have an increased DEC/BCX rather than a discounted cost. The renter should not be getting a bulk discount.
As one final piece of analysis, suppose we bought 11 single Spirit Miners for $240 each, $2640 total, and rented them for 38 DEC/DAY. We would make
(38)(11)(365)=152,570 DEC
which in todays market is about $1144.275, and still own 11 high value cards.
On the other hand if we buy that super cheap max level card for $1299 and rent it for 16 DEC/BCS we would make
(16)(11)(365)=64,240 DEC
giving us approximately $481.80 made.
Our ROI is always higher with the separate cards... even when compared to buying a super cheap LVL 4 card.
With this current flaw in the market, if you have 11 Spirit Miners you can have the best of both worlds. In this market you could rent out your cards for 38DEC/day, and rent a max level for 16DEC/BCX/day. You could make almost 90,000DEC per year in profit AND have a max level miner to use AND you still own 11 singles that you can sell whenever you see fit. At least until we see the market correct itself...