One of my proudest Splinterlands moments was when I was fortunate enough to be present in the audience of an @MSP-Waves broadcast in 2018. In this broadcast, 
When during that broadcast it was announced that the first Steem Monsters booster packs could be purchased for STEEM, I was all over it, happily spending the liquid STEEM that I had. The idea of owning my cards and my experience hooked me, and I told my wife @CarrieAllen "this is it. I want to do this, and I want to do it big." I immediately began writing Steem Monsters stories, articles and comedy sketches, which Carrie and I performed on our radio comedy show, The Playhouse. Eventually, through the big fantasy world-building collaborative writing contest, we were even able to earn ourselves positions on the Splinterlands team as content creators and marketers. This was a dream come true, to not only play this revolutionary game every day, but to work full-time as a creative writer. To this day, I'm constantly thankful for the fact that I can stay home with my wife and do work that I love.
One of the packs that I purchased on that first day contained a card called the Spirit of the Forest that was labeled Legendary. I didn't really know what that meant, but I could assume it was a good card. It wasn't until a few weeks later when I noticed a friend's post on Steemit that I realized my Spirit of the Forest was the first Legendary card ever created in Splinterlands. You can check out that old post below.
Splinterlands is a well-known force in blockchain gaming, and while we are small, Splinterlands has led the blockchain pack in many of the crucial innovations that have elevated play-to-earn gaming toward the world mainstage of gaming. Though there is a long way to go, the groundwork is now laid for a solid play-to-earn experience that has the potential to reach a worldwide audience of gamers.
In the beginning, Steem Monsters was a vision. Many people shared this vision, but today I still wonder how many of us expected that NFTs would become a trending topic in 2021, or that pieces of digital art would sell for millions of dollars.
In my marketing efforts, I have branched out a ways further than HIVE into the wider world of non-fungible tokens. I continually ask myself what gives NFTs their value. The simple answer is always the people who agree that they have value, but this is an easy answer. Digging deep into the worlds of crypto, blockchain and DeFi has shown me one important thing that we all realize, but of which few understand the importance: We all want to be first.
Wanting to be First
I look out across the vast world of social media cryptoland (cryptotwitter) and I see people whose life have meaning simply because they consider themselves "early adopters." They will endlessly shill and speculate while insisting that they are not offering "investment advice," but we and they both know that they are doing their absolute best to control and manipulate the markets for their own profit.
The loudest cheerleaders for cryptocurrency on Twitter will insist that you should buy, buy, buy and hodl, hodl, hodl. I have no doubt that they believe in the future of cryptocurrency and the power of the technology behind it, but they have two more important goals or motivations in my mind. First and most importantly, they want to make money. The way that money can be made while an asset is consistently growing in value is to make sure that it continues growing in value. Second, they want everyone they know to know that they were there first. Sometimes I wonder if the second motivation is even stronger than the first. There are lots of opportunities in the world to make money (most involving hard work), but there aren't as many opportunities to be right. Never underestimate the importance of being right to a human being.
There are certain early supporters of bitcoin and cryptocurrency that won't last. They may preach that they are here for the long haul, but it has become fairly clear to me that "early" is more important than "supporter" to many of these people, especially the noisiest ones. What will they do when values normalize, when they can no longer make piles of money for simply being early to the party? My guess is that many will fizzle out and fade away.
NFT Mint Numbers
The intense desire to be first that I see (and am certainly guilty of myself) is illustrated in many ways, but one of the most important is mint numbers. Many people in the NFT world will tell you that unless an NFT has a mint number, it's not really an NFT. This is not entirely true, but in this industry, what's true matters less than what people are saying.
Splinterlands, as one of the true pioneers of the NFT space, did not see the mint number phenomenon coming. On blockchains that are better known for NFTs (ETH and WAX come to mind), every collector knows that mint numbers are money. This is because low mints are the desire to be first perfectly exemplified for all to see.
I have seen mint #1s sell in some cases for 20-30x the price of higher mint numbers. The truest collectors on the scene realize something that many HIVE users and Splinterlands players have yet to learn. With the recent addition of the HIVE/WAX bridge for Splinterlands that allows users to transfer cards bewteen blockchains, I was shocked to hear many Splinterlands users complaining about overpriced mint #1 Splinterlands cards. Some Splinterlands players have even gone as far as to say that they are a ripoff or that they have no value. Even Splinterlands themselves felt the need to include a disclaimer in the announcement post that specified low WAX mints would have no utility in the game. Low mints almost never have extra utility; they are valued and collected simply because they are low mints. If Splinterlands players fail to see that, then the mint number has been a neglected idea.
Adding Mint Numbers to Splinterlands Cards
Unless Splinterlands adds STEEM/HIVE mint numbers to cards on their native chain, a division will be created between Splinterlands cards on WAX and Splinterlands cards in the game. People will start to view the WAX cards as "collectibles" simply because they have mint numbers, while they will continue to see the cards on HIVE as having value through utility alone.
Because Splinterlands is built on a blockchain, the information is there. Adding mint numbers to the cards could theoretically be as simple as changing the way the blockchain data is communicated. While C-1Q1NQC3KWO is recognizable to me as the first Legendary card ever in the game, I never would have noticed had it not been for the post that I shared earlier in this article.
If instead of cryptic serial numbers, players were able to see consecutive mint numbers that indicate where the asset falls in the total supply of dropped BCX of that card, many things would be treated differently.
Combining Cards - But what about when cards are burned through combining? This could be as simple as allowing the new multiple BCX card that results from combining to be the lowest mint number of all the cards that were combined. When cards are burned for Dark Energy Crystals, of course their mint numbers would also be burned.
The Shift - Suddenly, Splinterlands players would see their Splinterlands NFTs as having collectible value, not just value based on what they can do with it in the game. The markets would become more interesting as mint number would also need to be factored in to both asks and bids.
Imagine how much more exciting the release of a new set or new Reward cards could be if easy-to-read mint numbers were also part of the picture. Even Common Reward cards, which typically are sold during their print runs for just pennies (or less), would come with low mint versions that contained untold collectible value. In fact, the larger the circulating supply of a card (Common), the more rare is the mint #1, making a #1 Common theoretically more valuable than a #1 Legendary. There are many possibilities, and while I cannot begin to predict them all, this shift would be good for the Splinterlands NFT economy and would gain lots of new positive attention for the game.
Thanks for reading! See you out there!
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