Hello fellow Splinterland players!
Most of you probably enjoy playing Splinterlands as much as I do, and you think about how to get an edge over your opponents. This “getting ahead of the curve” can involve the invention of superior strategies or the acquisition of new cards in order to beat your opponents. With the implemented ECR decay, however, there is an inherent mechanism that puts a stop to these efforts after a few hours of playing. Here, I present a third possibility to accumulate DEC, which is not limited by ECR decay: trading the Splinterlands market!
In this post I want to share my strategy by outlining opportunities and pitfalls.
General remarks and lessons from the general stock market
Be aware of the hidden costs: If you sell a card in-game, the market platform used will deduct a fee of 5%. Accordingly, your profits between purchase and sell have to be greater than this amount. This can partly be amended by using third party markets such as
or
, which will return around 3% directly upon purchase.
Don`t grab into a falling knife! This is arguably one of the most famous saying in the stock market, but it also applies to the Splinterlands market. A great example would be a card like Oshannus. He has seen a heavy decline in price from 50$ to around 6$ as of writing this post. No one can predict when his prize will stabilize or even rise again. You can not bet on falling prices in Splinterlands and should thus look at cards that are not stuck in a downward trend.
This brings me automatically to my second - and most important - point:
2.Which cards are suitable/ not-suitable for trading on the Splinterlands market?
If you want to make profits of buying and selling cards, you need volatility in the prices. This is not the case for most of the common or rare cards: Many of these cards have a stable prize without huge fluctuation caused by the high print rates.
This is totally different for cards with a low free float: legendary cards! because of their lower print rates and the concomitant scarcity on the market, prices for these cards fluctuate substantially. Among legendaries, however, there are still substantial differences. How to identify the best cards for trading? Two factors are crucial for the selection and vital for your success:
- the current number of cards available for sale
- the current price range of cards available for sale
Below I will show two examples: one is Oshannus, a great card which is at a current price level of 6.20$ and a freefloat of 275 cards. The second one is Chaos Dragon, current price level of 13$ and a freefloat of only 50 cards.
Looking at the price of Oshannus, the first 10 sales hover between 6.27 and 6.44 (equals 3% difference = relatively stable price). The first 10 trades of Chaos Dragon, on the other hand, range from 13.80$ to 17.00$ between the first trades (19% difference = relatively unstable price). More importantly, the price range for Chaos Dragon is, with 19%, bigger than the profit we want to achieve (> 2%). Although I picked Chaos Dragon here as an example, below I will show that other legendary cards are equally suited to perform market trading, but you should concentrate on a few cards as it is easier to follow their price development.
Two examples of successful trades are shown below and demonstrate that it is possible with a little patience and observation profits can be made.
For comparison: the profit of the Djinn Murat trade was around 600 DEC within a day, the Legionnaire Alvar trade around 1000 DEC within two days. For a silver player like me (around 2 DEC/win) this equals DEC earnings equaling about 300 wins or 565 games (at a winrate of 53%). Or another comparison: my whole DEC earnings from playing in the month of January were 385 DEC. The two trades shown above thus represent winnings of around 4 months of playing, making only a few trades per month highly profitable.
Let me know if you already experimented trading the Splinterlands market. If not I hope this post will make you try!
Shoutout to 
Best of luck & may the Blockchain be with you!
-TheGreatKaspi (on Twitch aka "k45" or k45p3r13 or "kasper!")