It's official! We know Waka Spiritblade will be available at 12pm EST / 17:00 UTC on Thursday, February, 2022 in the Splinterlands store and will cost 5000 SPS and 500 vouchers to buy (in the initial phase). The countdown has begun! Now it's time to decide whether you should be saving up for this Legendary summoner!
At current market prices of $0.15 / SPS and $2.42 / voucher, Waka is currently priced at $1960. That's a hefty sum for any card, so we need to take a good look at whether he'll be worth it.
Let's first take a look at the current list prices of maxed out legendary summoners to get a quick pulse.
Maxed legendary summoner prices:
As you can see, the range goes from $312.50 for Quix the Devious to $24,970 for Archmage Arius. The average price is about $5700, so based on this simple metric $1960 doesn't seem excessive. It's probably best to remove outliers however, so let's take Arius and Julian out of the equation. Now the average is a modest $3582 - still reasonable! However let's face it - averages are for average people ;) Let's dig a bit deeper.
Let's look at rarity. We know that there will only ever be 1000 Waka Spiritblades. They're all maxed, which means there is 11000 BCX worth of Waka out there. This is about 2-2.5 times as much BCX as the Untamed Legendary summoners (e.g. Kitty had about 4k BCX printed, Llama 4.5k, and Yodin 5.4k). Therefore it's technically 2-2.5x less rare than these summoners. The Untamed Legendary summoners, and max level, range from $1,169 for Camila Sungazer to $7,111 for Kitty. If we the difference in rarity has a linear impact on price, then therefore we'd assume Waka should be priced between $500 to $2500.
4442 cards (i.e. BCX) of Llama were printed:
Let's now think of utility. Waka is the first summoner who will grant Poison to your entire team (every attack will have a 50% chance of inflicting poison). This can be absolutely deadly. It essentially makes every attacking card considerably more deadly, and will synergize particularly well with cards that are low on offense (e.g. deal 1 damage) but have high health, because those cards will now have survivability while still being able to inflict a ton of damage. It'll also introduce new strategies, like for example mixing snipe and sneak to maximize your poison output. Finally, it'll dramatically increase the value of immunity. Waka absolutely has an effect on the meta, and that should give him value. Going back to the Untamed Legendary summoners, it's a no-brainer that Waka has more utility than Camila, however he'll be outmatched by some of the other summoners in that group except for the fact that he's a 3-mana summoner and they all cost 7. That's a huge difference maker in low mana games, making Waka a viable option when others might not. In my opinion, Waka lands roughly in the 60th percentile in terms of utility among all Legendary summoners (i.e. I'll likely use him above 60% of the ones that are currently there, while the other 40% I would prioritize over Waka).
Finally let's have a look at Regular vs. Gold Foil chances & prices.
Waka Regular vs. Gold foil:
We know there will be a total of 960 Regular Foil and 40 Gold Foil. For the first phase of the sale it'll be random whether you get one or the other. We don't know how it'll be for the second phase, so let's just price phase 1 for now. 20/500 means a 4% chance of getting a GF.
It's a bit hard to repeat the exercise from above as there aren't maxed GF versions on the market of every Legendary summoner. Therefore let's take a look at what's available at min BCX and project what the maxxed costs would be from there.
Prices of maxed GF Legendary summoners:
We can see the prices range from $249 to $25k. Once again, let's remove the top 2 cards as outliers, bringing the top of the range to $10k. Since a maxed copy would require 4 BCX in GF, we could project that to a range of $1k-40k for maxed versions. However typically there's a discount when multiple BCX are applied. While this is highly variable, let's be conservative and assume a 30% discount, bringing the range from $700-28k, and an average of about $15k (after applying the 30% discount).
Summary!
Ok now let's tie all this together:
- Price tag of $1960 based on current prices of SPS and vouchers
- Average price of maxed regular foil Legendary summoners (removing top 2 outliers): $3582
- Average price of maxed gold foil Legendary summoners (removing top 2 outliers and assuming 30% cut on max BCX): $15k
- Rarity about 2-2.5x lower than Untamed Legendary summoners
- Unique utility, and 60th percentile among existing Legendary summoners (personal viewpoint)
- 96% chance of regular foil, 4% chance of GF
So with all this data, my conclusion ultimately is that the Splinterlands team did an EXCEPTIONAL job pricing this card. Personally I would value the regular foil at $1.8-2k and the GF at $4.5-5k, giving it an implied value of...$2k! Putting all this aside however, I don't see any scenario where the market price of this beast would be under the initial market price for a long time to come, so I don't think you can go wrong if you elect to buy one of these.
Final tip: if you're considering buying a Waka and are satisfied with its price based on the current price of SPS and vouchers, then don't wait to get your SPS and vouchers ready. If you wait and SPS and vouchers go up in price, you may get priced out. If however you buy now and the market prices of the tokens go up, that doesn't change the analysis above as those generally would lead to proportional increases in the value of the NFTs (remember you'll get airdrop points, the ability to rent, and of course battle earnings, so it's all tied together).
Hope this was useful, and good luck everyone!