There are lots of ways to invest in Splinterlands and in this blog I try to compare them to find out which one is good for whom. I'm not a financial adviser these are all just my opinion about different investment options in Splinterlands so do your own research before investing in any asset!
In my opinion best way to invest in Splinterlands is buying cards directly from the market because it's less risky compared to buying booster packs and you will buy exact cards which you need. Most affordable cards to buy right now is Chaos Legion cards. You can move to upper leagues by just owning Chaos Legion and reward cards. By building your deck you'll be able to earn more dec, reward chests, tournament prizes etc. Pros of owning cards are: cards keep their value better than most other assets, you can rent them to earn passive income, you'll need cards in the upcoming land system, they are scarce so you can sell them for more expensive price in the future, cards give you collection power so you can get sps airdrop band move higher leagues, without collection power you'll stuck at low league even if you get higher trophies etc.
Second best way to invest in Splinterlands imo is staking sps. Currently you can earn about 24% roi from sps staking and additionally you earn vouchers by staking sps. You can sell your vouchers or use them to buy packs at discount. Most tournaments has sps staking requirements so you'll need to stake sps to be able to join them.
Right now sps is trading at 0.105 usd which is close to it's all time low. With the sps airdrop ending and upcoming sps validator sale we may see some growth in it's price. Even if gets below 10 cents i think in the long term sps will be trading at least over 20 cents.
Other then cards and sps here are other good investment options:
Card packs - Currently cheapest Chaos Legion packs are trading at 2.80 usd each if you don't mind legendary airdrops then it can be good option to buy and hold them. Packs are scarce and till now all the booster pack editions had at least 5x roi if you bought and hold them. I think in 2 years Chaos Legion packs will be trading at 10 bucks each but it's just my opinion so everything can happen.
Spt - Spt is the native blogging token of Splinterlands game. You can earn it by blogging or you can buy it directly from hive-engine. By owning spt you can curate splinterlands related content and in exchange you will earn more spt. Current use case of spt is upvoting and being able to buy splinterlands nfts.
Land Plots - I don't know how land system will work but it will have huge impact on the gameplay so it'd be better to own at least one plot to mint cards.
Dec - Dec's best feature was sps airdrop but there's only 88 days till airdrop ending so I don't think there will be any other use case which can replace sps airdrop.