The non-gamers guide to investing less than $200 into Splinterlands.

in #spt4 years ago

You believe it has a bright future; you'd like to diversify with some of these recent STEEM gains; but you have no time or talent for the game and wouldn't know where to start?

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There are hundreds of enthusiasts intimately familiar with the game, carefully investing in cards to:

  • Improve their own game
  • Sell to other gamers in future

They're really good at what they do, and you can't hope to compete with them, so don't try.

You don't want to sell to players.
You want to sell to collectors.

Collectors aren't concerned with gameplay, they just want one of each card; and if you believe the game is headed for a much larger audience, you just want to snap up cards which are plentiful now and will be scarce when the collectors arrive. Simple.

This strategy requires zero game knowledge or aptitude, which is great news.


The cards we want to look at are a type known as Rewards cards.

They're given to players for free. The higher the level of player, the more of these cards they get, just for playing.

The cards have a capped supply; and most players win more of each card than they need before that supply runs out and the cards stop printing.
They usually dump excess cards on the secondary market to finance the acquisition of other cards which aren't given away free by the game.

That's the sweet spot, right there.

These are cards which are everywhere now; lightly valued by the current playerbase; but which will suddenly stop being printed at some point in the near future; and become highly valued by a multitude of future collectors who have yet to hear about the game.

You can see live updates on how close each of these cards is to their total cap - Here -

Thanks, @kiokizz, for such a helpful tool.

At time of writing these cards are closest to ending their print run, at which point they'll no longer be given away, they'll only be available to buy from those who have them.

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Ruler of the Seas only has a few days left; Brownie probably has at least a month to go.


So we have a handful of good options here, let's drill down further and buy a few.

Head over to https://peakmonsters.com/market
Log in with keychain
In the filter on the right, Unselect 'Untamed' and select 'Reward'

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Goblin Mech is over 80% printed, and price is 5% down, so looking cheap at $0.024
We'll click the light blue 'BUY' button and snap some up.

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You can see the cards I've selected have the red shopping cart on the right.
You can SHIFT+CLICK to select multiple cards quickly
Some are higher level, we're not interested in those, and
I'm only buying up to 3c, so didn't select the one at the bottom.
That little alarm clock is irrelevant, feel free to buy those ones if the price is right.

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I've continued shopping, and also picked up some Rusty Android cards. They're out of print now but haven't seen a price rise yet, so worth stocking up on.

Now I click the little shopping cart, and you can see the 17 cards I've selected, the total price either in STEEM or SBD, along with my available balances.
The other option, DEC is the internal currency of Spinterlands and is earned by playing.

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I'll pay with STEEM, and just confirm with keychain, the peakmonsters site will handle the transaction and deliver the cards to my collection.

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If too many of you take this advice and drive prices up you'll want to look at Reward cards under 80%; (they'll be out of print in a few months anyway) or wait a few days and check again.

Keep an eye on the value of your cards in the Collection tab. This is also where you'll go to list them for sale when the time comes.

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If you're in a position to invest $200, simply head over to Splinterlands and buy 100 Untamed packs. You'll get 10 bonus packs and a chance at some sweet airdrops.
Don't open them; just wait a year or two.


Its easy to assume that you can't wisely invest without intimate knowledge of the game; but just knowing it exists, gives you an edge over your future customer base.

Of course knowing isn't enough, you also need to pull the trigger.

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When the reward cards turn to gold is the best!

It's always an Undead Minotaur or Vampire though :)

Got a couple of legendaries and a couple of golds in my season rewards just now.
Best I've done in a long time :)

Woohoo!

You have been manually curated by the @splinterlands / @steemmonsters team!

Enjoy your juicy upvote and keep creating excellent Splinterlands content!

Whoa. Awesome tutorial. I often think about how the reward cards are undervalued cause when you get something for free it's never worth it. 😉 A handful of folks DO play ONLY to sell their reward cards on the cheap... I suppose that's good for folks with the ability to 'future-think'. To be fair, thinking about the future is NOT a human characteristic... but some of us are figuring it out.

Thanks for dropping the knowledge. 😎@carrieallen

Great Post and so very true, the bad move would be to not invest at least a small amount because its no telling where this game might end up. But like all investments don't invest anymore than you're ok with losing.

P.S. .... Stay away from my Rusty Androids :)

!BEER

I think a good point about reward cards that will help drive up the price and is mostly forgotten is these cards are only obtained through playing or buying individual cards. There are no unopened packs that could be massed opened and suddenly drive the price down.

True. Some of the totals sound daunting, 400,000 of each common; but at 500+ to max one out, that's less than 800 possible, and we have 3000+ daily players.
Assuming most purchasers are buying in order to combine, that's very few loose singles that are going to be available to collectors down the track.

I think that's another choice that investors will also have to make soon enough is whether to invest in single cards or maxed cards as their will be a customer for both. I think single cards will sell for a premium on a per card basis, but unless you have a bot to list one card everytime a card sells it's going to be lots of work compared to buying maxed out cards that may sell less per card, but the seller doesn't have to deal with the volume.

hey matt is there any reason to join a guild on SM? Which one?

Plenty of advantages. DEC bonuses for wins and discounts on potions and orbs.
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@contestkings is a great option. You have to pay your way in and contribute by doing daily quests, but then you own your seat.
Other guilds offer free membership, but obviously those seats are hotly contested and you're a member at the discretion of the leader.

cool have been doing daily quests. will sign up

Fantastic. Be great to have you onboard :)
Crafting/mining is on the way and I believe a lot of that will be guild based.
The guys in discord were talking about DEC taking a dip yesterday, so I turned 400 STEEM into 64K DEC, then thanks to our Guild discount I only had to spend 70,500K DEC to get 115 Daily quest potions.
That's 575 random rewards cards over the next few months for around AUD $80.
Won't take many epics, legendaries and golds to make that back, just need to average 14c/card.

AWESOME ARTICLE, @mattclarke!!!! Hmmmm... I think I will go buy me some right now, hahaha
Take care 🥰🌺🤙

Amazing post! Super helpful. :)


ibt
Congrats! on your upvotes from the IBT Community

Things are a bit tight right now, but I have been slowly accumulating the cheaper rewards cards when I have had the spare DEC / Steem to do so.

I guess I need to buy one more ruler of seas to level up my card before the printing stops and the supply starts being bought up...

This is a really nice guide m8, I haven't invested much into the game, my cards are all delegated and I split the rewards 50/50 with the player, but investing into some of the cards is definitely on my "To do"list because I see great potential for Steemmonsters.

Its a great system, the herons. I have both of my sons' accounts earning that way, (snowy-egret and dimorphic-egret)
They're too young to appreciate the game at the moment, and their cards were just getting dusty :)

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