Conflicts Are Starting Next Tuesday - Don't Miss Out On Your Airdrops!
Airdrops have been a part of each set release ever since I had joined Splinterlands back in early 2020. The concept is as simple as it is clever. By providing additional value to packs sold early in the sets cycle, people are more enticed to buy their packs early and/or to maybe buy more packs than I actually would need right now. This ensures that the company earns more money earlier from pack sales. While this is obviously beneficial to the company, the way things were handled in the past, these airdrops actually were a burden to the ecosystem.
Over the years, the basic concept hadn't changed at all and it always worked like that: Once a certain amount of packs got sold from the store, another card was introduced to all future packs. At the same time, all packs already sold had a chance to be airdropped one copy of that card. Over the lifetime of a set, you could thus sometimes earn ten or more airdrops. The more packs you bought the more airdrops you would potentially receive. Often times airdrop cards are the most expensive cards of the whole set. Looking at the Untamed edition for example, the 4 most expensive cards all were introduced through an airdrop:
The issue at hand was that your airdrop chances only depended on the amount of packs you had bought, not on the amount of packs you still held or opened in the meantime. This often times lead to people buying way more packs than they needed and instead of holding or opening them, they would just resell them for whatever the market was willing to pay. And this of course made sense. If a pack is $4 and you get say 20% discount for buying in bulk you are already down to a net cost of $3.2. Now imagine that over the course of a set each pack will average out to receiving airdrops worth $1.5 total. Your net cost would then be down to $1.7. Obviously, people were more than happy to dump these packs at a 50% discount, knowing (or at least hoping) that they'd still end up in the profit once all airdrops concluded.
This mechanic always had been an issue for the value of these packs and during each sets lifetime, it lead to hugely discounted packs on the open market. This in turn led to more cards flooding the market than what was actually needed and thus also reducing the value of the cards to be found in the set.
Luckily, Splinterlands was aware of the issue and as with many things recently, they tried to came up with a better mechanic moving forward, thus introducing Conflicts as the new airdrop mechanic for Rebellion.
While the idea is still to entice people to buy their Rebellion packs early, the new system also tries to reward players for actually holding and/or opening theirs packs instead of reselling them on the market. To do that, the amount of airdrops you can receive now longer depends on the number of packs you bought. Instead, you now have to stake your cards and packs in so called mage wagons. Depending on their collection power, these mage wagons will then produce airdrop chances for you and after roughly each month, you will be able to claim another airdrop, providing you with cards according to the amount of chances you had accumulated.
Staking your cards doesn't affect their ability to be played so there's virtually no reason not to stake these cards as long as you don't intend to sell them. By making this a continuous accumulation process instead of taking a snapshot at a certain time players are also enticed to just keep their cards staked for the whole airdrop period instead of trying to move things around shortly before an airdrop hits.
To stake your cards you will have to buy so called mage wagons at a price of 50 vouchers per wagon. Each wagon holds up to 100 packs and up to 5 monsters. There are 87 cards in total in the Rebellion set right now, so if you want to stake all your cards you will need a total of 18 wagons which will cost you 900 vouchers to get. At the current price of a bit below $0.04 per voucher, that's roughly $36 if you don't hold any vouchers at all - pretty affordable in my opinion. Keep in mind that the amount of chances you get from a wagon is directly dictated by the collection power of the cards staked there. So while it might seem interesting to get more cards in order to stake additional cards, this is only really going to be worth it if you have higher level cards. Staking a few 1 BCX cards is hardly going to do anything for you.
The first airdrop is starting as soon as next Tuesday, so it might be a great idea to get your vouchers now as some people might be sleeping on conflicts and might inflate the voucher price a bit as we are getting closer to release. It's also a good idea to have Rebellion maxed out as much as possible until then so you can earn the most chances possible right away.
Personally, I really like the new system and feel like it's vastly superior to what we had so far. By providing additional value to buying packs early but also giving incentives to keep the cards and packs you have, we should be able to get the best of both worlds. Help Splinterlands to sell more packs earlier while also protecting the resale value of both packs and individual cards and thus protecting the ecosystem overall. So far, this seems to be going pretty well, so lets hope this new system pays off for everybody in the end and this is something we'll do every set moving forward!
And that's all from me for today, thank you all for reading and see you next time.
