Regarding land, I don't think you need to worry too much. With all the planned functionality of land, I don't think you overpaid at all, even if the price has gone a bit down in the past couple of weeks. I of course have no idea what the prices will be after the land reveal, but think of it like this: There's only 150k plots in total. Splinterlands has on average (per right now) 379k active daily players. And this is only expected to grow. Today already, that's much less than 1 plot per active player. And you own 2 of them! If you manage to get more, that's awesome, but 2 is still a more than what most will ever own. If the Splinterlands team deliver on this (and history this far has shown that they will), these plots will be in extremely high demand in the future. Even if you pull Common plots only.
The problem was that this thought came into my head... "get some packs, Matt... c'mon get some packs!!"
Haha I feel you hard on that. So many things to spend money on, all of them awesome.
Regarding CL packs selling out, it's very unlikely that you won't have time to buy any if you buy them in the first 24 hours. I could be wrong of course, and pretty much everyone has their own opinion on this. But there are 15 million CL packs. That's 10x the amount of packs in entire Untamed. Some old time players even argue that it's better to only buy the cards separately on the market instead of buying packs at all. At least cheaper, historically. Card prices are apparently expected to fall further when general sale cards flood the market.
I've probably spent more money in the presale phases too than I should have, and I'll personally be buying some packs myself in the general sale, but will be relying on single card buys after that on the market to get my cards up to the levels I need. Will also try to abstain from opening and hodl a few CL packs for at least a couple of years, to get some nice price appreciation.
I found episode 80 of Cryptomaniacs (with a guest from the original Splinterlands team) extremely insightful on this topic. A highly recommended watch/listen.
But hey, the excitement of opening packs really can't be put a price on in my opinion.
At this time, Baakjira is listed for $27. At least I can subtract something from my $310-$320 voucher expense premium to soften the blow.
This price will go up in the long term, once the card is out of print. Historically card prices in any given series go way up once all packs are sold out. So it's all about patience. Most the cards I delegated to you actually cost less than 27 bucks back when I bought them, and now look at them.
So sure, maybe you bought some packs/cards that were a bit more expensive than they needed to be, but I don't think you messed up too bad. Plus, you got to open them and to have fun :)
Amazing reply. Thanks for the guidance and wisdom. I just heard that 350 packs are needed to guarantee the next airdrop card, and that this sum will continue to rise for future airdropped cards... so the temptation to maintain full eligibility will be there. I just don't know how much I want to spend on packs vs the singles as you mentioned. I also need to get my SPS and DEC up. Like you said, so many options, and all have their perks. I think I'll pause on the third plot until I get another 100-200 packs. The price of singles should fall with the flood of inventory as you said, so I'd then stop the lottery wheel and start sniping what I really need before buying more packs for investment purposes. It is damn fun to hunt high-level golds though. I just want one monster card home run to hold, but haven't quite gotten there yet. I have a 2 gold summoners and a gold epic, and they'll be great over time, but I want one notch up, however unlikely that may be. I'll just try to stay naive and try to get lucky.
Oh to turn back time and want to buy those cards at those prices more than Bitcoin or Ethereum.
You're welcome! Not sure about the wisdom part, haha, but I'll agree that I've accumulated quite a bit of experience with this game. Yeah, that's a tough one. Some of the airdrop cards will apparently not be Legendaries, and will thus require fewer packs for airdrop-eligibility. On the other hand, you'll need more than just one airdrop card to level them up to an adequate level. To max out cards for use in Silver League, 3x Legendaries are required (for Lvl 2), and 10x Epics are needed (for Lvl 3).
So if this were to be done with airdrop cards alone, that would require 1050 packs this time around, more than $4k. My point being, some gaps will probably have to be filled with singles anyways. Maybe this will make it a bit easier to just settle on a number of packs to buy and be at peace with it.
Opening packs is so much fun that it's not even possible to understand it, hahaha! But yeah, that's some great pulls! I actually got my first two Gold Foil Legendaries with Chaos Legion – Never owned one before that. Mainly because back when I was tearing open all those Beta packs, I didn't understand/care to comprehend the concept of Potions, so I just opened without. What a calamity it turned out to be. Just make sure to always always always have enough Potions when opening :D