We are now into November and the Exode development is continuing full speed ahead. I am quite happy to have discovered this gem of a project back in May, and wanted to share some thoughts and observations around my current deck and supply of certain cards. Based on this I will make a few predictions on where I think the future demand will be around certain cards.
My current deck & the journey I had
When I decided to jump onboard the EXODE spaceship back in April-May, I bought a science starter kit, 2 TOMS settlers contracts and around 50 Alpha booster packs at a time when they still cost USD 2 each. I bought a few random cards on the market from time to time, until recently where I bought more packs from the player market at USD 2.3 and USD 2.6. At time of writing, Alpha booster packs are available in the store at USD 3 each, so it is still better to buy from other players. My current card situation is given in the table below:
As you can see I have 1082 cards in total, and 2 TOMs Settlers contract. The contracts have been running for about 6 months, and with 6 cards dropped from each contract each week, they have produced around 312 cards. I also bought a starter pack and a few random cards from the market, so approximately 750 cards have been acquired from Alpha booster packs (150 packs), at estimated USD 2.4 on average (USD 360 in total). This brings the total investment into the game to USD 450 so far.
My current drop rate is approximately (I bought a few in market, and alpha and TOMs contracts have different drop rates) 59% for common, 36% for rare, ,4.2% for epic and 0.9% for legendary, which is more or less what to expect. Alpha boosters drop chance should be 65%, 30%, 4% and 1% while TOMS contracts should be 54%, 40%, 6% and 0%. My elite drops are a bit below expected at 2.32% (should be 3%) and my market purchases have had overweight towards elites, so I would expect this to be at least 0.7% higher.
Total market supply
At the moment there are 117485 cards available to all players from all sources. 14602 Alpha Booster packs have been sold or given out as referral bonus, and of those less than 7000 remain unopened.
This means that around 38010 cards in existence came from Alpha booster packs, which is 32.35%. The remaining cards are drops from contracts and other packs.
Analysis of my cards
My most special card so far is the Elite Norah I picked up, which is 1 out of 4 in existence so far:
This card is a beast and will give a significant advantage during colonization play. It is also extremely good for appeasing citizens during the EVAC phase, where I have seen times of 10 seconds (this is before the balancing patch).
All my elite rares from Alpha boosters are also quite special, with only 4-11 drops in existence. I am highlighting the four crew cards I have below, where there are respectively 11, 8, 9, 4 in existence:
Contracts in general are generating a lot of drops, which can be seen on the number of elite rares as well. My 2 elite TOMs custom are 2/36 in existence (I bought 1 of those in the market). In total I have got 1 common elite and 1 rare elite from my contracts:
The contracts have also dropped 7 each of Explorator and Happy Five (I bought 2 Explorators in the market), but those have dropped more than 600 each in total, which can also be seen in their market value hoovering around USD 1.5, much lower than the cheapest alpha epic at USD 5.
The 10 legendary cards gives a nice variety of play styles. In general they are spread out, with the exception of 3 drops of the repentant pirate! I am not too sad about this though, since I suspect this card will gain significant value now after its inspiration bonus will be implemented in the current test environment. 35 of those cards have dropped in total, and it is a great expansion in the possible play styles with the pirate faction and 4 officers. The rarest legendary I have is so far the Rebel General with 22 drops, and the most commmon is Sh4rken with 44 drops
Where do I expect the future demand of cards to be?
It is currently very difficult to say which cards will be popular, especially since colonization is yet to be released, but here are some speculation from my side.
In general the card prices (which will be a reflection of the desires of the players) will be some variant of this simplified formula: Price = Factor * [number of players] / [number of drops]. It is not sure it will follow this linear behavior, but in general if you increase the number of players but keep supply constant prices goes up, and if you keep number of players constant and increase supply, the prices goes down. During alpha I do not expect the number of players to increase significantly, so prices will depend mostly on how many cards are available, which in turn will depend on time for contract cards (since number of contracts are fixed, a set number of cards drop each week = increased supply each week) and number of alpha packs opened (if current players invest in more packs then supply increases).
Based on this I expect contract cards to continue loosing value until people starts upgrading cards, which I will discuss more below. Alpha booster legendary and epic will probably stay in value until we see some significant buying of Alpha booster packs (with 14600 sold out of 200000, there is a lot of room here to increase supply)
Normal legendary and epic
I believe that the legendary and epic cards from booster packs will set the price standard for other cards, and they will be linked to the price of the packs. I did some spot-checks on the cards in the market, and the number of drops for epics is currently between 32 (Stranded Trader) and 69 (Admiral Valro), excluding contract drops, starter epics and special drops such as SunTec. This is a little higher than legendary with lowest 24 drops for Rebel General and highest 44 drops for Sh4rken. Epics are currently trading at USD 5 (Eissen Suitx3) and upwards while legendary trades at USD 14 (Sh4rken) and upwards. Legendary provides a lot of more flexibility in the builds than epics, so even if it is not a big difference in number of drops it probably explains why people are buying & selling them at a higher price. Legendary cards from the Syndicate contracts (the Kumicho) seems a bit high in the price at USD 10 since 134 such cards have dropped so far, I would expect the price to go down a bit until we see a larger influx of new players (it is a very good card, but most players will only need one or a few).
Elite common cards
This is a category where I personally have a big interest at the moment, and where I also believe the highest demand will be from the alpha players. The fact of elites having unique abilities coupled with their rarity will ensure demand for now and later. Currently the cheapest common elite goes for USD 2.9 (elite defensive ammo) with 124 drops in total, which can be compared against the cheapest alpha pack elite at USD 5.79 (elite Lonestar), ,which has only 24 drops so far.
The rarest common alpha elite I could find using the deck expert tool was protective walls with only 5 drops, while the most common was underground bunker with 25 drops (I have one of those!). Be aware that not all links to elites worked in the tool, so I may have missed something here. The rarest common elite on the market was energy cells and traveler-2 with 12 drops each, and price points USD 60 and USD 9 respectively.
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Elite rare cards
Looking at elite rare cards, the cheapest on the market is currently elite Triskan fighter at USD 15, with 8 dropped in total. The rarest elite rare I could find in the Deck expert Tool was an Elite Xeno Analyst with a single drop! The most common elite rare had 13 drops (longsword squadron).
In total there is currently only 6 alpha rare elite cards listed on the market, ranging in price USD [15, 18, 18, 25, 30, 550].
Elite epic and legendary
Elite alpha epics are exceedingly rare, and the most common is Norah, of which 4 are in existence. Many of these cards have currently not dropped yet and only 1 card is listed on the market (Orbital shield, 3 drops, USD 50). This is a sellers market, where they can set whatever price they like. If the buyer takes it though, is a different question!
Elite alpha legendary I could only see 9 in total in the Deck Expert Tool. The most common was elite arena power suit, with 3 drops in total. Two of the elite alpha legendary are listed in the marketplace; Elite Captain Cranium at USD 495 and Elite Arena Power suit at USD 999. Keep in mind that some of these 9 elite alpha legendary cards were given out as rewards to some early backers I cannot recall how many in total), so the actual drop rate is even lower.
Upgradable cards
A category of cards that I also think is very interesting is cards that are relatively uncommon and that requires a lot of upgrades to max out. Examples that has been discussed in the past and immediately comes to mind are the Claymore hyperfighter and the Drachian Mantis:
As you can see, both of these cards are rare and have the upgradable trait, and currently 273 resp. 279 cards are in existence. 14 respectively 13 cards have to be burned to max out one of these cards, meaning that current card supply is only sufficient to upgrade 18 hyperfighter and 20 Mantis to max upgrade level. A fully upgraded Mantis will have 8 Crew, 4 Equipment sets, 8 Cargo and 6 passengers, and few if any ships can compete with that. What is interesting to see is that players have already caught onto this, these cards are currently trading at USD 2, while another rare card of similar rarity, the Drachian Commissar (with 254 drops), trades at USD 0.54.
There are also other rare alpha upgradable cards that may be of interest. One card I looked at recently is the escort cruiser:
Only 266 in existence and 12 cards are needed to fully upgrade!
Summary
In this article I tried to define a number of category of cards in the EXODE game that are interesting to look at from a supply and demand side. Some of what I wrote is speculation from my side, which may be correct or not, but at least I hope you enjoyed reading the article. Feel free to comment below on what you liked about it, or if you think something is not correct. I may write similar blog post about this in the future if you think it provides some value and insights into the game. I know that Elindos have plans for the future to provide more market data and transparency, which we will look forward to. In the meantime - fly safe and pick your deck, it is never to early to strategize!
great article captain, I really hope I can pick up some more alpha boosters before we move to beta in a few months. those elite epics are my fav tbh. I think they provide less variety but are more versatile and integral to the deck generally.
also i think all the elite laegendarys are from boosters atm. there will be 2 extra of each legendary that was created by a player (large supporters of $500+ i believe) but I don't think those have gone out yet because there are only 1 or 0 elites listed of the mysterious robot, mysterious ai, mysterious boss. maybe the cranium ones were sent out since the card is finished? i didn't check how many there are.
Thank you for the feedback, and yes I agree with you that the epics also opens up a lot of play styles. I think that is a topic that deserves a more detailed comparison than the brief remarks I had in the post.
It's an interesting thing to think about, especially where the contracts are concerned - they just keep printing!
I assume the contents of the contracts will change as the game does though?!?
Yes it is good to keep in mind the increase in supply. Excess supply is interesting to keep an eye on, but also keep in mind that something is in excess until it no longer is, and these switches tend to happen quite fast. I see 2 events that can cause a rapid increase in demand, either when people start upgrading their cards (keep in mind that both the TOM settler and Rekatron contracts have a lot up upgradables) or when we have a rapid increase of players. If we have around 600 epic TOM settlers cards (per type) by now, it means that we get around 100 new cards per month, so number of new players * how many upgrades needed per player (on average) need to be in excess of this number for the supply to go down. Take Explorator for example, 16 extra cards is needed to fully upgrade. If we have 50 new players per month, and 20% decide that they need a fully upgraded Explorator, then 160 cards are burned per month. I am planning to write another post on upgradables, so I can discuss this a bit more there.
Congratulations on this expert post @Eyebroo!
This earned you the "Top contributor" role on our Discord; this role (which may be temporary, ie. trimestrial for instance) only has a few members, and displays the best EXODE contributors. This article certainly deserves it!
Thank you for the honor, and the feedback! I will probably follow up with some posts, one in particular I have in mind is to drill down in details on the upgradeable cards.
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