I want to write about Splinterlands today, now that the season is over and I can brag that I reached CL3 again. Nah, I won't do that, it should be much more interesting than that, I hope.
I heard a couple of times that there are people wanting to burn the remaining unsold Chaos Legion packs. Apparently there were enough such voices since the team felt the need to address it in more than one Town Hall, and explain how the main sets work, and that there are other scarce assets like land, validator nodes and promo cards to address this desire of scarcity. But we will see that's not all there is.
I don't like when burning is preferred in crypto, as a way to keep or increase prices. It's much better to stimulate growth and find more use cases, but also more difficult, and takes time. Burning can be used in conjunction with those, for small adjustments, while new use cases are developed and growth happens.
On the other hand, I would completely replace burning with something productive. Like moving the funds that would otherwise be burned to a locked fund (in a DAO, the best way) that generates revenue for the DAO. Instead of burning tokens, create more of them and use them properly.
But let's get back to Splinterlands entirely.
If we look at @dalz's stats regarding Splinterlands from 3 weeks ago, we see there are around 400k daily active users these days.
Image from dalz's post linked above
Now, the question is how do you define a user of Splinterlands and how does he define it?
Because there are investors-only type of users on Splinterlands which never play the game. At most they rent out their cards, but they might be collectors-only and not do that either.
So, I wonder if this number includes people transacting with Splinterlands assets or only players of ranked battles.
For simplicity, let's assume it's just players. They should be the most anyway. 400k players daily, on average. And it was half a million not so long ago.
Stick around, I'm actually going somewhere with this.
Today I had the curiosity to see how many summoner cards there are in total in circulation right now.
This number will fluctuate, as more CL summoners are discovered in packs and as more summoners are combined for higher levels.
But when I did the calculations using the information on the Splintercards website and the calculator in Windows, here's what resulted:
Total regular summoner cards in circulation = 543,041
Total gold foil summoner cards in circulation = 42,285
Total general summoner cards in circulation = 585,326
Anyone knows where I'm going with this?
If we count the fact that there is a count down period of 24 hours between the times two different accounts can play the same card, it means technically, right now, a max of 585,326 daily players can be on Splinterlands, because that's how many summoners are available, and one needs a summoner to play ranked battles.
BUT...
What the number above doesn't say is this:
- a big portion of CL packs which were bought aren't opened (there are some packs of earlier versions unopened too), and most of them will probably not be opened before the SPS airdrop is over
- there are still over 6.7m packs on the primary market to purchase
- there are 6 rare summoners in the CL set
- there are 6 legendary summoners waiting to be airdropped
- Riftwatchers miniset is coming in a few months, and if needed it will include summoners as well
Still feeling the desire to burn packs, anyone?
585k summoners in circulation, combined with the stats from dalz and a max around half a million for daily active users, show this was almost the full capacity at which Splinterlands operated in terms of available summoners to play the game.
Even with the summoners that will come out from opening the packs (and there will probably be a flood of them after the airdrop is over), summoners will remain a rather scarce asset in Splinterlands. If we consider they will be needed for land as well, even more.
Since I checked them out, do you want to know which are the scarcest?
- For regulars: Prince Julian - 83 cards (price is over 2000 USD / BCX on the market)
- For gold foils: Archmage Arius - 3 cards!!! (none for sale, over 3000 USD / BCX on the market for the regular ones)
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
Interesting, the amount of Summoners overlooks the level of them, so we could have a half million of level one summoners and those wouldn't be all competitive players. One needs a good amount of them and leveled just to reach gold, so I wouldn't say that there is an over supply of them.
Exactly. This does not count BCX's, it counts upgraded cards as 1, because you can play 1 card.
That is very unlikely. Because many earlier editions summoners have been combined to higher levels.
Let's take Alric from Beta, for example. Total cards printed are 76,269. Yet cards in circulation + burned (both regular and GF) account for 9,039. The huge difference comes from people combining them, and thus reducing the circulating supply.
No, of course there isn't. In fact, if we account that many of us have multiple summoners we use (without counting the ones we rent out, because those are used by others), we can draw the conclusion there are fewer unique players in the game than the DAU may give us the impression.
It is my impression as well, we will hear again that fatidical "why the cards are so expensive?".
I'm sure we will. It's cyclical. But once someone understands Splinterlands, it makes sense.
If you consider that most players hold at least 5 different summoners ( 1 for each splinter) in order to complete the daily quests the max amount of players with 5 different summoners would be: 585,326/5 = 117 065. It is a little bit strange to think that there are a ton of players out there with less than 5 summoners...
I thought about that too. But there are both players with fewer summoners and with more summoners on their playing deck. There was a time when advise was to develop well two splinters (thus 2 summoners or maybe more, if one has alternatives). I'm not sure if this still works nowadays, but I never followed this advice.
Also I've known and heard of players who rent cards as they are needed for certain games, but don't rent them long term or own them. This allows some sort of free number of summoners that is on the rental market for different players to use from time to time.
Yea, I need to fix that haha.. These are good cars, but I need to other splinters like your sayin
what this brought to mind is that 585,326 or less are eligible to go any higher than bronze, and/or earn any meaningful rewards. Im glad that I own a handful of my own summoners.. I should go scoop up some more though.
I wonder if people stuck in bronze have their own summoners or they play the ghost ones. Ghost summoners do not count for that total.
I think that a big chunk of players are in novice/bronze league and they only own the Spellbook, meaning that they have ghost summoners. That's how this could make sense. I have close to 300 summoners myself over all my accounts lol (some waiting to be merged...)
I haven't thought about ghost summoners when I made this calculation, but it makes sense. Because they don't count toward the total summoners in circulation, but they are active players nonetheless who use them.
Ya I am finding out as a newbie that summoners are my week point. I expect the longer I do it and buy cards then I will get what I need.
!CTP
Take things step by step. If you are with your summoners at level 1, then get the monsters you need at level 1. Then, upgrade summoners at the next level, then upgrade monsters to the max level permitted by summoners (different for different type of monsters - common, rare, epic and legendary - and for different type of summoners), then repeat.
Thanks for the tip.
!CTP
I tend to overlook summoners as well and it was only recently when I decided I would start upgrading my cards. Having more options is always better and it kind of sucks to see your cards capped because of the summoner level limit.
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
Oh yeah, this advice should really be taken seriously: to upgrade summoners first. Step by step, with monsters following behind to the max allowed by the summoners.
I am sure this is helpful to all the Splinterlands players out there. Thanks for sharing on List Nerds.
Thanks for dropping by Bob!
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