It's official! We know Waka Spiritblade will be available at 12pm EST / 17:00 UTC on Thursday, February, 2022 in the Splinterlands store and will cost 5000 SPS and 500 vouchers to buy (in the initial phase). The countdown has begun! Now it's time to decide whether you should be saving up for this Legendary summoner!
At current market prices of $0.15 / SPS and $2.42 / voucher, Waka is currently priced at $1960. That's a hefty sum for any card, so we need to take a good look at whether he'll be worth it.
Let's first take a look at the current list prices of maxed out legendary summoners to get a quick pulse.
Maxed legendary summoner prices:
As you can see, the range goes from $312.50 for Quix the Devious to $24,970 for Archmage Arius. The average price is about $5700, so based on this simple metric $1960 doesn't seem excessive. It's probably best to remove outliers however, so let's take Arius and Julian out of the equation. Now the average is a modest $3582 - still reasonable! However let's face it - averages are for average people ;) Let's dig a bit deeper.
Let's look at rarity. We know that there will only ever be 1000 Waka Spiritblades. They're all maxed, which means there is 11000 BCX worth of Waka out there. This is about 2-2.5 times as much BCX as the Untamed Legendary summoners (e.g. Kitty had about 4k BCX printed, Llama 4.5k, and Yodin 5.4k). Therefore it's technically 2-2.5x less rare than these summoners. The Untamed Legendary summoners, and max level, range from $1,169 for Camila Sungazer to $7,111 for Kitty. If we the difference in rarity has a linear impact on price, then therefore we'd assume Waka should be priced between $500 to $2500.
4442 cards (i.e. BCX) of Llama were printed:
Let's now think of utility. Waka is the first summoner who will grant Poison to your entire team (every attack will have a 50% chance of inflicting poison). This can be absolutely deadly. It essentially makes every attacking card considerably more deadly, and will synergize particularly well with cards that are low on offense (e.g. deal 1 damage) but have high health, because those cards will now have survivability while still being able to inflict a ton of damage. It'll also introduce new strategies, like for example mixing snipe and sneak to maximize your poison output. Finally, it'll dramatically increase the value of immunity. Waka absolutely has an effect on the meta, and that should give him value. Going back to the Untamed Legendary summoners, it's a no-brainer that Waka has more utility than Camila, however he'll be outmatched by some of the other summoners in that group except for the fact that he's a 3-mana summoner and they all cost 7. That's a huge difference maker in low mana games, making Waka a viable option when others might not. In my opinion, Waka lands roughly in the 60th percentile in terms of utility among all Legendary summoners (i.e. I'll likely use him above 60% of the ones that are currently there, while the other 40% I would prioritize over Waka).
Finally let's have a look at Regular vs. Gold Foil chances & prices.
Waka Regular vs. Gold foil:
We know there will be a total of 960 Regular Foil and 40 Gold Foil. For the first phase of the sale it'll be random whether you get one or the other. We don't know how it'll be for the second phase, so let's just price phase 1 for now. 20/500 means a 4% chance of getting a GF.
It's a bit hard to repeat the exercise from above as there aren't maxed GF versions on the market of every Legendary summoner. Therefore let's take a look at what's available at min BCX and project what the maxxed costs would be from there.
Prices of maxed GF Legendary summoners:
We can see the prices range from $249 to $25k. Once again, let's remove the top 2 cards as outliers, bringing the top of the range to $10k. Since a maxed copy would require 4 BCX in GF, we could project that to a range of $1k-40k for maxed versions. However typically there's a discount when multiple BCX are applied. While this is highly variable, let's be conservative and assume a 30% discount, bringing the range from $700-28k, and an average of about $15k (after applying the 30% discount).
Summary!
Ok now let's tie all this together:
- Price tag of $1960 based on current prices of SPS and vouchers
- Average price of maxed regular foil Legendary summoners (removing top 2 outliers): $3582
- Average price of maxed gold foil Legendary summoners (removing top 2 outliers and assuming 30% cut on max BCX): $15k
- Rarity about 2-2.5x lower than Untamed Legendary summoners
- Unique utility, and 60th percentile among existing Legendary summoners (personal viewpoint)
- 96% chance of regular foil, 4% chance of GF
So with all this data, my conclusion ultimately is that the Splinterlands team did an EXCEPTIONAL job pricing this card. Personally I would value the regular foil at $1.8-2k and the GF at $4.5-5k, giving it an implied value of...$2k! Putting all this aside however, I don't see any scenario where the market price of this beast would be under the initial market price for a long time to come, so I don't think you can go wrong if you elect to buy one of these.
Final tip: if you're considering buying a Waka and are satisfied with its price based on the current price of SPS and vouchers, then don't wait to get your SPS and vouchers ready. If you wait and SPS and vouchers go up in price, you may get priced out. If however you buy now and the market prices of the tokens go up, that doesn't change the analysis above as those generally would lead to proportional increases in the value of the NFTs (remember you'll get airdrop points, the ability to rent, and of course battle earnings, so it's all tied together).
Hope this was useful, and good luck everyone!
Is Waka only being sold Maxed out?
The fact that this price is so normal for maxed out Splinterlands Summoners makes me realize how casual players like me who don't have a lot of money, have more reasons to feel the others have unfair advantage. (Just a feel, I know it's technically fair, but game design is about making the game feel fair, not the reality.)
Yes he's only being sold maxed out. I do admit I have mixed feelings about this, and think it might've been better for them to sell 1 BCX at a time. That would've helped spread the benefit among the player base a bit better. Ultimately though these cards are really mostly accessible to players who are invested in the game, and I also don't think that's a terrible thing. Finally if you look at the rental costs of maxed out legendary summoners today they're around 300 DEC mid season (e.g. take Llama, Kitty, or Yodin for example). So I expect this guy, maxed out, to be rentable for somewhere around 150-300, which at the current price of DEC is about $1. That's not too bad :)
When you put it at these numbers $1 DEC a day really doesn't sound too bad...
Anyway, that's an amazing analysis!
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Some juicy math in here.
Thanks for sharing!
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BEER.That's a very neat analysis of the card value for this legendary summoner. In my opinion this card will be sold out in minutes if not seconds. Probably some whales will get most of them and then rent out or resell them. It might be possible that it will be possible to buy the card at a later stage in the splinterlands market.
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I agree it'll probably sell in minutes... That's a good thing :)
Great analysis....
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I'm expecting a few counters to this - like a sort of triage-cleanse to get rid of poison in back row monsters.
Thank you! Agree there will be multiple counters and strategies developed to deal with this. That's one of the things I love - it adds new complexity and different battle scenarios!
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Wooow, thank you!
Thanks for the tag in Twitter....This is a card I've been on the fence with but you are right, when it comes down to it, even at current prices...It's a win.
I'll 'try' to grab a copy lol
I'm getting more and more hyped up as the event gets closer. Hope we both get one! :)
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going to go with a huge no, on is he worth it. gold foil yes but definitely not on regular foil. only 4 percent chance at gold not worth the risk. power over 160 days isnt making this money back and renting for a year either. so have to bet on someone selling it for more than 2k. whole guild talked it over and the value of other cards you could buy at these bottom prices is crazy for the 2k value. you can buy a whole collection of multiple splinters at low level. good news is he will be up for auction after first 500 so can actually see what his real value is right away. and for whales might be worth it to stay at the top as a whale but normal person value just not there.
That's a totally fair comment vash. Here's one counterpoint regarding the secondary market value however - do you believe there are more than 1000 cards folks are willing to buy at the current price? Because if so, then at least in the short term after the sale the price won't go below the current price given that some people who want to buy at the current price won't be able to. Even if for that reason alone, I think it's worth trying to buy one if you're able to.
Fantastic analysis and I couldn't agree with you more. It is absolutely critical to get your SPS and vouchers now before the team releases some other news and the tokens spike.
Just a FYI follow up:
This card goes for sub 250$ now,
with the tendency of falling even lower