After waiting for what seemed like ages, I was finally able to participate in the Colonize Mars Mission Two supply crate sale. For those of you who are new to Colonize Mars, it is a blockchain based game that is designed to simulate the colonization of Mars and encourage space exploration. In addition to being based on real aerospace technology, everything in the game is represented as an NFT and players have the ability to earn passive crypto income from playing. In this post, I'll share my unboxing video, demonstrate how to craft and upgrade NFTs, and give my analysis on whether it is better to buy booster packs (supply crates) or purchase the cards you want on the market.
Unboxing Results
If you want to follow along with the action, I highly recommend watching the video as you can see how smoothly the sale went as well as joining me in opening the packs in real time, but for those of you who just want the fast facts, I'll lay out the most important details here. The Ultimate Supply crates were on sale for $39 during the official sale, and after opening my one Ultimate crate, I received an estimated $54 worth of cards based on the prices suggested by Atomic Hub on 7-9-2021. I'm certainly impressed with the cards that I got and that is a nice ROI, but I want to point a few things out.
- Selling cards on Atomic Hub will incur a total of 12% in transaction fees. Thus, if I were to completely liquidate my collection, I would only receive about $47
- When purchasing supply crates, you are likely to get a variety of different cards. Depending on your strategy this can be good or bad. The more different cards you have, you can have different functionality in the game, but it also means that you will have to stake cards to many more colony assets and thus you will spend more time logging in to perform colony maintenance and earning income.
Crates VS Cards
Both of those considerations lead me to an important consideration, and many people will want to know if they should buy crates or cards. Although I'm not here to give financial advice, my PERSONAL opinion is that crates are more fun and exciting, but buying cards is the better for passive income. Hear me out.
Let's start with the benefits of the supply crates. Obviously, the crates have the "lottery" like feel of not knowing what you are going to get, and there is always that super small chance that you can get a Dark Matter or even Ownership card. That being said, it is almost a certainty that you will also get a lot of lower level cards that will have minimal staking rewards.
Instead of purchasing an ultimate crate with the chance of getting a Gold or Dark Matter card, you could go to Atomic Hub right now and buy TWO Gold cards or one Dark Matter card with change left over to spare. With this option, you are getting a fewer cards, but they are higher rarity. Thus, your staking rewards will be higher, and you will have to spend less time logging in and performing colony maintenance.
As always, it's your choice, but I wasn't able to get in on the initial mission one sale, and instead of buying a crate, I went straight for a Dark Matter card, and I was 100% happy with that decision.
Summary
Before closing this article, I want to give a huge thanks to the Colonize Mars team. The sale went smooth, there were no technical issues, and I'm impressed by the way the team granted whitelists to the people that had supported the project from the start. I'm excited for the project and to see the game continue to develop.
As always, thanks for reading, and feel free to comment below. If you participated in the NFT drop, what was the best card you got? Thanks for reading.
References
https://wax.atomichub.io/
https://twitter.com/ColonizeMarsNFT
