So a couple of days ago the details were released for the Rebellion Pre-Sale in . This is my general expectation and plan going forward...
Rebellion Expectation
To start, I would like to say that I was totally wrong about my Chaos Legion sales prediction which I expected to sell out rather sooner than later. That was during the time when SPLINTERLANDS blew up and all assets were at crazy high valuations because demand was bigger than the supply of cards. The combination of price increase, overprinting rewards cards, SPS sell pressure, most of the player base existing of bots that only really were after getting earnings made Chaos Legion turn out into a set where pretty much everyone got burned on.
Now, we are in a situation where we are still in a bear market with SPS at an all-time low, a lot fewer players in the game with pretty much all of those getting burned on Chaos Legion, Card Prices in a never-ending decline, a crazy oversupply in cards, older cards being stripped of most of their use case, the team with only a 6-month runway buring 250k a month (which imo is still way too much), land delayed, SPS still under peg, ...
The fact remains that there are still many players and whales who enjoy the game and look forward to having new cards to play with aside from any profit expectation. Opening packs to many also is very addictive and similar to gamblers, previous losses don't really mean a lesson has been learned.
The pre-sale dynamics for Chaos Legion were designed by Aggy and very effective in making players buy way more packs than they needed or wanted while the money was available. This time they are designed by Matt and more aimed toward players who actually want the cards to play with and most likely don't have as much money available. What I fear the most is some power creep in the actual design. Each set kind of introduced a new theme that was needed to stay competitive. With Untamed this was the crazy increase in mana cap including up to 14 Mana cards, Chaos Legion had the Dual Ability Rare Summoners, & Rebellion will have the choose your summoner ability dynamic.
I would highly be surprised if the 500k pre-sale packs sold out easily but I was wrong last time to the downside so I might be wrong this time on the upside. The fact that rebellion comes ahead of land is just a way so players have more funds available still which otherwise would have gone to land.
When it comes down to card prices, packs are pretty much a sure way to lose money the coming year since it is nearly impossible for prices to go for more compared to what they were paid for. The moment this is the case, buyers will come in to dump the prices down and make a tiny profit in the process. The fact that players won't be able to buy packs, get the airdrop and dump them to get more packs this time around simply will mean less packs get sold and the value drops slowly over time with a bigger dump once the last card is airdropped.
In the end, everything always will come down to more new players coming in compared to those opting out which right now puts Splinterlands in a negative spiral. While it's hard to many new players coming in, this was exactly the same before SPS was introduced as some of the whales were getting out.
My Rebellion Strategy
I have never been a pack buyer in Splinterlands and nearly always opted to buy cards directly on the secondary market at a price I can control without any need for luck. I did get 610 Chaos Legion Packs in total mostly re-investing affiliate money and some of the extra funds I had from the bull market. Unfortunately, the affiliate payouts have been fully bypassed for a while since DEC is good enough for the devs to profit from while only credits count for affiliate payouts with zero reasons for players now to buy with those.
Packs are also more expensive now at ~5$ (taking into account that DEC at some point will get to Peg)
I will continue to play the game going forward and still believe it has a good future once this bear market is over. I will buy zero packs but instead pick my spots and buy some specific cards directly from the market that I personally like and want to play with if they are reasonably priced.
This was my exact strategy with Rifiwatchers which so far got me these cards:
Most likely the capitulation in other Splinterlands assets will continue with players who need funds for their pack gambling addiction getting those from dumping older assets. I will go contrarian on this and continue the accumulation of SPS and older cards that will be useful for me in Wild. There is still a lot of faith that needs to be restored to players and I kind of expect mechanisms going forward that help give more value to older cards. The concept of a card-burning event should give some nice value for the mass printed Chaos and Reward cards. Land will be one of those and I'm hoping that Draft Mode will also reward players that hold older rare cards.
With part of 50% the profit from Rebellion going to the DAO and the need for SPS to go up in order to attract more players, I do see SPS currently at fully diluted supply at below 40 Million value going up as likely more will get burned compared to what's minted once DEC gets to peg.
Personally I won't buy any Rebellion packs but instead will try to get some specific cards off the market to continue to play in Wild and be competitive there. While other players will sell off older cards and SPS in order to get funds for their pack gambling adiction, I plan to continue buying those as I do see Splinterlands survive this bear market with still better times ahead where things get back in a positive spiral.
