Your Own Cards!

From the days I started played trading card game, I always wish I can create my own cards. I wanted my cards will be unique, and it can't be obtained from store. When Splinterlands announced land in 2020, there was a vision of items and spells to be created on land, and then one can produce their own cards. This concept in revolutionary in TCG, as centralized TCG companies like MTG or Pokemon never wanted control of their own assets to players. Splinterlands was and continue to be different. It has always allowed significant control by players, especially in the governance.

Yet, 5 years later and counting, that initial promise remain elusive. Based on the current land whitepaper flowchart, most players believe, this workflow is multiple years away. So we always wondered and pushed for utility that can shortcut this long development process and bring something tangible to players. We have them! Here are the first concept of the land cards. Not quite unique yet, but we have to start somewhere.

@cryptomancer revealed the following during an update.

Began work on what I'm calling the Land card abilities project. This will be the next "big thing" with Land. Full details to come later, but for now the high level overview is this will initially be a new set of 4 special craftable cards (one of each rarity) that are only useable on Land and Mage Wagons. These cards will not have traditional gameplay stats or abilities (so they will not be playable in battles). Instead, they will have new Land specific abilities that will benefit your plots. Like regular cards, the abilities will change and become more impactful as you level the card up.

So these are exclusive Land cards and can't be played in battles. My personal speculation is this is about 2 months away. We will see if that works or not in terms of time line.

Why do we need land cards?

Land is considered a sink for overprinted and old cards. So there can be a concern that any new exclusive land only card will be less optimal. However, this concern in unfounded. Let me explain in a few bullets. All plots will be from this page https://next-land.spl-stats.com/.

• Under-utilization of land: We started collecting data from land utilization thanks to @beaker007 from March this year. The plot below shows, although this year we have done a lot of development geared towards land, the utilization remained pegged between 31% - 32%. This is an extremely narrow range for the last 4 months, with a lot of development and new products.

• No Card Liquidity: Card liquidity for older cards have dried up completely. That is usually good for price but only to certain extent. People wont buy a $100 card, that doesn't give substantial return on land resources. There is a PP limit, beyond which, buying cards at higher prices are not profitable and therefore sales volume dries up.

• Low resource prices: We always use the Grain factor plot to look at resource prices. Prices of land resources like Wood, Stone and Iron struggled to stay above fair value for majority of the time. This is simply because, there aren't enough utility for them. We have created new utility like Aura and uses like midnight potion and wagons. However, both of those products remained time bound, meaning, you only need them for a small period of time.

• Oversupply: We have a massive stash of Grain in Praetoria (10.15B), and not enough uses for it. We are running a 14M grain deficit every day, but at this rate, it will take 725 days or about 2 years to burn through that grain. Obviously that is not acceptable. We must increase utility which required grain consumption, and only then the demand will increase, supply will decrease and price will rally.

• Not enough utility for Wood-Stone-Iron: At least the grain consumption is higher than production so we are running a deficit, which is good. However, the other resources are continuously getting added to the stockpile.

Take wood for example, We are currently producing 5M wood as a surplus, and the rate is increasing.
We are quite a ways away from below 1M net surplus a day during the height of aura production during mid-May. To do a proper price spike, I think we need to make all these daily resources as a deficit.

How do Land Cards Help?

Well if they require Aura to construct, and they are desirable, they will consume all resources. It is as simple as that. If we make them desirable enough and that desire becomes a need, then people will be happy to produce them. That will help create an uptick in resource prices, and an uptick in land utilization. More land utilization will help with the flywheel and that is great for the economy.