LPE and ROI - UNITE!

In my last post, I talked extensively about ROI in Splinterlands, and in my last Land-Post, about ROI on Land and why I think that the LPE-Metric is not prevalent to new players.

LPE and ROI are two different things. LPE focuses on the production efficiency of plots, while my ROI calculations refer to the monetary cost of the production.

A higher LPE does not mean necessarily a higher ROI:

Beta Rare Gold foil. I pay $220 for a max, giving me 20,000 PP. That is 90 PP/$.
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[lots of math]
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ROI: 220,296 / 2,360,000 = 9,3% per year (vs. 12,1% with Rare Beta RF)
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BUT LPE = 25,148 / 2 = 12,574 (vs. 3.501 DEC/h/Plot with Rare Beta RF)
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So, the yROI of my simulation goes down, but LPE goes up substantially.
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Hence, higher LPE does not equal higher yROI - that if I calculated somewhat correctly here :-D

Card Staking Efficiency

As I went through Azircons Post about Folks with 5 plots, I noticed that one player had an incredibly high amount of PP for only 5 plots. Naturally, I went to see how and why and found another, quite logical, coefficient that might help in Land calculations:

PP / Energy

Also PP per DEC staked. This one tells us how efficiently a card works on our land. The more PP you have on a plot, the more efficient it runs.

Now, why?

This is the one that can help to connect ROI and LPE. For a high LPE, you also need cards with a high PPE. Alpha Legendary GF cards for example have an PPE of 10 (meaning they give 10 PP for each DEC staked), and those are also the cards that boost your LPE to the sky.

For a good ROI, you also need a high PPE, as the staked Energy has to be taken into account, too, and this assures that you get more resources out of your plot.

If we now connect PPE with ROI, we get a metric that tells us what the most efficient card is both on Land as for the money we put in.

Few notes:

1. $/1000 PP and $/Max includes the DEC needed to be staked
2. The Cost/BCX is taken from the first non-neutral card and does not include terrain bonus.
3. The prices are momentary. You can download the sheet and actualize them yourself if wanted.

Following this chart, the biggest bang for the buck here would be Beta Rare RF with 7,68$ per 1000 PP. They have a PPE ratio of 0,55 PP per DEC. If we now put those to into relation, by dividing the cost by PPE, we get:

The Cost-Production-Coefficient (CPC)

I guess the correct term would be: Cost per 1000 Production Points per Production Points Per Energy.

As it is a cost-denominated coefficient, and we want the lowest cost, so the lower the CPC, the better is that card suited to boost both our ROI as well as our LP in a balanced way.

Here are the 5 best card types at the moment:

Type	Cost/1000PP	PP/E	CPC
Alpha Rare GF	$14,27	4	3,57
Beta Epic GF	$15,33	3	5,11
Beta Legendary GF	$26,84	5	5,37
Beta Rare GF	$10,95	2	5,47
Alpha Epic GF	$33,50	6	5,58

Best of other Editions:

Type	Cost/1000PP	PP/E	CPC
Untamed Legendary GF	$19,50	2	9,75
Chaos Legion Legendary GF	$11,49	1	11,49

Plotting CPC against PPE you can see that most of the cards with a high PPE have also a low CPC. Meaning, a high PPE is already an indicator for a good deal. But CPC takes into account the cost as well:

Here again you can see that most of the better CPC are on the higher end of costs, considering the mass is around 10$/1000 PP. But the concept of the CPC is to find a balance, so again, the best CPC is not an outlier, but at 15$/1000 PP.

Conclusion

The CPC is not meant to be the one decisive metric. It always depends on what's available on the market anyway. But it can help a lot when one wants to take into account both real life money as well as in-game land efficiency.

My favorite card type, Beta Rares, have a relatively high CPC with 13,97, but still stick out with the low Cost/BCX of $7,68. I might be switching to Beta Rare GF.

I'd say that best case is a card with a CPC between 5 and 10. 10 to 20 is more affordable than efficient, and over 20 is not really worth it.

The Alpha Rare GF are quite expensive at the moment, as there are no 1 BCX cards - that, too has to be taken into account. The CPC is calculated with the cost per 1000 PP, but that doesn't mean that there are cards with only 1000 PP.

I hope you can see all the formula in the sheet that is linked, in case you want to use it as well. I certainly will.

What do you think?

Is this coefficient helpful to land owners that just started?
Is the CPC a good balance?

I'm open to any other proposals as well 🙃