Rising Star - Are we seeing inflation in the card market ?

Hi All, I've been watching the Rising Star card market on TribalDex quite intensely over the last 4-6 weeks. This is mostly due to me being a new player and wanting to spend my hard earned Starbits wisely to pick up cards a decent rate to help me progress.

I normally look for around 4 different card types:

• Low cost instruments (1 luck) mostly to help increase my unique card count,
• Low cost people cards (ie, 10 fans) to give a small boost cheaply, and again to increase my unique card count
• 10 luck guitars (ie, i54 pink guitar) to help improve the skill output of guitar lessons
• Low cost rare people cards (eg, R120 Dan) to improve fans and skill

In this last week or so I've seen a general shift in prices upwards and I'm just not able to pick up the same bargains:

The table above shows the rough changes I'm seeing. This is not hard and fast, and things change regularly, but what I'm saying is that I could count on picking up the noted cards at the lower prices frequently enough to keep me going and improving over late Dec and most of January, and in the last week or so, that just has not been the case (at all).

Again, the recent price column is a rough guide, but when looking at the percentage change its quite dramatic. And just to demonstrate, I took the screen shots below from TribalDex just now, showing the cheapest cards in each of those categories.

Pic 1 - Low cost instruments - ranging from 445 to 530

Prior to this week the general advice floating around for new players like me was to not buy packs because you could get the average contents of a pack for less than 10,000 Starbits if buying similar cards from the market. I'd say that it is now getting very close to not being the case - and say you were to buy a 12 pack for 100,000 Starbits - if you picked up an epic or something like juliet, then its getting more likely that you'd get better value from doing that.

Now I havent watched the market for long so I dont know really how it works, it it could be the case that this is common, and then people stop buying from the market and buy packs for a while, and hence the market prices drop again, etc, etc and so on - but I'm just finding it really interesting.

Pic 2 - Low cost people - with Buster at 750 and Joel at 900. Buster was regularly down at 500 previously

I'd be keen to know what others think of this, and whether this is common, with the market floating up and down. I'd by particularly interested to know why.

Pic 3 - 10 luck guitars with i54 up at 1,099

I also note that in the past week or so, Hive has gone from a price of ~ $0.9 to ~$1.15 (~27% increase), whereas the selling rate of Starbits on Hive engine was up at $0.0003 for a while and is now back down to $0.0002 (33% decrease). I dont know if its related to that or not.

Pic 4 - Rare People Cards at a min of 6,000 (and the ones above were sold out at that price)

Anyway, I'm keen to know what others think, and would welcome a discussion and any insights to be shared in comments.

Many thanks

Hoosie

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