My pondering on the pricing of potions for Survival, which are impacting my Survival card-buying strategy.

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The purposes of Survival mode

1. To promote card utility and ownership of multiple copies of each card
2. To drive up the value of cards, especially those near burn value, which should allow us to activate the SPS flywheel more easily.
3. To drive up rental costs of cheaper cards.
4. To encourage levelling up of cards (?)
5. Point 3 may have the side effect of helping address the user experience in Modern as maxed may no longer have viable rental costs for the returns in Bronze and Silver.

The purposes of the Survival mode potions

1. To allow people to continue playing in Survival where certain key cards in their collection have been killed.
2. To act as a DEC sink and/or utility for land 1.75 resources.

Survival mode potion pricing considerations

1. The cost of revival potions should be higher than most people would be willing to rent that card for, as it effectively places a ceiling on the amount people will be willing to rent cards for in Survival and reduces the need to hold multiple copies. But for certain meta cards potions could be extremely useful.
2. To encourage the levelling up of cards and ownership of multiple card copies, the revival potions would need to benefit those with higher level cards more.
3. We want the price to be at a level that these potions are used with some frequency so that they add a meaningful benefit to land.
4. To achieve points 2 & 3 the cost would ideally need to scale with card levels but benefit higher levelled cards more. The cost might also need to reduce on card rarity so that it costs more to revive a common than a legendary card to reflect the longer cooldown period of lower rarity cards.
5. The potion price effectively places a rental ceiling price for Survival on each card, and in most cases the potion price therefore needs to be much higher to drive card utility.
6. Considering the cost for maxed legendary cards. Rentals vary, but are very low for many cards. The potion price needs to be affordable for some cards whilst allowing for significant rental price rises for most. So maybe a cost of around 30-50 DEC would seem about right at the moment.
7. This should be considered on the extremes of say Djinn Biljka and Eternal Tofu. We want to encourage card utility over potion use for Djinn Biljka, whilst trying to avoid spamming of Eternal Tofu due to potions being too affordable.
8. Hopefully we see the SPS price rise dramatically, which would normally lead to an increase in rental price. Where we see significant jumps in price the potion cost may need to increase.
9. This is where the creation of potions on land creates a challenge, as in 1.75 as this would be one of the major utilities for land at that time. If land owners focus on production of potions or ramp up production dramatically for this, it could create an oversupply of potions, driving down the potion cost and thereby discouraging card utility. But at the same time we need an adequate supply of potions for Survival mode at appropriate prices. If potions need to be traded in land, this might also require on a single potion at a single price is used, potentially undermining point 4 above.
10. One option for this is that the land resources needed to create potions could change depending on the price of potions, so that potion prices are maintained within a range. Another is that potions on land are just set up to be very expensive to create which might allow the market to decide the pricing, which would naturally drive prices higher or lower as SPS price & potion demand changes.

Full disclosure: I have bought most of my initial cards for Survival, focussing mainly on maxed level cards. I may need to do a second round of buying once full details are released.

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