Conflict Airdrops: Are We Getting "Screwed"?

The Conclave Arcana Conflicts are about to start and I find myself in a bit of a pickle. No, not that one. My single-wagon Rebellion rare GF strategy, put into place months ago, won't be as strong as expected, largely due to the proliferation of black foils within the new Conclave Arcana set. After much deliberation, I decided to let it play out anyway, even if I don't expect to get more than a couple cards in the entire conflict period. Call it an experiment. Maybe I'll be wrong and get more than expected. Maybe I'll be lucky and get a gold foil (or black?!?!?!).

But the real question here, the one most people are interested in at the moment. Did I get screwed? Am I getting screwed? Are WE the people getting screwed? Who's getting screwed by who and for what reasons? And how? Is the pickle involved? This is an economic game and we must know these things, and know them in detail!

First of all, did I get screwed? Yes. Absolutely. But how? When they announced Rebellion would maintain half of its value in the upcoming airdrop, I devised a clever strategy to make use of a single wagon to try to land some valuable airdrop cards. This would keep wagon replacement costs low and give me a good return on these gold foil rare Rebellion cards that I was going to stake. As a card lord, I have to calculate the opportunity cost of renting out cards as opposed to staking them on a wagon. In the upcoming airdrop, these cards would be worth as much as a max level regular foil legendary CA card. I figured that had to count for something, right? That's where I was wrong, and that's where I got "screwed" if you want to call it that. Because at that point, the team hadn't shown their cards (pun intended) with regards to black foil, and of course they reserved the right to give these new foils as much CP as they wanted to give them, as well as PP.

I was dismayed when I saw the black foil legendary cards would receive 50,000 PP on land, as it seemed like an arbitrary integration of huge new land values to satisfy company greed, and a betrayal of earlier promises. Who paid for the development of land? The SPS DAO. And yet the company feels entitled to sell overpowered land chips and betray the previous whitepaper to make more money on sales. I'm not mad, just disappointed, because I hope they wouldn't go down that route. They're not done.

But I digress. Who else is getting "screwed"? If the Rebellion rare GFs are worth next to nothing, then all Conclave Arcana regular foils are in the same boat. If a wagon full of max level legendaries doesn't earn you one card per airdrop on average, then let's not even talk about filling up wagons with common cards. Forget non-max cards, they are not even in the picture. If you are buying these with the intent to play in modern and stake on wagons, you end up douple dipping on the utility of those cards, but you will get almost nothing from the wagons nonetheless.

Who are the big "winners" in the conflict? Qui bono? The people that get to stake cards like this one on their wagons. A black foil legendary like this one brings 262500 power, which is about the same as ten max gold foil epics, or five gold foil legendaries. These are the cards that will dominate the airdrop and suck the vast majority of the value to themselves. But then the glaring question that remains is: did the people who own these cards also get screwed? Maybe, but that is only speculation.

There are some people looking to get into the airdrop and one popular route seems to be the black foil commons, and gold foil epics at around the same price. But that amount of CP won't get you as much as it did in previous airdrops, and that is by design. It is a high priced game to want to chase after these conflict airdrops. Enter at your own risks.

I don't blame the whales because in many cases they are in the red too. It is easy to isolate one section or aspect in which they seem to be winning, and ignore the cost behind that achievement. They support the company with their money, and get a large share of the products in return, which leads to a lion's share of the rewards. In bad times, they stand to lose the most as well.

Thanks to Azircon for the inspiration behind this post. Not because he promised 100$, but because he said it was impossible for me to write this post. I won't claim any money because in the end I am not defending the same narrative as he describes. But I want to talk about the idea of the average player getting exploited. First of all, what does "average player" mean? It's just impossible to define, because there are a thousand ways to interact with the game, spend money on the game, get returns from the game both in entertainment and financial ways. Some ways are better than others, and I am not here to defend bad strategies that lead people to get burned. Everybody makes their own decisions.

However, there are also many ways in which players are misled to invest into something, and expect something, and months later it gets taken away, or cheapened before that actual value gets delivered. This has been a trend in the ecosystem, and has left a lot of people disillusioned, especially those that buy in heavily into the hype at any particular time. If somebody had opened a hundred legendary packs on day one, and getting largely burned, but ending up with approximately gold level legendary cards, and they were hoping to get some good value from the wagons at least... well I'm sorry, seems like you got screwed. But that's not my situation, and if it is someone else's they can voice their opinions about it.

So in the end, are WE the people getting screwed? I don't know. There are good and bad ways to spend on Splinterlands, to get your money's worth or not. Sometimes it's harder than you think. Do your own research and use critical thinking, and avoid spending good money based on assumptions that might turn out to be false. We all make mistakes and there are many mistakes to be made here.

See you next time! Hope you enjoyed reading.