Are We Heading For Another Perfect Storm In Splinterlands?

Looking back at the history of Splinterlands, 2021 has undoubtedly been our best year thus far. Back then, it all came together for a perfect storm. The SPS airdrop was launched, crypto was in raging bull mode, and most assets were traded at crazy prices. All good things come to an end, and in hindsight, it's easy to see that a lot of errors were made. The surge of daily signups was, in fact, mostly bots drying to suck as much value as possible out of the ecosystem. The DEC reward mechanic minted DEC into oblivion and both the Chaos Legion base set as well as the Chaos Legion reward cards were over printed at a crazy rate.

After the euphoria of 2021 came a long and dark bear market and with SPS at only 1/100th of its all time high today, it's fair to say that we've bled quite a bit. But, and that's the important part, we are still around and while we've lost a lot of members along the way, we still have a vibrant, highly active community. On top of that, we've had a change in management, we've very obviously learned from a lot of our mistakes, and we've fixed a lot of our fundamental issues. That's not to say that everything is golden just yet, but I do believe that we are very much on track now and that indeed, we might see another perfect storm forming for us in the coming year!

Obviously, there's no guarantee, I don't have crystal ball, and all kinds of things could go wrong along the way. But lets just assume for a second that things will play out in the way we hope they will and indulge in a bullish outlook for next year!

First things first, the most important factor, even if I don't like it, is still the overall crypto market and that in turn is still completely dictated by what Bitcoin is doing. We've had the halving back in April 2024 and ever since, we've seen some up and down but overall, BTC has been looking pretty good and just recently started to flirt with its ATH again. Past success doesn't guarantee future results, but it's more than likely that BTC will be going back to full bull mode rather soon.

Once that happens, and again nothing is guaranteed, all the rest of crypto is going to follow. All of a sudden, people will once again have a lot of funny money and they will be looking for stuff to spend it on. We certainly won't be the first project they'll be looking for, but over time, we'll see interest pick up even if nothing else happens. The good thing is, though, that there actually is more happening. Quite a bit actually.

The team is actively working on the new player experience, looking into onboarding, and how to make the game more welcoming to new players overall. So chances are, when we see interest pick up again, we'll be more prepared this time and just maybe the new signups are going to be real players instead of bots this time. New players need assets, obviously, and that's where things are going to get really interesting.

Back in 2021, we've literally been sold out for quite a long time. With both Untamed and Dice completely cleared, there wasn't anything on sale for almost 9 months if I recall correctly. During that time, all our assets shot up in value and the top cards were selling for thousands of dollars. Untamed, as all the sets before it, had comparably low print runs and there simply weren't enough cards to buy. Push & Shove everybody. Now, if we focus again on where we are right now, we're actually in a somewhat similar situation, or at least we could end up in it once again.

So far, we've sold roughly 960,000 packs. While there are still 1.2M more packs for sale, a lot of them are going to burn and we'll probably end up somewhere between 1M and 1.2M packs sold. Compared to Untamed, which sold 1.5M packs, that's quite a bit less supply than we had back then. Interestingly enough, Rebellion also contains more different card, so as a result, we'll end up with substantially less cards than what we had for Untamed. At the same time, once the next set is released, Chaos Legion, with it's hugely inflated print numbers, will leave Modern.

So all of a sudden, there will be very few people left with competitive decks to compete in modern. This in turn should increase the per battle rewards in modern, earning everybody competing there more SPS per win. That again should coincide with a rising value of SPS thanks to the overall market action. In effect, people will earn a lot more per win than they do right now. This is obviously going to make Rebellion cards more valuable, but at the same time, it will make buying the new set more interesting.

Good thing is, we've learned from the past, and so this set is going to be nowhere as overprinted as Chaos Legion and should thus be able to maintain value a lot better. The important part for the overall ecosystem, though, is the fact that to buy the set, we will need DEC. A lot of it. But guess what, there's just not enough DEC out there:

As we know, the only meaningful way to generate more DEC is by burning SPS. So no matter what happens, if there's enough demand for the next set, SPS is going to be burned and that, once again, is going to help with the overall value of SPS.

I won't make any predictions and as I indicated before, a lot of things could go wrong along the way. But I believe there's a real chance that 2025 could turn out to be just as awesome for us as 2021 was. If everything comes together as detailed above, we'll be in full bull mode ourselves next year and everybody that stood through the fire and rain (or technically is buying back in right now) is going to have a very pleasant time. Fingers crossed!