Splinterlands Auction Review: GF Heloise the Hollow

Hello there.

The first ever GF Heloise card for auction was recently sold. The buyer was able to get it for 14M DEC. In my previous post, I did all sorts of comparison with current GF Legendary cards for sale, and I ended up with around 20M as my estimate. I was a bit off, but definitely closer than others that expected it to be less than 10M DEC.

The initial part of the auction was pretty active. In the first ten minutes, the highest price of the RF copies was already exceeded. Tehox did the minimum bid at 10K, but Azircon immediately set the minimum to 1.2M credits. Within the first 30 minutes, the max RF price was almost doubled at 2.75M by Azircon.

Things started to slow down once Azircon increased the price from 3.45M to 5M. Venarisyndicate increased it to 5.1M, and housewifeftw made a minimum bid to 5.11M DEC. From such a very exciting first 2.5 hours of auction, it came to a standstill. I saw in the discord where Eldon1 said that the real auction will start at 5K [USD, or around 5M DEC at peg]. This is what prompted Azircon to bid with the 5M credits.

It is a bit funny that bidding pretty much stopped after it reached 5M; apart from the two afterwards. I think 5M was the limit for a lot of players, and setting it to this amount early on in the auction pretty much eliminated a lot of would be bidders. This sped up the process and pretty much set the stage for the serious bidders.

Almost 12 hours after the auction started, Azircon moved it with a minimum bid. Venarisyndicate and housewifeftw eventually did minimum bids of their own. It seemed like the battle for the 1st GF Heloise will be between these three. But Cryptomancer, out of nowhere, decided to stop all these minimum bid shenanigans and increased the bid to 6M DEC.

Housewifeftw, not to be outdone, made a minimum bid a few hours after. For those not familiar/have forgotten, Housewifeftw is a big buyer in these types of promo events, and is also the first winner if the RF Heloise card. I can see them trying to add the first GF Heloise card to their collection as well.

But Cryptomancer had his own plans. Almost an hour after housewifeftw's minimum bid, Cryptomancer increased it to 7.5M DEC. There were no additional bids, even minimum bids, against it for so long that it was almost the end of the auction. People were pretty much resigned that Cryptomancer's 7.5M will win it. But in a wild turn of events, Cryptomancer increased the bid to 14M DEC just a few seconds before the end of the auction.

I was monitoring it in-game and in the discord, and a lot of people was flabbergasted when they saw it. Some were even saying that Cryptomancer screwed himself over by doing that when he could have bought it for so much less. So it was really nice when Cryptomancer decided to share his thoughts on the matter.

I think this was actually next level commitment on Cryptomancer's part, and showed how much he wanted the card. I didn't even consider that option. I wouldn't put it past housewifeftw to make a last minute bid, but Cryptomancer checking the reserve of his opponents and bidding above that pretty much secured him the card.

With only 4 GF Heloise cards left, this can be a very viable strategy to use in the future. With the way the auction went, I think housewifeftw, venarisyndicate, and azircon can end up with the 3 cards. It will be interesting to see if the rest will reach a similar price point. Cryptomancer submitted his last bid with around 30 seconds left, so we can't really say if the others were planning a last second snipe [if they had 10M prepared for the snipe it just won't go through]. I do hope that the 14M DEC is going to be the lowest for this card.

That was a very interesting turn of events for the first GF Heloise auction. It was like a rollercoaster with a lot of ups and downs at the start, some twist and turns in the middle, and a big finale. I look forward to the next 4 ones.

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