Hey everyone, here's another Splinterlands post from me on a topic I have not talked about before, it's the new Conclave Arcana mini-set Escalation!

The pre-sale just ended yesterday so all players participating in the pre-sale are now able to open their packs, in this post I will share my plans and vision as a smaller player how I will handle this new set. The term small or big player is very relative and my friend @cherokee4life and I started a kinda meme thing calling each other whales because we are relative big in different assets in the game, we both have quite a bit of land - again... relative but he's buying a lot more cards than I am lately, on the other hand my SPS stake is much higher but this is primarily because I am building my accounts for 4.5 years almost every single day at multiple accounts, time in the market is more valuable as timing the market. 🙂

Well, this all is just rambling but the thing I wanted to say is just that for starting players I have a 'big' accounts but when I look at the big boys in Diamond and Champion league, I feel very humble so I still see myself as a small player and my plans can work for all small accounts.

Participating in the pre-sale

I didn't want to do nothing in the pre-sale so I bought 3 packs just to support the team and the game really, 3 packs didn't get me any promo cards so it was just that, showing my support.

I really feel buying packs is for whales, it is NOT the best way to get the cards you need and when buying only a small amount of packs you need to be really, really lucky to pull something cool and valuable. It can happen, I've done it with a couple of Rebellion packs in which I pulled a Gold Foil Legendary I sold for $125 so I could buy more cards I needed.

So why I feel like packs are for whales? the odds average out when a whale buys 1000 packs at a time, in such large numbers the packs WILL contain Gold Foils and even some of the cool new Black and Arcana Foils maybe. As a small player you would be better off seeing what cards do well in battle, I usually wait and see which cards kick my ass in ranked battle and then make plans to buy them, more on that later.

Opening my 3 packs

I have to say, the art looks stunning and it's fun opening packs! But opening my three packs proved my opinion, all I got was 4 common cards and 1 rare, the absolute minimum - plus 1 extra rare in the last pack.

As you can see I already pulled some doubles so I sent them to my alt accounts since it wasn't enough to level them up. I did got three of the 13 mana common giants and even at level 1 they are pretty potent and usable in my ranked battles in Modern Gold league.

Planning long term vs. short term

Every 18 months or so, a new set will be launched - pushing the oldest of the two sets currently in Modern League out and it rotates out to Wild League. This means that probably one year from now, give or take a couple of months a new main set will be released and it will replace Rebellion in Modern League.

This means a player that wants to stay and compete in Modern has to keep investing in the new sets to be able to play, and in three years time the cards will no longer be usable in Modern League.

Newer players may think this is unfair but it's not, I completely understand why this is - it's to keep the game sustainable and give revenue to the Splinterlands team, all the wonderful people working there need to eat too remember? 😉
It would be strange if you could make a one time purchase for let's say $800 in cards and play and earn with these cards without any costs. From a player perspective this would be great of course but it would make the game unsustainable and this is exactly the reason why in Wild League, you have to buy the Wild Pass with 2000 DEC every season.

I do feel like there should be brackets in Wild as well just like in Survival now, so people can choose a bracket and pay more or less for the Wild Pass depending on which bracket they choose. As it is now, players with a Bronze level deck will only lose money when playing in Wild League, they are never going to earn anywhere close to the 2000 DEC paid for the Wild Pass. The lowest account I am running in Wild is a Gold level botted account, it's still running at a slight loss every season of less than $1.

Ok, I start to ramble again - I do that when I talk about the things I like 🤣

The point I was going to make is CARDS or short term, again, relative. In three years they won't be able to be played in Modern, so what about the long term parts of the game?

I am here since August 2021, and I will plan to be here for the long run. SPS and Land will always be here in the game. SPS is needed to earn in the game and will always be the bottleneck, long term I do think SPS will be more scarce and hopefully more valuable and it's why I concentrated on building up my stake in the last year with all earnings made from posts like these.

this land deed overview is made on @beaker007's awesome site, it's a must for every land owner.

As I said, Land is another long term part of the game that will start to become more and more important and integrated in the game, land plots won't remain this cheap for ever so I am putting €50 personal funds in to land every month to either buy more workers to put on my plots, more land plots depending if there are nice plots for sale in the regions I am active in or buy more DEC to stake on my lands.

A warning for smaller players interested in land however: land is a freaking black hole for money, getting one plot of land up and running easily requires and additional $50 on top of the plot cost, and to be self sufficient, you need at least one Grain plot and one other plot.

Buying Escalation cards

So, am I not interested in the new cards whatsoever? I am! And over time I will definitely but the cards I feel I need to stay competitive in Modern League with my Silver level deck fighting in Gold League.
Am I buying them now? NOPE...

Patience is the key here, while supply is still low and demand is high(er) since everyone wants the new cards to play with, I will wait a couple of weeks until more packs are opened and more cards appear on the market so a floor price can be established, THEN I will start to buy the cards I want and need with what I make from my posts and hopefully I will sell some cards I still have for sale including this beauty.

That's it for today, let me know what your plans are and whether you agree with me or think I am totally wrong! 🙂

Thank you for reading!!!

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Have a great day!