The Splinterlands Gamer #1 - Splinterstorm skins in Splinterlands: An Analysis

The Splinterlands Gamer - issue 1

Hey everyone! First of all a small intro about myself. This is officially my first decent post so I want to explain more about myself.

I have been active for about one year now (even if my account is way older) in Hive and some tribes. I have known beautiful, energetic people in here, and at some point or another, all have encouraged me to start writing and add value to this incredible blockchain/community. But there is a strong reason I haven't post anything meaningful about Splinterlands until today: Selfishness! Yep. If you are spending time reading my piece, at least I should be honest with you, right?

As soon as I discovered Splinterlands in 2020 I started a buying frenzy. The reason? Well, I am the owner of a trading card gaming brick and mortar store since 1997.
I'm also an old gamer, bought and sold from Ultima Online Keeps to Diablo's Stones of Jordan, been there, done that. Heck, we were doing play-to-earn in WoW selling gold to rich Europeans before Play To Earn was a thing, haha.
I have basically been waiting 20 years for the technology to arrive; the dynamics were in there since the beginning.

So I immediately recognized the value proposition of Splinterlands. I started playing Magic in 1994 (yeah, moxes, duals, and the like) and bought my first pokemon 1st edition boxes in 1999. Sold too early but still in the business, "...but that is another story and shall be told another time..." .

Fast forward to nowadays, it looks that my initial assessment was right; Splinterlands is doing great! It is smashing records of new players , generating a vast amount of wealth for all the ecosystem , and making headlines here and there.

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So today I'm going to cut straight to the topic of this very first "The Splinterlands Gamer" issue that I intend to pursue with some certain regularity:

The Splinterstorm skins: Are they an attractive item to purchase?

Skins are something that has been around for a long time in the vast majority of online games. Back in the day, we oldies just called them "cosmetic upgrades" , and that is what basically are, a "repaint" of some original asset.

The appeal of the skins are basically two:

• 1- For long-time players, a skin helps to liven up the items, characters or cards that they are used up to every day. It is nice to see different art when you have been playing 1 , 2 or 5 years to the same game and sometimes even repeating the same part of a game (I'm looking at you, Mephisto or Onyxia 😜)

• 2- It is a "strength flex" to shop to other players; skin distribution usually is limited, both in time and quantity, and it takes either a) to be an old guard, b) Be a very good player with sound results in PVP seasons or c) to spend decent money (and sometimes all three conditions!) in order to have access to them.

So yeah, skins are a nice thing to have, and have made a pretty penny to industry leaders like League of Legends.

And here we are, with our own Splinterlands Skins!

The first set is called Splinterstorm , and it's comprised of 74 different skins that cover almost every card printed in Alpha/Beta editions.

The original price for this skins was based in the original card rarity, and since then the prices were adjusted a little.

Commons - 1880 DEC - Now 1960
Rares - 4700 DEC - Now 4900
Epics - 9400 DEC - Now 9800
Legendaries - 18,800 DEC - Now 19600

No idea of why they tweaked the prices, maybe some OG can tell us. The first thing that you need to know is that 6 of them are already sold out! This are:

• Angel of Light
• Spirit of the Forest
• Selenia Sky
• Chromatic Dragon
• Gold Dragon
• Lord of Darkness

All of them with mintage of 100. There is a unique trait with this skins, that they are account bound, so no matter what, those 100 skins will be forever, and only, on those 100 accounts that purchased them.

Talking about mintages, the available copies are: 1000 for common skins, 500 for rare skins, 200 for epic skins and 100 for legendary skins. Those were decent numbers back in the day, but consider what they look now, with a 300,000 player base... This mintage is tiny!

Now, back to today. Are this skins worthy? Well, apart from the already commented boost to your game experience AND to your ego 👻 , is true that nowadays with DEC reaching unheard prices ($8 per 1000 DEC as we speak!) It maybe doesn't look like a good idea to spend that much on skins....

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However, it turns that looks like a pretty good idea! And SPS governance token is to blame for. If we take a look to the Splinterlands Airdrop document, we can see that those juicy SPS airdrop points that are responsible for our daily SPS dose can be earned also with... Exactly, Skins! While we can keep 1960 DEC in our wallet to generate 1960 Airdrop points... It turns out that if we have one common skin (bought for 1960 DECs) That common skin will give us a daily 1000 airdrop points! "But it is not that much" anyone would rightly say. Agree, but we have one piece of information left:

If you buy a complete set of Splinterstorm skins, be it commons, rare, epics or legendaries, you will get a 50% discount!

Running the numbers, we have:

• For 23520 DEC, you have 24 common skins, that grants you 24,000 daily sps airdrop points
• For 55860 DEC you have 23 rare skins, that grants you 57,500 daily sps airdrop points
• For 83300 DEC, you have 17 epic skins, that grants you 85,000 daily sps airdrop points

I don't put the numbers for the legendaries because the sold out of the 6 skins mentioned above makes it a worse choice.

So this is it! Basically the ELI5 is that if you like skins, and you have a good amount of DEC saved for collecting SPS airdrops, you can safely buy complete rarity sets and still get those SPS drops for the rest of the 350 days left. You will end up with a really cool set of alternate pictures to enjoy and to brag about 😎 !

Warning: Remember that we are talking about SPS airdrop point here, not SPS tokens! The airdrop points are just a measure to calculate your part of the daily airdrop. Don't Ape into it without knowing what you are doing, do your own research, not financial advice, and yadda yadda!

Let's wrap up with some bullish tease: We know that this skins only cover Alpha and Beta sets, so it is reasonable to assume that at some point a skin collection for Untamed and maybe Orb and Dice can appear! And lastly, we still don't know what can be in the works for skin holders, as our very own Chris Roberts puts it:

It's been awhile since this first round of skins was released, and the team has been busy growing and developing higher priority >aspects of the game, but skins will play a much larger role in the future of Splinterlands. Keep on the lookout for new skin updates! >;) There are many exciting things to come!

Thanks for reaching here, I don't run a server or witness or delegation hustle so if you have enjoyed this piece feel free to vote, comment or tell me your ideas / strategies back in to the comment section! Today was a great day to compile this piece as the game was down and I had some more spare time around 😎 I have a few ideas for the next topics of this little newsletter, we will see at the return of my vacations. Have fun everybody out there!