One of the things that is most exciting and the biggest change from previous sets is the way airdrops will work in Rebellion. Instead of each pack you buy giving a single "chance" for an airdrop, cards and packs from the Rebellion set will be staked in wagons. These staked cards and packs will generate points over a month, and your accumulated points at the end of the month will be converted to airdrop chances.
Specifically, each pack will contribute 100 points per hour, and each card will contribute its CP per hour. Each 100k points will generate 1 chance. For the first card, there will be 4,000 BCX available, and 200 chances will yield one guaranteed BCX.
In this post, I want to look at the potential ROI of staking cards in wagons. I have previously done a few posts on this, but now that the official numbers are out for the first conflict, I wanted to update the numbers with more concrete info.
But first, a battle!
https://splinterlands.com/?p=battle&id=sm_GtMvVludclPfjb4wxt9t
Rebellion cards aren't useful only for wagons. In fact, when cards are staked in wagons, you can still use them in battle! So I want to take a minute to show how some of the cards in Rebellion can be used in battle.
Here is a battle where I use a total of 3 rebellion cards: a 3-mana dual element summoner, a 2-mana no-attack back-line tank, and wailing wraith, one of my favorite cards of the set. The return fire of the backline tank took out one of their sneak cards, and the summoner allowed me to fit in cards I otherwise likely couldn't have. And wailing wraith is always a win.
And you can see my opponent had similar ideas, using the same summoner and 2 other rebellion cards. So out of 14 cards in this battle, 6 of them were from Rebellion.
So yes, Mantaroth and Grimbardun smith are the MVPs of the set, but don't let that fool you and make you miss out on some of the other really good cards Rebellion has to offer.
How many CP can I expect to buy per dollar?
One of the metrics I focused on a lot in previous posts was how many CP you could get per dollar. This maxed out around 167 when you could get bad GFLs for ~$75. The past few weeks, when people caught on to this and GFLs went up to ~$100 went down to ~125 ($4 GFR, $20 GFE, $100 GFLs). Some cards dipped below this in the past week or two, and I've grabbed up some GFRs when they did. With the announcement, the floor is firmly up to 125 CP/$, and likely will stay above that for a while.
So for calculations in this article, I'll use 125 CP/$ as a benchmark.
How many points per hour per guaranteed BCX?
Now that there is a guarantee, it's usually the best EV to end the airdrop with an amount right around a multiple of that. In previous airdrops, this usually meant buying a multiple of 200-300 packs, depending on the requirements. Here, it will mean ending up with a multiple off 100k200=20M points. If a conflict runs 30 days, you need 20M/(3024)~=28k points.
Every approximately 28k points (depending on the exact length of the season) will yield one guaranteed BCX of the first airdrop card.
For the sake of maximizing EV, I will move forward assuming you're buying CP in ~28k increments to maximize guarantee potential.
Tell me the ROI already!
Okay, I think that's enough building blocks to calculate the actual ROI. Because the truncated distributions involving guarantees aren't easily analytically-solvable, I'll resort to my old favorite: simulation.
Below, I simulate 1,000 runs of conflicts using 28k CP, and show the distribution of resultant BCX.
Some assumptions:
- No GFs. I have crap luck. If I get a GF I'll be thrilled! If not, I won't be disappointed as I'll have assumed that from the beginning.
- Total points each hour in conflicts. I'm going to assume 100% of outstanding packs and cards are staked to wagons. This is very pessimistic, but will put a floor on the expected value. Currently, there are 92M "points" outstanding, so I'll use that number.
- The value of the airdrop. $10 for Rage
The plot above shows how often you're likely to get different amounts of BCX. Since I'm using 28k as a baseline, you're guaranteed one BCX. The expected value is 1.5 BCX (as opposed to 1.2 BCX without the guarantee), which translates to $15.
Assuming 125 CP/$, you spent 28k/125=$224 to get that guarantee, and so get an ROI of $15/$224=6.7%. Not great, but that's just one airdrop. What about 9 airdrops.
There's more!? What happens with all 9 airdrops?
Some additional assumptions.
- The value of the airdrop. $8 for non-summoner legendary cards. $20 for summoners. Each subsequent airdrop will be worth 5% more than the last, so the last one will be worth 147% the first.
- The distribution of the airdrops. We'll keep it at 4k BCX for all with the same guarantee. I think, based on how old airdrops work, the BCX and the amount needed for a guarantee will need to go up, but I don't want to guess at those numbers, and them both going up may well cancel out approximately
- I will say 50k packs sell each month and all are opened and staked, so 50k x 150=7.5M new cp staked each month + 4000 x 500 (the CP from the new airdrop) = 2M = 10M total additional points each month.
Below shows a histogram of the total value over 9 months from staking your cards + all the airdrops.
The above shows you've got a high chance of getting total airdrops worth anywhere from $200 to $250, with a low chance of getting significantly more than that. Taken together, the EV of 28k CP of rebellion is: 107%. The lowest value was 82% (this is the value of getting only the guarantee for every airdrop), and the highest value is 182% (if you're consistently getting more than the minimum guarantee).
Conclusions
I am pretty surprised at these numbers. 100% ROI over 9 months is really nice.
I used the most pessimistic assumptions I could throughout, and these numbers are still quite high. The guarantee really changed the game on the ROI of this. The guarantee, depending on how many of those actually get used (as they don't take away from the 4000 BCX), might mean way more BCX get printed than expected.
Of course, this is all based on some assumptions and while we can finally use actual numbers on some of these things, some things are in the future and entirely unknowable. It's possible someone will do this same calculation and realize how much they can get by buying and opening rebellion packs, and so way more enter the market than I've accounted for. However, 82% is the ROI even if you never do better than minimum, which is still quite nice.
Referral
Interested in splinterlands? Like the battle and the use of rebellion cards? Want to stake some rebellion cards in wagons and get airdrops? Use my referral link below and I'll send you some cards to get you started!
