A lot of people are tired of the constant talk about burning assets. They don't see it as an answer for Splinterlands. They see it as more of a marketing stunt or a distraction. Personally, I have never been a fan of burning tokens but in the case of Splinterlands, its needed — especially with cards.

Cards are an asset you can never use up. The game is designed to print more cards anytime there's more demand. And usually at a faster pace than demand grows.

The game is built for temporary supply crunches, followed by a flood of new assets. What it really needs is mechanisms in place to take out excess supply.

Even if you believe land will take out 75% of the cards in circulation ( which it won't), consider that 85% of all cards have a chaos legion border and we still have over five million packs to open between Riftwatchers and Chaos Legion, plus we're still printing millions of soul bound cards, and we probably have a million or two packs of a new promo set coming soon. And then in 6-8 months we'll probably see the whole thing start over when Rebellion is released to crickets.

We have too many cards and land is not the silver bullet answer. We need to burn cards. Lots of them.

How do we do it?

Here's two ideas:

The first is the card graveyard on land.

Right now you have to stake cards on land. On normal land with no Runi you have a max of 5 cards you can stake. But what if there was a PP bonus for burning cards on your land?

Right now if you stake a 1 bcx common CL card, you get 2.5 production points. What if burning was an additional option that gave you higher PP rewards? The way I'm picturing it, if you burn a card on your land, your land gets a permanent production boost with 3x what you would have gotten for staking the same card. So a 1 BCX common CL card could be staked for 2.5 PP or burned for 7.5 PP.

I know Matt had concerns about the few players who have all the alpha gold foil legendaries soaking up all the rewards with a few plots, so there would need to be limits on individual plots for how much PP it could have so nothing breaks but something like this could help some other plots compete that aren't loaded with those ultra rare cards.

What I like about this is two fold. First, its market driven. If the card prices start to rise, it may not be worth it to burn them anymore. If its more valuable to rent them out or play with them they don't get burned. If a lot get burned and then we get a boost in players and suddenly there's a 2021 style boost in card prices and income, good. The cards will come back. They will always just keep printing more. And if they get over printed again and are too cheap, fire up the land furnace.

The other thing I like is that the land reward pools are finite. So burning cards doesn't create more rewards. It just gets you a larger portion of a pool of assets that we were going to get anyway. This is key to success in this economy. It helps balance assets instead of creating moar constantly.

Two more quick notes on the idea:

1. If you burn cards on land, you don't get DEC. That gets burned too.

2. The PP bonus on the land would be permanent. Burning monsters on land would increase the value of the plot because it would come with automatic PP. That said, if there was nothing staked on the land, it still wouldn't produce. I see this as a bonus that you get a percentage of based on maxing out the staking on the plot. If you have a greave yard that can add an extra 10k PP but you plot is only staking 5 half maxed cards and 25k DEC instead of the full 50k, the plot owner only get 5k pp. If there's nothing staked, they get nothing, and if the plots has 5 maxed cards and enough DEC, they get the full 10k pp bonus. This encourages people to stake fully on these plots with graveyard bonuses.

This one I can't take credit for. @aftersound mentioned it in a recent video but has yet to flesh it out. This is my version of his idea.

Burning cards for new cards

If we do another Vrooz type promo card that isn't company revenue, instead of using vouchers or DEC as payment, we burn cards.

Right now Vrooz is sitting at 38 cents. That's pretty awesome considering it cost a 10 cent voucher to get one if you had the SPS staked.

If we assume a similar outcome for the value of the next one, would it be worth it for you to go buy and burn 10 1 cent common cards to mint 1 BCX of a new common promo card? I would think yes.

Of course we should be able to burn other cards too.

So here's my suggested cost for each BCX of a new promo card:

10 Common BCX = 1 promo card BCX

3 Rare BCX = 1 promo card BCX

1 Epic BCX = 1 promo card BCX

1 Legendary BCX = 6 promo card BCX

We could have new, more valuable cards and at the same time end up with far fewer cards in the economy. It would be a mass burning of some of these cheap cards no one has any use for and it would be a cool new promo card people get exited for. Plus, if we did a similar thing where we allowed people to mint based on SPS stake, we might help more people see the value in staking SPS.

So yeah, burn it all and let's get back to a reasonable place.

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