Splinterlands Chaos Legion Presale Final Standings ($500,000 Spent for 1st Place!) + Phase 2 Info

The Splinterlands Chaos Legion Presale ended a few days ago and I haven't had time to write up a presale summary post due to the Thanksgiving holiday here in the United States. Without further ado, here's my final Chaos Legion Pre-sale update!

I have been documenting the movement of the Pre-sale leaderboard with some recent posts:

Final 6 Hours of Splinterlands Chaos Legion Presale. $339,000+ to Take First Place!

The Final Countdown! $156,000+ to Make The Top 6 on Splinterlands Chaos Legion Pre-sale Leaderboard!

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Final Top 10 Pre-sale Results

@aggroed setup a livestream of the final 90 minutes of the presale and it was a lot of fun. We watched in real-time as players jockeyed for the top 6 positions where they earn the right to help design a new Chaos Legion Legendary Summoner card. Players were repeatedly warned not to wait until the last minute to buy pre-sale packs as there would be absolutely no extensions if there was a server slowdown or crash due to the rush of last minute orders.

One player, @moriarty95, threw caution to the wind and executed some stealthy last-minute orders to swoop in and secure the 6th spot on the leader board with a total of 17,273 packs. Taking a chance on a last minute purchase paid off handsomely as they will now be able to design their own summoner, and word is, also receive a free copy of the regular and gold foil version of the summoner!

The top spot on the leaderboard goes to a consortium of buyers known as @red-panda-pool who acquired 28,574 pre-sale packs at a cost of over $500,000 USD. If this doesn't show the continued future potential of Splinterlands, I don't know what does. The amount of packs purchased in this pre-sale and at the price of about $18-20 per voucher and $3.60 for the pack, means there is a tremendous amount of continued demand for this game.

What's interesting about the pre-sale is the devs decision to use VOUCHER tokens as a mechanism to allow for the potential of more players to secure packs. What this also accomplished is shifting the majority of the profit from the sale of these packs to the players rather than the company. Think of it this way, the market decided that these pre-sale packs were worth about $23 each (price of VOUCHER and pack combined), but the developers were only receiving $3.60 for the pack purchase. This means the players were receiving 85% of the potential revenue for these Chaos Legion pre-sale packs. I'm new to the crypto-gaming space, but this is unheard of in the non-blockchain world of gaming. In the non-crypto world of gaming, the game-maker would have charged $23 for each pack and pocket an enormous profit.

I think Splinterlands has a winning recipe for success here and the 875,000+ packs sold in the pre-sale are evidence of that.

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The Cost of Leaderboard Glory

Making it to the top of the Chaos Legion Pre-sale leaderboard did not come cheap. It appears that several of the top spots were taken by pools of buyers so it wasn't a single person with uber-deep pockets, but some of the top finishers do appear to be single players spending six-figures to continue their dominance in the game.

I mentioned earlier that the 1st place finisher with over 28,000 packs would have spent over $500,000 to achieve that rank. It's unclear how many players are in the Red Panda Pool, so it could be 1000 players each spending $500 or two players spending $250,000 each.

To make the Top 6 required over 17,000 packs, which would have a value of over $325,000. In my last post about the leaderboard, I predicted a minimum of 15,000 packs to take 6th place and it turns out that prediction was underestimating the amount of sniping that took place in the final hour of the pre-sale.

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What Happened to Pre-sale Vouchers?

Something crazy happened at the end of the pre-sale. Several accounts holding large numbers of Voucher tokens failed to either sell or redeem their VOUCHERs in the pre-sale. It is expected that the VOUCHERs will have much less value after the pre-sale so holding them seems absolutely insane. As of today, VOUCHER prices have fallen to under $13 each.

These four VOUCHER holders have lost a significant amount of money from a completely foreseeable event and it leaves me scratching my head. Even Aggroed commented during the pre-sale livestream that these people are going to lose a substantial sum by not using these VOUCHERs.

@agefund, @pupil_675996, @milomage, @elvishguardian are all very new accounts that were created during the pre-sale, so it seems they were meant to be used specifically for VOUCHERs, but they never dispensed with them during the pre-sale. The fact they all hold the same amount of tokens makes me think they are controlled by one person or pool.

Once the VOUCHERs begin airdropping at 2x the previous rate, prices will fall further, but right now the unrealized loss on the VOUCHERs held by these four accounts since the pre-sale ended is over $46,000, or a total of $184,000 across all four.

If you don't intend to use VOUCHERs to purchase Chaos Legion packs, you should be selling them as you receive them since there is absolutely no chance that HODLing vouchers will net a better return since the devs have made clear the best use case for VOUCHERs was the pre-sale.

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My Personal Pre-sale Results

I ended up in 865th place on the pre-sale leaderboard. While I was not trying to compete for a top spot, I was a bit surprised to see that my purchase of 100 packs, plus 10 bonus, resulted in me making the top-1000. In hindsight, I suppose it bodes well for the game that over 800 players purchased at least 100 packs in the pre-sale, which had a cost of over $2,000. That shows a significant level of commitment and doesn't even reflect the demand we will see in the next phases where the remaining 14 million packs will be sold.

For my purchase, I am entitled to two guaranteed Doctor Blight cards in the airdrop occurring on December 8th. Since the odds of a Doctor Blight drop is 1 in 50, it is statistically likely that I will end up with two more cards, bringing me a total of 4 Doctor Blight cards, enough to upgrade to one Level 2 card and have one Level 1 leftover.

I'll wait to decide what to do once I can evaluate the market for Doctor Blight cards. It's also possible that luck is not on my side and I don't get any additional 1 in 50 drops, or it's also possible I end up with more drops or even a Gold Foil version. Each airdropped Doctor Blight will have a 1 in 50 chance of being Gold Foil. I am eagerly awaiting December 8th to see what I got.

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Phase 2 Chaos Legion Sale

Now that the Pre-sale is out of the way, what's next for the Chaos Legion rollout?

Phase 2 involves 2 million packs of Chaos Legion being released. These 2 million packs will require a VOUCHER for each pack purchased, just like the pre-sale. The difference here is that there is no leaderboard incentive, no Doctor Blight airdrop, and no SPS purchase discount. For this reason I expect the price of VOUCHER tokens to drop precipitously from their $20 average in the pre-sale.

On December 8th, VOUCHER tokens will again begin airdropping for holders of staked SPS. 66,666 tokens will be dropped each day, double the amount in the pre-sale, and once the 30-day period has concluded and the 2 million VOUCHERs have been disbursed, and 2 million packs sold, the general sale will then begin to release the remaining 12 million packs.

Purchasing packs during Phase 2 will entitle you to up to two additional airdrop cards as a new card is being dropped after each 1 million packs purchased. The question players will have to ask themselves is how much are those two cards worth? These airdrops are not guaranteed either, so you only have a chance of receiving them. These two airdrops are the only difference between Phase 2 and the general sale. Personally, I'll be passing on making any Phase 2 purchases unless the devs reveal a very good airdrop card that I would miss out on if I wait until the general sale to purchase the rest of my Chaos Legion packs.

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I can't wait to see our @Hive.Pizza guilds with these new Chaos Legion cards and the performance boost we will get in our brawls. Check out my latest #BrawlReport to see how PIZZA 2 The Deep Dish performed in our last brawl: https://www.splintertalk.io/@shauner/shauner-s-17th-splinterlands-brawl