Time capsule: how the price of Splinterlands Alpha cards changed within 3 years?

Hello mates!

It's time for some memories! I just found my old Steem posts from 2018 where I was doing frequent card market reviews for Alpha and Beta cards. I think that would be interesting to shortly compare prices of some Alpha cards in late 2018 and now, after 3 years, so we can evaluate on the value growth of those cards. It's also nice to open some kind of time capsule and see how the Splinterlands' early days were look like.

Let’s have a look what was the card market situation at 01.11.2018:

The cheapest offer for Alpha legendary gold foil card was Lord of Darkness with the price of 598 USD. Currently, to get gold foil Alpha Lord of Darkness, you need to pay 55,5K USD and there is only 1 card listed on the market.

For sure, it won't be easy to sell it for such amount, but assuming it's doable, it's 92x price increase (9200%) in 3 years. Awesome ROI even in crypto world.

The most expensive Alpha gold legendary card in the market was Selenia Sky with the purchase price of 2200 USD. Currently, it's not even possible get gold foil Alpha Selenia Sky, because there are no available cards listed on the market and there are only 29 cards available in total, so the ROI here would be SICK as well.

Let's move to the one level down and check what was the price of gold foild epics. There was 185 gold foil Alpha epic cards available on the market. The cheapest offer was Defender of Truth with the price of 37.40 USD. Fire Demon was the most expensive card in that category, with the lowest offer of 47.99 USD. Currently, gold foil Alpha Defender of Truth is listed for 3335 USD and Fire Demon is listed for 30k (sic!) USD, with only one card owned by @cryptomancer listed for sale.

This is insane, how the gold foil Alphas increased their price within 3 years.

Interesting fact is also that I found in my archive documented sale of gold foild Beta Jarlax the Undead made by well-know @flauwy for 110 USD. Now this card is worth 899 USD, so purchaser made fairly good deal ;)

Also, regular Alphas were much cheaper 3 years ago, even the top legendaries from this edition. Top 3 most expensive regular cards were: Selenia Sky (22.75 USD), Spirit of the Forest (8.25 USD), Gold Dragon (9.45 USD). Selenia now is listed for 1990 USD, Spirit for 416 USD and Gold Dragon for 899 USD. Therefore, HODLing Selenia Sky was definitely good choice from time perspective for the owners.

Conclusion is, that given fact that we are just about to open new Chaos Legion packs (initial flood of new cards should make them relatively cheap) and fact that land expansions is incoming (which utilize cards further) and fact that Splinterlands team works on multiplying active players base, in my opinion this is very good time to get and hold as many cards as possible. Deflationary nature of Splinterlands cards and all mentioned factors above, makes me a feeling that in the long run a chance to loose on that investment is minimal.

I hope you enjoyed this time capsule. Until next time!