Splinterlands Land watch - Crazy Common Totem Prize

I watch totem prices on a regular basis and try to figure out what could be a good strategy here. That is why this weeks market actions caught me by surprise.

*Disclaimer I bought land so I'm interested in Totems as well, as well as their utility

On the 14th of February a big buy of Common Totems happened:

A usually calm market, where totems were sold between 30 and 50 Hive for the last month was shaken up with 3 Common Totems being sold for 90 Hive. This caught me by surprise for various reasons. Let's get through them:

The utility of Totems surrounds even more questions then the utility of land. We know at the moment only so much, that Totems will increase the effectiveness of production. According to the information we have around totems it also seems that these tokens can be used only on suitable land plots: examples of their abilities were very specific like: "speed up *Death Splinter* Item card minting time", "increase the rate of *Sparkstone* harvesting" or "reduce the maintenance cost of a *Farm building*".

If you don't have a suitable plot where you can use this ability, then the only reasonable step will be to buy a suitable plot or sell the totem.

Your market reach will be much smaller as only the plot owners who can use the totem will be interested in the purchase. Where it might provide some unclear utility, because we don;t know if a Common Totem will provide 1%, 5% or 20% more production on a plot.

We also don't know if Totems can be rented out as well. And once deployed in a building, then how can those be redeployed to a different building (if this will be possible at all).

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The high price surprised me, because I noticed no big reveal in the last days around the totems, which could support this decision.

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No price action happened on the remaining totems. Currently the difference between the last sold common and rare totem is only 35 Hive, while the total supply of the Common Totems are 5x more then the Rare Totems. In the case that this was a legitimate purchase, then we could expect the prices of Rare Totems to increase in the future as well.
What also speaks for the price increase is the limited amount of Totems. For the 150.000 available plots currently 31222 totems are available. Here I would add for the speculators out there, that this is not the final supply. The Splinterlands team mentioned that additional Totems might rarely be found on land as well.

My thought about these purchase are:

I think the current selling price for Common totems is to high.

Reasoning:

• There are still to many unknowns around Totems
• Rare Totems should have a better utility and cost nearly the same. They would be a better buy
• For 3 Common Totems a new plot could be bought. Now a small increase in productivity can't be compared to having a plot with a building which can provide a production. (though Totems would save the owner cost to get Summoners and Monsters to run the plot).
• Be cautious, if you want to use this asset as an investment: This is a very slow market. It might well happen that if you would buy a totem for investment you would not be able to liquidate it when needed.

This seems to be an interesting day for Splinterlands,
so I wish you a great day, have fun and see you in Game!

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If you are new to the game, then feel free to reach out to me on the Splinterlands Discord channel https://discord.gg/7TjZ2jg2 , my username is Arkasz there as well.
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