I have been playing Splinterlands every day, so far for about 5 months. Today, I am taking a huge risk in trying to give my personal/bias/unqiue analysis on Splinterlands.

NOTE: I am writing this based on my personal perspective and i would not be touching on every aspect. This is also not a financial advise.

1. I used to play magic the gathering, pokemon and Yugioh physical game in the past. So in a certain way, i have seen how trading card games evolves.
2. I have been in crypto for a number of years. Since this is a crypto game, I can give some of my obversation how well this game integrate with crypto/blockchain.
3. I am a note collector so I will tend to look at this from a perspective of a collector.

Inflow + Outflow

I always believe that in order to be Play2Earn, the game needs to be Pay2win. This is because there must be inflow of money into the ecosystem then players able to cash out. (I may be wrong and there is an upcoming game trying to be Play2Earn but not Pay2win, we see if this theory can be successful) What concerns me is the ease of making money and the recurring purchases. For example, I used to play axie infinity and one thing I am uncomfortable is that a lot of new players coming into this game is purely just want to earn money. For most players, they paid one time off and able to IMMEDIATELY EARN quite a significant sum. With not much incentive for players to pour money back in, that means the cash that players made mainly come from new players and this cant be sustain forever. However, I believe this ecosystem can change dramatically once the leveling and burning mechanism is in placed. In Splinterlands, I like how new comers hardly earn anything and season players earned more. This will wield out those who are looking for quick earnings and less care about the ecosystem of the game. The beauty is that regardless whether you pour in money or not, you still can grow. There is an article by a writer in Motley Fool that reflect his experience where he only paid the basic $10 to unlock the game, he still can accumulate up to $2000 of assets in a year time.

Skilled based game (New players)

I prefer the game to required skills to play. Otherwise it would turn into who put in more money will win and this will discourage new players to join. For splinterlands, especially for tournaments with bronze/novice cap, it is not a surprised that one can lose to people with much lower rating. As such, this allows the community to grow and that is cruical in sustainability of the game.

Season Players

Usually, season/skilled players should be the one earning the most. As a result, they can also be the one that impact the ecosystem quite significant. So what is important to me is that if this ecosystem encourage them to reinvest their resources back. Currently, to get more chests and more dec earnings in Splinterlands, you have to move up to the next "ranking bracket". And that need you to buy more cards to merge and level up and to accumulate the necessary "collection power". Regardless which legion you are in, players are likely to reinvest their earned dec into the game to upgrade themselves. Even the top players who has full collections are pouring tons of money now to get the new edition: Chao Legion Packs.

Limited Quantity + usefulness of each cards

So far, game dev are cleared that they dont want to inflate/reprint the existing cards. That means, the developers want to ensure that the cards will retain the values and protect investors/owners. The merging and leveling system requires mutiple copies and as such, when people are reinvesting and combining cards, the qty will continue to drop and price likely to go up.
Fun Fact: This year, a physical card "black lotus" from magic the gathering was actually sold for $500k usd! You can also see that top graded 1st edition Charizard price can be very expensive. Useful cards will always remain high in demand and can be symbol of status, just like PFP NFT.
Another thing which I love so much is that almost all the cards have their own time to shine. For most games, there are a clear distinguish of good cards and useless cards. But in Splinterlands, there are everchanging rules, so even a 1hp card with high atk card can suddenly be a top choice card under the rule of hp equalisation. In addition, cards has burning DEC value, so you can always exchange cards for DEC especially when price of DEC shot up.

Protecting early players and welcome new players

One of the most difficult is to protect the early investors/players so they can continue to be in the game while new players are not overwhelm. It quite common to come out OP cards in new edition and the old cards become worthless. For Splinterlands, as long as you use alpha cards, you can earned additional bonus DEC when you win. As a result, you can see how alpha cards are always so expensive. On the other hand, there are players that can climb the ladder even without alpha/beta cards. As for new asset, the team also need to be careful. Not just the new asset cannot be OP, they have to be useful, otherwise no one will buy. The dev had mentioned that for each new edition, the main design is to have new skills so will bring more depth to the game and have to also compliment the existing cards and counter existing meta. Recently, the dev team included dec bonus for beta cards, reduce the burn dec amt and lower the collection power of chao legion cards are wise choice to protect early investors/players.

Blockchain Gaming

To be honest, i am very very impressed by how well Splinterlands are built on blockchain. Splinterland is operating on Hive engine so just by creating an account in Splinterland means you have an account in Hive and immediately you can tap on the existing ecosystem within Hive like hive-engine DEX, hive blog, hive wallet, 3rd party app like peakmonster that you can easily change all your rents. In addition, Splinterlands also support cross chain to BSC and ETH. I have tried to transfer in and out DEC to BSC/Hive/Eth and they all works INSTANTLY fine!

Splinterland "Universe"??!!

Splinterland is bigger than what you think and the dev is linking them up beautifully! Splinterland has land play and the current cards are going to be used as work placement for land play. Splinterland also has Splintertalk where you can blog and earn splintertalk tokens that can be used to buy splinter art nft. For govern tokens SPS, they look at the whole "universe" for collection points. So if you put in effort to blog, holding land, providing liqudity pool for DEC and SPS, rating points, you can get daily airdrop SPS. As such, the whole Splinterlands "universe" like land grew sharply in values despite lands still in development. Players also can choose to get the SPS airdrop to sell for DEC so can get more SPS or use DEC to buy more SPS for staking to get more voucher etc. There are so many ways where you can earn more like DEC/SPS for SPT for more collection power for more SPS.

Developers

One of the most important is how the developers develop the game. So far, the developers have been doing well for these 3 years. In addition, the dev always make sure they took 1hr+ every 1 or 2 weeks to conduct an AMA so that they can give updates to the community and answer any qns they may have. The cofounder also did openly admit that he dont know for some questions. Developers can also point out what methods that existing games are doing and see if it can be implemented. For example, magic the gather tournament can splited into all cards and selected editions. So similarly, the ranked matches can be splited too.

There are more to write but I will just stop here. Thanks for reading.
If anyone of you are interesting in play Splinterlands, do consider sign up using my referral link:
https://splinterlands.com?ref=namelessnameless