Elements Economics

[iDaire]

Elements Economics Theory
The Bazaar is now a market!

Imagine if the bazaar in EtG was, instead of being a boring old shop where you do all of your daily transactions, a stock market! That’s right, you heard me! Stock market! I don’t have a very good knowledge of economics, but I know the very gist of it.

Basically, we divide the cards in the shop into five tiers shown below.
Tier I - Any common card that can be slid into decks very easily: includes pillars, pendulums, and vanilla creatures with less than two attack and HP.
Tier II - Any other common cards: includes vanilla creatures, all creature control spells and all permanent control spells.
Tier III - Any uncommon cards that can most likely form the foundation of a deck: includes all dragons, creatures with skills, all other spells and permanents excluding any said in the following tiers.
Tier IV - Any rare cards: includes all nymphs and shards
Tier V - Cards unobtainable through normal means: includes mark cards and foil chimera

Now that most of the cards have been categorized into one of the five tiers, the process is quite simple. Each of the cards in the tiers (excluding the fifth tier) gets a base price in the bazaar. The base prices are stated below.


Tier I - 15 each.
Tier II - 75 each.
Tier III - 150 each.
Tier IV - 1k each.
Tier V - Not obtainable through the bazaar.
The prices of their cards are never actually their base prices

Here’s the tricky part. Stay with me here.
Each card in each tier would be considered a “stock.” The values of stocks increase and decrease every day with supply and demand. Since this is an online game, there is no supply, meaning each of the values can only increase/decrease with demand.

Each of the cards will be given an invisible number called “value.” EtG will record how many players bought which cards every day and log the total the same time that oracle refreshes. This goes as follows.

The default value of a card is 1.0

Every time someone buys a card one time, the value of the card goes up by +0.01

Every time someone buys a card ten times, the value of the card goes up by +0.1

Every time someone sells a card, the value of the card goes down by -0.005

Every time someone sells a card ten times, the value of the card goes down by -0.05

The value of a card can never drop below 0.8

At the end of the day. two things are recorded: the value of each card and the number of people that bought the card.

If the number of people that bought a card one day is lower than the amount of people that bought that card yesterday, the value of that card goes down by 5% of the difference.

If the number of people that bought a card one day is higher than the amount of people that bought that card yesterday, then nothing happens to the value.

If the number of people that bought a card on one day is zero or less than 15% of the amount of people that bought the card yesterday, the value of that card drops straight down to 0.8

This may be confusing, but I will explain it all with an example.
If Day One the value of Skeleton is 1.0 and 200 people buy it and Day Two 150 people buy it, then the value of Skeleton at the end of Day One is 3.0 and the value of Skeleton at the end of Day Two is 2.0, because the value raised to 4.5 (150 people bought it) but it dropped to 2.0 because the amount of people that bought it was 50 less than yesterday (4.5 minus (5% of 50)) = 2.0.

If that doesn’t explain it, leave a reply below and I will try to explain it the best that I could. Otherwise, I will assume that everyone understands it. Now, what do the value of the card have to do with the price of the card? Here is how:

Tier I has a base price of 15 electrum. So, the price at the end of a day is (15 + (value * 10))
Tier II has a base price of 75 electrum. So, the price at the end of a day is (75 + (value * 15))
Tier III has a base price of 150 electrum. So, the price at the end of a day is (150 + (value * 20))
Tier IV has a base price of 1,000 electrum. So, the price at the end of a day is (1,000 + (value* 50))

So, the prices of the cards are never actually their base prices. Let’s summarize it. Depending on the transactions made on a card, an invisible number called “value” goes either up or down every time, never going under 0.8. Depending on what tiers each of the cards are, the prices of the cards will alter, the cards in higher tiers altering much more than those in lower tiers.

Is this a good idea? Is this a terrible idea? I’d like to see some feedback for this idea.
-- iDaire, a member of the Elements Community

[Treldon]

If I get your idea correctly (it's early), this would serve two purposes:

• Create daily updated statistics of the popularity of the cards
• Make rares available for buying

As I see it right now, neither would work as intended.

The statistics part would not do much, because only relatively new players need the Bazaar on a daily basis to get their cards. Others usually have enough basic cards to go by, and just occasionally need to get one or two for their Arena decks perhaps. As - while the forum is not a good indication for this - I don't think we have too many new players in any given time, so cards wouldn't be bought in the hundreds per day, thus the prices would hardly change.

As for the rares, there is only one way I can imagine this working: by introducing the supply side. So for example if you wanted to buy a red nymph from the Stock market, you could only do so if there was one that someone put up there for sale.
And even then there would need to be some limits on the prices you could ask/get for cards. Nymphs should never go for 1k , but one should not be able to cash in 1 million from a single card either

[Chapuz]

Noobs would know the most wanted cards. Good, that's something they can see to start well.
Original idea, fun and viable.  + rep

[Treldon]

Noobs would know the most wanted cards. Good, that's something they can see to start well.
Original idea, fun and viable.  + rep

The problem with that is that someone (or several people) would definitely use it to mislead newbies by artificially keeping prices of weak cards inflated.

I know, there is little point in doing it, but that would not stop the trolls

[Chapuz]

Noobs would know the most wanted cards. Good, that's something they can see to start well.
Original idea, fun and viable.  + rep

The problem with that is that someone (or several people) would definitely use it to mislead newbies by artificially keeping prices of weak cards inflated.

I know, there is little point in doing it, but that would not stop the trolls

"Arena is bad because there can be farms"

[ddevans96]

Chapuz, farms aren't trolling. There's a massive difference.

[iDaire]

Maybe a limit could be made on how much one person can alter the value of a card.
This would open the situation so that the price of a card doesn't become dependent on how much one person buys it, but more on how much multiple people take part in buying it.
How about each person only being able to add +- 2.5 to the value?

[eaglgenes101]

Add an option to short the value of a card so that there's a way for people to counter trolls.

[Chapuz]

The value of a card isn't changed if it's bought more than 6 times by the same player. Fixed issue.

[Sera]

That would make the whole stock concept lose its meaning. It would only get stuck at the normal purchase rate.

For a collectible card game with infinite supply of card copies, it wouldn't work in the first place.

[OldTrees]

That would make the whole stock concept lose its meaning. It would only get stuck at the normal purchase rate.

For a collectible card game with infinite supply of card copies, it wouldn't work in the first place.

How so?

Say 100 people bought 10 copies, 50 people bought 6 and sold 2, and 50 people sold 1. Also say the price changes by X each time.
You would have a change of X*(100*6+50*4+50*-1)/200 = X*(750/200) = X*3.75
Since 3.75 =/= 0, the stock concept is not lost by the cap of per person influence on the market.

[Devourer]

When I was a n00b and just starting out, I couldn't effectively build decks because I lacked the capital to buy any card more than 100 or so. Inflating the prices makes it harder for noobs to get started and reduces the amount of new players.
As has already been brought up, cards are very rarely bought from the bazaar in relation to the amount of people playing, since most people already have the needed cards. The prices would get stuck at near .8 or 1, which doesn't really help anyone.
Putting rares on the market is... an iffy issue, since by definition they should be rare. Making it so that only cards that have been sold can be bought solves the issue neatly, although there are probably still ramifications, since rare cards like weapons and shards get sold fairly often by veterans with too many.
Generally, I really like the idea, but I doubt it will ever be able to be implemented effectively.