I have built a model of Steemmonsters economy and analysed a few price points over the past week. I will share some findings below. I will focus on regular cards from five main splinters. Numbers might not be precise.

Dated: 23/12/2018

It seems that the most readily traded cards are of Beta series. Alpha cards were much less popular, while many gold cards, especially pricey ones, were not traded during past weeks at all. Low or no trading volume on some cards makes it difficult to point out there market value. I have used minimum asking prices for all cards as an estimation of the current market value.

We can observe that there are two forces influencing prices:

• card battle performance
• rarity

Due to above forces, Skeleton Assasin is valued almost twice as much as Animate Corpse, despite been both common cards and almost identical in rarity (total BCX - Base Card XP). Powerful Hydra combines rarity and battle performance and is one of only few cards which prices went up over the past week.

Alpha Cards

Prices of average regular alpha card fell by between one and eighteen percent. Similar drops noted gold alpha cards.

Value	Common	Rare	Epic	Legendary	Summoner
average price $	0.15	0.2	0.71	5.45	0.6
Change $	-0.002	-0.03	-0.09	-0.99	-0.025
Change %	-1	-15	-13	-18	-4

Common cards quite kept their value, while legendary cards lost the most.

Beta Cards

Value	Common	Rare	Epic	Legendary	Rare Summoner	Epic Summoner
average price $	0.1	0.12	0.6	2.99	0.45	0.85
Change $	-0.025	-0.01	-0.125	-0.01	-0.06	-0.13
Change %	-25	-8	-21	0	-13	-15

Unlike Alpha cards, in Beta series legendary cards kept their value, while common cards have lost a quarter of their value.

Beta prices - Prediction

Predicting future is a tough task, so I wonder how close or far it's going to be ;)

When Steemmonsters developers stopped giving away beta packs at the beginning of the IV Season, many expected for prices to rise and might be disappointed with prices diving. I think that the reason for this bear market is that cards were often overvalued. Steemmonsters developers move to only sell beta packs is very good, as this way cards are semi anchored to dollar (as long as game stays popular). This move will preserve prices on the certain level, thus allows for an income for the developers team and and guards cards value.

I expect that regular beta cards prices will get still lower and should stabilize around (average) values as follows:

Value	Common	Rare	Epic	Legendary	Rare Summoner	Epic Summoner
average price $	0.05	0.10	0.45	1.46	0.10	0.47

Rare and Epic cards should be already around the stable bottom, but other cards I expect are still going to loose up to 50%. As you may have noticed, Rare Summoners I have valued much lower than currently market does.

Conclusions

Above numbers are estimated and my calculations might be wrong. However, market volume has doubled over the past week or so, and higher trading volume will allow to establish more fair, real prices. It might be worth to wait a few days before upgrading / buying more cards on the secondary market.

Let's see in a week or two how my predictions worked. What are your predictions?