Purple!
Yes Aura, and
Midnight Potion is PURPLE!
For those who knows the inside joke of Splinterlands; the phrase "purple & city bus" should be familiar to you. I bought one of the first regions during land pre-sale during October 2020 (yeah now nearly 4.5 years back!). The comment below is a reflection of my frustration during June of 2023, when we we still couldn't do anything with land. This was before Land 1.5. As a reminder, Land 1.5 released in November 28, 2023, when we could finally farm something! Before that and even after that for a very long time, items and spells remained elusive and fictional. So for a long time I used to say, item and spells could be PURPLE AND CITY BUS, meaning you can call it whatever, it doesn't mean anything.
Today Midnight Potion is the first thing that I can call an
item; and I don't know if it is a nod to my frustration, it is as purple as it gets! Thank you
@cryptomancer and thank you
@cryptomancer with the creative team to make this happen! Better late than NEVER!
Aura Lab
Basically the concept of Aura Lab is two things at the same time:
- Create an item that attach the card game to the land game
- Give some immediate utility to research points
Aura is used to construct Mid Night potion, which give users a higher (double) chance of getting a Black Foil Card from the Conclave Arcana Packs. Just for reference, following are chances of getting a Black Foil card:
Standard Packs: 0.025% (1 in 4,000 cards or 1 in 800 packs)
Alchemy Packs: 0.25% (1 in 400 cards or 1 in 80 packs)
Legendary Packs: 0.125% (1 in 800 cards or 1 in 160 packs)
Starter Packs: 0%
These potions give players a major advantage when opening Conclave Arcana (CA) packs, doubling the chance of pulling Black Foil cards, much like Alchemy Potions do for Gold Foils. But there’s a twist: Midnight Potions can’t be purchased directly from Splinterlands. If you want them, you’ll either need to craft them yourself or buy them from fellow players via the Non-Card Market.
Crafting Midnight Potions involves an all-new resource chain built entirely on the Land system:
Spend Research to obtain soulbound Aura Lab Permits
Use a Permit to build an Aura Lab worksite on any plot (except Castles or Keeps)
My Aura Lab
I converted six of my occupied plots to Aura Labs, because both occupied and magical plots get 100% boost for Aura production. Some of my occupied plots were beefed up, and it was an easy decision.
I also bought 6 new Runis to power up these plots for additional boost. The last Runi cost me 0.3 ETH. I clearly overpaid, but I needed to get this going quickly, so it is water under the bridge. With the help of a Runi, this plot is producing 136 Aura/hr.
Permits
It required me six permits from the League of Verico and that costs 6*10,000 = 60,000 research point, which I felt is rather low. That said, perhaps we like to keep the bar low for general participation. However, the flip side of this is the fact that a lot of people can produce the potion relatively cheaply, which makes its price low.
Above are my six Aura Labs as of now. They are not optimized, but I will fix that later.
Crafting and Internal Market
Finally, it was time to collect the Aura, just like any other resources, and go to the new crafting page to make the Mid Night Potion. It takes 40 Aura to make 1 potion. In my first ever batch, I crafted 27 potions. Each pack will require 5 potions, so I have enough to open 5 packs. I plan on opening about 10,000 packs, so I will need 50,000 potions. I will get there.
The other thing is the market. The whole point of this exercise is to give people some value for research point that they have farmed for 2 years. I must say the value is low. The potions are already trading at 20 cents and only going lower. So how much of a true value this will have only time will tell. I wish we had made crafting this a bit more expensive.
