LAND: Cards > Plots?

If you fail to plan, you plan to fail

That should probably be the motto for everyone wanting to utilize LAND soon. But the circumstances are vastly different for all the players: do you belong to the few having entire regions and/or ALPHA and BETA gold foil cards; or do you only have 1-2 plots and a couple of cards? Probably you are in between, like me, but even so that space of possibilities is far and wide. While I can't answer as to what the best strategy is for your situation, I will try to talk about that in between space a bit - perhaps it will be useful.

I have 12 plots and I tried to get some diverse terrains since I don't have cards from only one or two splinters. Still, I pulled 7 Deserts which favors FIRE/DRAGON cards. 7*5 (# of slots per plots) = 35 slots in total that should be filled with this splinter to receive a 10% bonus on production. While that doesn't sound much, it actually is, since you want to put the best cards possible on those plots (highest production points). And cards with higher PPs (3-5k+) are not cheap. The best cards I had from playing for around 3 years were gold legendaries, but the problem is that they were only lvl 1... so they only had 2500 PPs which is not that great considering that a max lvl reward card from the chaos edition is only a couple of bucks. Playing all that time surely did not pay off for getting cards that are great on LAND. But oh well, I guess I can buy them now?

Buying better cards

I quickly realized that having many plots won't really make a great impact if one does not also have the high quality cards to fill them. Sure, if you have a tract or more it is more about quantitiy and filling the best plots with quality cards. But for someone like me only having a dozen plots, I have to focus on quality cards for every plot. The thing is, there are some really great cards atm (at least I think so) that are fairly cheap ($30-$50) with 4k PPs. I say fairly cheap since getting into 5k+ PPs will cost you quickly $100+. The best cards for PPs are gold foil cards and they quickly scale with rarity as you can see here:

Older cards are also exponentially better than newer ones, but their prices are like in the thousands of $$$ so it's not an option for me.

The sweet spot for me are rare gold foil cards. As mentioned you can get them for $30+ and I am actually buying all the cheap ones up atm... But who knows if that's going to be a good deal? Maybe the SPS I am planning on mining with my plots won't be nearly as high as I am expecting. Perhaps the ROI is only 10% (taking 10 years to get back my initial investment)? Nobody knows for sure now and of course LAND 1.6+ will bring many changes and more so when all the 50+ Ressources will be available.

Conclusion

It seems to me that if you have few plots it makes sense to try and buy some good cards now and focus either on SPS or Research. If you have a tract or more you will probably want to get more cheaper cards and a handful of good ones. The caveat in all of this is of course that nobody knows just how much LAND will be utilized. Perhaps 50-60% would already be great? We should find out in the coming weeks at least.