Thoughts on the card economy following this gem event.

I see a lot of people saying that the card economy will be completely ruined. Obviously this is true if valve doesn't remove the duped gems and ban those involved in exploiting.

I see the price drop in some boosters/cards being only temporary. Currently the cheapest way to get 400 gems (the price of the cheapest booster) is to buy 4x backgrounds/emotes. Currently the cheapest ones are 5 cents and rising steadily and will only get more expensive as the stock dwindles. That's a minimum of 20 cents for the cheapest booster, which is already the standard price for those anyway. Sure some games with more expensive cards will drop for a bit but everything does during the Winter/Sale sales and events. This also won't affect every game, if you look at the list of craftable boosters you will notice there are TONS of games missing from the list. Combine that with the limit to how many boosters you can craft per day and in the end it won't really make a big difference.

I for one am happy about this auction event, I finally have something to do with the hundreds of backgrounds/emoticons I've hoarded over the last year or so. I do believe there will be more to come anyway.

Happy holidays.

Edit: Booster crafter has been removed for now.