It’s been a while since last posting any Axie Infinity content here. Just like my last post on Tesla, this is essentially a revised and edited brain dump. I’ve been chipping away completing the daily quests four to five times a week on average. I’ve also been trialling-and-erroring breeding as an additional revenue stream.
The awesome thing with Axie is that SLP earned through play allows one to try different things at little to no cost (unless you count the time cost to earn it). Because I enjoy playing PVP and PVE and I earn at the same time, I grapple with the idea that SLP is money. To give this more context, I will describe in more detail what I have been up to lately.
Entering the Axie ecosystem as a non-gamer, there was some gaming lingo I was unfamiliar with. A term I’d heard thrown about a bit was ‘meta’. I learned that the term meta refers to the popular gaming styles adopted by a large majority of players (thanks cagyjan for spelling it out for me!). Often inspired by the leading players, the large majority of other players end up copying that gaming style. This does not give you a unique edge in any way because once this becomes the meta style, the top players refine and adapt their playing style to give them the edge over all the other ‘copy-cats’. The ‘danger’ for the average player who adopts meta- playing styles is that by the time they’ve cottoned on to the meta and remodelled their team around it, a new meta could have spawned. In this way it’s much like chasing one’s tail.
I ended up getting sucked in to the meta style recently. I was playing PVP one day and I kept getting smashed by the same looking teams - what I later learned were meta-teams.
The team formation: traditional meta classes; plants up front as the tank, with heal^ and steal^^ moves; beast in the middle with powerful combos; and a fast bird at the back with a ‘back-door’^^^ move and high-damage moves.
I decided to get in on the act. I looked at the parts and cards of the meta-Axies and chose the beast first. My plan was first to swap my earned-through-play SLP for ETH and buy one of the (at the time) classic meta-beasts. He looked a lot like one of these:
It’s easy to find these if you know what you’re looking for - just use the filters on the Axie Infinity marketplace and input the class, breed count, pureness and parts you’re after.
The prices shown here are in ETH. We call these pure ‘RIMP’ beasts with ‘CottonTail’ and ‘Goda moves’. Those moves look like this:
RIMP with CottonTail and Goda
Let’s break down why this beast became part of the meta-game, ie. what makes it so special? The name ‘RIMP’ is a portmanteau for ‘Ronin’ and ‘Imp’, two of this meta-beast’s moves. Ronin (as you can see in the picture) is potentially one of the best damage-dealing cards. When played in combination with two other cards, this guarantees a critical strike on your opponent. This means it will deal double the amount of damage it would normally deal. Imp by itself is just a so-so card but, with a critical strike, will also gain one energy for your team. Nice! If you’re not saving energy (ie. you are playing your default number of cards per turn) you will only have two energy to play with, which makes it hard to get the Ronin combo as it requires a three-card combination. That’s why Cottontail is another nice card to have. It is a ‘zero-energy’ card, ie. you can play it without using any energy. If you have two energy and those three cards you are still able to use them together as a combo. This will result in dealing big damage from the Ronin (guaranteed) critical strike, fair damage from Imp, and two extra energies from Imp - thanks to the critical strike courtesy of Ronin - and Cottontail. Nice! Goda is also a nice card to have because it has decent damage and shield but - more importantly - it has the ability to destroy one of your opponent’s energy (if they have been saving energy).
The next step in my plan was to introduce my meta-beast to my ‘A-team’ and (hopefully) increase my battle % win-rate. That didn’t go so well at first as it took a few battles to get used to how to best use it. Then I kept on grinding away to earn enough SLP to buy another of the same meta-beast (don’t tell your Axies they are the same though because they won’t love you anymore!!). I wanted another so I could (you guessed it!) breed more! Because these beasts are ‘pure’, there is almost zero chance that breeding two of them together will spawn anything other than an Axie with all the same traits and moves.
The major flaw in this plan was that all this took time and the meta in Axie is constantly evolving. I paid around 0.27 ETH for my first meta-beast. Some weeks later when I’d earned enough SLP to fund the purchase of my beast’s breeding buddy, this floor price had sunk to around 0.16 ETH. This is good if you’re a buyer but if you’re looking to breed it becomes less and less profitable. I bred these two together and morphed their baby all the way to Adult. When it came to listing the newly bred meta-beast for sale, I made the mistake of listing it just above the ‘floor’ price. The floor price kept sinking further and further. It’s still on the market now at 0.22 ETH. It’s not worth the gas to de-list and re-list it at floor price. I will probably use it as a battling Axie once I have sold off all the other meta-beasts. From this experience I learned that if you’re going to breed and sell meta-Axies, you need to list them at (or just below) floor price so that they sell and fund future breeding. However, the floor price has sunk so much for these Axies that it’s hardly worth it anymore. The metas have changed several times over since I first got into breeding these!
I’ve bred them four times now. Should I keep breeding the same two Axies together (remembering that the number of SLP required to breed increases as the breed count increases)? Here comes the tricky part because it comes back to the question - ‘How do you perceive SLP?’ Do you think of it as money? When considering the price to breed again, do you compare the price of that SLP to the amount of ETH you could get for it on Uniswap? There are more variables to think about - Does playing Axie Infinity feel like work to you? Do you think about the time you spend earning SLP when weighing up whether to make another breed? I went through the same series of questions after three breeds (the SLP price jumps from 300 per Axie to 500 per Axie from three to four breeds so it becomes more touch and go). Also, in the time it takes for your Axie to morph the floor price for your old meta-Axies could drop further.
Ultimately after the third breed I decided to have another go because earning SLP does not feel like work to me. So it was worth using up some extra SLP to have more Axies to sell for (hopefully) more ETH than I would get from swapping the SLP. And this is where it comes back to my original point about low-risk trial and error. If it doesn’t work out you haven’t really lost anything if you feel that your time playing the game isn’t worth anything.
I think the fourth breed for my meta-beasts will be my last breeds for a while now. In searching for something else on discord the other day I stumbled upon this from Jiho:
... not that I ever expected to get rich from it, but I did think that breeding profits would outperform the amount of time required to earn SLP through play. Once I’ve sold all my meta-beasts I might do some back-of-napkin figures to see if I can work out if I managed to achieve this.
The Axie Infinity core team have been hard at work (as usual). They have launched a lot in the past month or so - the week-long land demo (Project K) and the release of the Ronin testnet.
But it’s been a couple of community projects in the last few months that I’ve been most excited about.
WOA is an ERC-20 token that can only be minted by depositing an Origin Axie into a smart contract. Origin Axies were the original Axies. The overall supply of Origin Axies is capped at 4088. So that the Origin Axies in the ‘pool’ are of similar value, there are a few constraints: they must be ‘common’ class Axies (Aqua, Plant or Beast), have no mystic parts and have a breed count of 0-2. Essentially they are ‘vanilla’ Origins. With these constraints the number of eligible Axies is capped at 1967 (could be less if these remaining Axies engage in more breeding). The act of adding an eligible Origin Axie to the WOA pool mints 1 WOA, which relinquishes ownership of this Origin Axie to the pool. However, the reverse also works. One can deposit one WOA to get a random Origin Axie from the pool - the one WOA is then burned. Another way to look at it is: for every Origin in the pool, there should be one WOA - put one Origin in, mint one WOA; take one Origin out, burn one WOA. Here are some advantages that WOA offers:
AxieTree is a new borrowing and lending marketplace in closed alpha phase. This concept builds on the recent ‘scholarship’ craze.
Axie scholarships are programs launched by Axie community members to lend their Axies out to newbies who perhaps cannot afford to buy their own Axie team. The scholar agrees to terms with the lender a percentage of SLP earned through play for themselves and the lender. They also agree on a minimum requirement of SLP earned over a period to remain active within their scholarship program.
Essentially AxieTree abstracts these interactions to smart contracts and a UI. I’m looking forward to the public release of this marketplace because it will be another potential revenue source for established Axie players. The borrower only has to cover gas costs and earns SLP. The lender pays no gas (except - I think - gas for listing the Axies in the marketplace?) and also earns some SLP. Passive income. Woop! Woop! Hopefully more people come into the Axie system as a result. One of the great hopes with the original scholarships systems was that as scholars earned SLP they would ‘graduate’ to be able to buy their own Axie team. The same outcome with AxieTree lenders would be awesome too!
^ ’heal’ - the ability to restore HP (hitting power) to keep the Axie in the game longer.
^^ ’steal’ - the ability to take an ‘energy’ from your opponent. Energy refers to how many turns you have. You start a battle with three energy, thereafter you get two per turn. You can save energy for when the card(s) you’re looking for comes up, but in doing so you run the risk of the energy being stolen.
^^^ ’back-door’ - refers to a card that allows you to jump over the opposing Axies at the front to attack the Axie at (usually) the back. By default, Axies attack opponent Axies positioned at the front. Axie players tend to position their highest damage-dealing cards at the back to protect it until the end of the game but a back-door card counters this strategy.
