A little over six months have passed since I purchased my first Axie team and got started. I’ve compiled a few key learnings for this post. I have separated them to ‘in game’ and ‘the game’ - ‘in game’ are Axie-related PVE (player versus environment) and PVP (player versus player) learnings. ‘The game’ are learnings in the Axie world outside of PVE and PVP - still part of the game. The game elements include buying and selling of Axies and Land, investing for scarcity and investing in related Axie assets such as Mystic shards.
In game
Learn by playing (doing)
My first experience with Axie was reading the seminal Bankless article in March featuring exhuman. My initial reaction from reading that was - ‘That sounds pretty cool, I want to find out more’.
I did some reading, watched some videos (this! - no offence Chief, when I first watched this I thought ‘wtf?!’. Watching it again now it all makes sense) and - honestly - decided that it was too complicated and put it in the too hard basket.
Luckily I kept thinking about it and went on their Discord a few days later and asked a few questions and that convinced me to get started. But I still went in completely clueless ... and that’s OK. Don’t think you need to know a lot to get started, otherwise you will never get started. There is still so much I don’t know ... and that’s OK.
Play to your strengths and your opponent’s weaknesses
As you learn while you play, you’ll start to figure out how things work. Here are a few examples:
- Starting with the basics, in PVP mode you get three turns (called ‘Energy’) on your first go and thereafter two turns. However, if you have a card that has a ‘Gain energy’ or ‘Destroy energy’ card, you can play this to your advantage - obviously. Similarly, if your opponent has a ‘Destroy energy’ card you will want to play all your turns as they come up and not save them until better cards come up - so take a look at what cards your opponent’s Axies have.
- Watch out for ‘Target’ cards - by default, Axies attack their opponent’s Axies that are at the front. They need to destroy the Axie that is at the front (AKA ‘The tank’) first before they can get to those behind. However, if your opponent has a ‘Target ...’ card (eg. Target furthest enemy, Target Bird, etc) then you know that your Axies behind the tank are vulnerable and not to put all your eggs in one basket, so to speak.
- If you have the card that says ‘Apply Aroma ...’ and you play that card, your opponent will attack that Axie when it’s their turn, even if there is a Tank in front of it. I have an Axie with this card and it took me a while to realise why it kept getting attacked even though there was a Tank in front of it. Fortunately the same Axie also has an ‘Apply Debuff’, meaning that it removes the Aroma for the Axie - so I just need to remember to play those two card in combination if I want to avoid being attacked.
In PVE mode, keep ‘grinding’
‘Grinding’ is a new word I learnt when I first discovered Axie Infinity (I’ve never been a gamer). In PVE mode, your Axies’ ‘levels’ will slowly rise as you grind it out. As you keep levelling up, some levels will be just too hard to crack, so you will need to grind it out on the level below to level your Axies up. It actually took me a week or two playing in PVE mode before I realised this!! Once your Axies reach level 25, they no longer level up. Instead you will need Axies with high damage abilities to keep rising through the levels. You may find that beyond level 25 your Axies hit a wall at some stage and they just don’t have the abilities to defeat the Chimeras (they’re the bad guys in PVE mode). If that’s the case you may need to try some different Axies. If you introduce new Axies to your team they will need to be re-trained, starting from level 1. However, if their abilities are superior they may help you rise to higher levels. I made it to level 28 with my first team and couldn’t get any further. Now I’m re-training a bunch of other Axies. My plan is to get them all to level 25, experiment with different combinations and see what happens.
The game
Starting costs
A common criticism of Axie is that you need to buy a team before you can start playing. The argument goes that it’s inaccessible to some who are either crypto-illiterate or unable to afford the cost. If unable to afford it - look at it in a different way. Yes, there is a cost to buy your Axies, but on the other end of the deal is a seller. And you can sell yours too. This is something that really only dawned on me after I started playing.
Further, common beginner advice is to buy a cheap starter team so that you haven’t lost much if you don’t enjoy the game and decide that it’s not for you. However, this often leads to inevitable disappointment because the ‘cheap’ team has very poor batting abilities, resulting in a negative feeling about the game. If the same person spent a bit more to get a quality team they may enjoy their experience more and want to keep playing.
Nowadays there are lots of ‘scholarship’ programs that Axie OG community members have created to help newbies get started for little or no cost, which is another great initiative to get around the starting cost dilemma.
When selling Axies, don’t be afraid to list them above ‘floor’ price
For the unitiated, floor price means the lowest price for an Axie. There are also ‘Mystic floor’ prices for the cheapest Mystic Axies. After I’d been playing for a month or so I decided that I wasn’t happy with my Tank. I decided to list it for sale. It wasn’t anything special but I listed it for 0.1 ETH - at the time I think this was almost double the price for similar Axies. I bought a new Tank and relegated the old one to ‘the bench’. While your Axies are listed for sale in the Marketplace, you can continue to use them. After a few weeks I went back to using my ‘benched’ original Tank. I continued to use it thereafter as my default Tank because I figured out its strengths and weaknesses and decided that it did have some PVP value (see above learning - ‘Play to your strengths ...’). So it was a bittersweet day when I realised months later that my original Tank had sold. I’d forgotten it was for sale!
Don’t be afraid to set a higher price and then forget about it (especially if you don’t need the money straight away)!!
‘Proof-of-play’ is a real thing
At first I thought proof-of-play or play-to-earn were just convenient terms invented for memes or marketing. However, when you think about it, is essentially a new form of mining. Blockchains have proof-of-work or proof-of-stake or proof-of-the-kitchen-sink but SLP is generated through play. And that can be converted to other currencies with utility outside the Axie ecosystem, or used within it. The price fluctuates on how all the other moving parts are moving - gas costs on ethereum, amount of breeding that is happening (SLP is burned when used for breeding), pumps on 4chan, etc. Similarly the economics of mining bitcoin and other cryptos is dependent on a lot of other moving parts. So proof-of... and play-to..., although convenient, are unique to Axie Infinity and it’s part of the reason why it is so hot right now.
Scarcity. Utility. Aesthetics.
Axie OG Jiho frequently refers to this framework as a reference for valuing Axies (start here to read more). With the recent pump in Mystic prices, I’ve been thinking a lot more about this. I was lucky enough to dip my toes in to the Mystic market a month or so before all the crazies happened. Still HODLing.
But now with the floor price so high, I’m looking at more accessible Axies that possess this triple threat. Some factors I’m looking at are:
- purity - 6 is 100% pure - all parts from the same class.
- breed count - 0 best for re-sale value. However if I want to breed, I would probably get better value buying an Axie with breed count greater than 0 as you’re not paying the breed-count=0 premium.
- body shape - especially Big Yak and Frosty. They both get the nod from me on the aesthetics front - soooo cute!!
- the rarer classes (Dusk, Mech, Dawn, Reptile).
- parts that are very useful in battle (for tanks - shiitake, rosebud, zig zag; for supports - toothless bite, shrimp, ronin).
- rare attributes like ‘MEO ...’
Anything else I should be looking at in my quest for triple-threat Axies? In keeping with my ‘Don’t be afraid to list Axies above floor price’ learning, I have listed a few for sale to raise more ETH to re-invest into triple-thread Axies.
Axie #130938. My first n00b attempt at buying an Axie for its triple-threat properties - a pure beast virgin from Japan. Also has a cotton tail, which is a great part for battles (gain 1 energy). At 0.3 ETH, I thought this was a value play.
Niftex shards can present arbitrage opportunities
I wrote about Niftex and their unique ‘sharding’ of rare NFTs a couple of months back on Publish0x. Whilst I still think it’s a cool idea, the hype for NFT shards has died down since. I sold shards I held for a couple of Axies to buy Axie land recently. However I noticed in the Axie Discord the other day a discussion about the sharded double Mystic ‘Starbugs’ ($BUGS). $BUGS has been pretty unloved relative to other sharded Axies on Niftex. In the Discord chat, the point was made that the current floor price for double Mystic Bugs is 150+ETH, whereas the total market cap for $BUGS is currently around 24 ETH. This seems ripe for some takeover offers to come in, resulting in someone with big bags of ETH nabbing a discounted double Mystic Bug and shard holders making a nice profit.
Don’t be afraid to look dumb
This quote comes from Erik Torenberg.
If you're not afraid to look dumb for a certain period of time, you can benefit from sort of a social-cultural arbitrage. If you're not afraid to look dumb for a certain period of time, you’ll take high upside bets that others won’t take, + keep trying when last try fails.
The idea of cute collectible internet monsters being a viable investment seems pretty absurd. If you bought Mystic Axies a year or two ago you would have looked dumb to most people. Same for Axie land. Does that look dumb now? I felt slightly dumb when I bought a Mystic Axie (I hadn’t seen Erik’s tweet at that stage!) a month ago. Not now.