How Can We Earn (and have fun) From Axie Infinity?
I’ve been playing Axie Infinity for awhile now, and it seems like the game has been gaining quite a bit of traction lately. So, here is my review to give a better understanding of what this new trend is all about.
What is Axie Infinity?
Axie Infinity is a game. It is similar to Clash Royale in the sense that if you love mentally calculating how many elixers your opponent is left with after discarding his cards, you’re likely to enjoy Axie Infinity too. For Axie Infinity, it is highly beneficial to know how many energy/cards your opponent is left with to completely annihilate him the next round. The game is also similar to Pokémon in the sense that if you love class advantages, you’re likely to enjoy Axie Infinity too. A Fire Pokémon (E.g. Charmander) deals additional damage to a Plant Pokémon (E.g. Bulbasaur), and the reverse is true.
When Bulbasaur tail whips Charmander, the damage is adorably insignificant.
For Axie Infinity, a Beast Class deals additional damage to a Plant class and you can find the complete class loop here. Maybe you’re just a casual player and you don’t care about such details. Instead of stressing over PvP (Player-vs-Player) battles, you’d rather chill the night away with PvE (Player-vs-Environment) content. If that is the case, you’ll just need to use Axies (I’ll just refer them as fishes from hereon) that has a balance of high attack damage and decent defence capabilities to pull through your fights. You can also breed the fishes to give birth to cuter/stronger fishes to potentially sell for a profit or use them for your battles.
If the aforementioned components interest you, it is worthwhile to give the game a shot.
What Is Special About Axie Infinity?
There are two things about the game you need to know about. The first thing is that Axie Infinity is based on a blockchain technology that uses cryptocurrency as its medium of exchange. Instead of MapleStory’s Mesos or Neopets’ Neopoints, all transactions are dealt in ETH. You buy a fish with ETH. You sell a fish for ETH. If 1 ETH is valued at $2,000 USD today and the fish is being priced at 0.25 ETH, you are using $500 USD to buy a fish. In order to play the game, you’ll need to own a team of 3 fishes.
As of today, a decent team costs an estimate of 1 ETH with each fish averaging 0.33 ETH each.
By now, you’re probably wondering — Why in the world would I spend more than a thousand bucks to try a game? You can simply download the top 10 games off the app store or through a third-party platform like Steam for free. You can try the games with zero cost to begin with. However, here is the second thing you need to know about. Axie Infinity is a play-to-earn game. By winning battles, be it in PvE or PvP content, you gain Small Love Potions (SLP) which is an in-game currency that is required for breeding. On average, you will earn 200 SLP with 1 hour of gameplay on a daily basis. 1 SLP is valued at $0.30 USD at the moment, which means it will take less than a month to get back your cost price of the 3 fishes you bought. Here is the part where it gets interesting. The fishes and SLPs are NFTs, which loosely translates to: Each fish and SLP is unique and can be owned, bought and sold. In the event that you’ve tried the game for a couple of days and you don’t enjoy it, you can simply sell the fishes and the SLP you’ve earned thus far.
Unless you’re selling your fishes at a severely discounted price, it is highly unlikely you’ll lose money in Axie Infinity. Furthermore, you can earn SLP every single day.
How Do I Buy Axies and What Axies Should I Go For?
In order to own your first 3 fishes, you’ll need to buy ETH on a crypto exchange (E.g. Binance), transfer the ETH from the crypto exchange to your MetaMask wallet, subsequently transfer the ETH from your MetaMask wallet to your Ronin wallet (Which is Axie Infinity’s in-game wallet) and purchase the fishes on Axie Infinity’s Marketplace with ETH. For a step-by-step walkthrough, there are detailed tutorials on Youtube.
For the current meta of the game, these are the fishes I would recommend:
Tanks
Plant Axie (Pure) — Pumpkin, Serious, Cactus, Hot Butt
Plant Axie (Hybrid) — Pumpkin, Serious, Leaf Bug, Yam
Mid Lane
Aqua Axie (Pure) — Sponge, Lam, Oranda, Nimo
Aqua Axie (Pure) — Blue Moon, Lam, Oranda, Shrimp
Beast Axie (Pure) — Hero, Goda, Dual Blade, Hare
Beast Axie (Pure) — Hero, Nut Cracker, Dual Blade, Nut Cracker
Last Lane
Aqua Axie (Hybrid) — Goldfish, Lam, Cuckoo, Koi
Bird Axie (Pure)— Pigeon Post, Little Owl, Eggshell, Post Fight
Bird Axie (Pure)— Pigeon Post, Doubletalk, Eggshell, Post Fight
Reptile Axie (Hybrid)— Snail Shell, Tiny Turtle, Lagging, Thorny Caterpillar
Closing Thoughts
A game wouldn’t survive if it is bad. It doesn’t matter if it is using blockchain technology or not. In my opinion, I believe Axie Infinity will survive and attract many new players to join. The gameplay is a combination of Clash Royale, Pokémon and Hearthstone of which all of them have proven to be a formidable force in the gaming industry for years. Axie Infinity is fun to me. In time to come, the cost of entry for Axie Infinity would be lower.
Developers of the game are already making plans for new players to try out starter Axies to have a feel of the game.
In addition, more innovative gameplays are gradually being introduced into the game with new mechanics such as land plots and artifacts. With more people stepping into the game, the cost of SLP and Axies would increase. We don’t need to look too far back, the cost of SLP was $0.05 USD and Axies were only 0.05 ETH in April 2021. Over the last 3 months, the cost of SLP and Axies has risen close to 6 times in value. It is an incredible feeling to actually earn money while having fun playing a game. Try it, you’ll be hooked.
