Axie Infinity - Be a lunician, fight, breed and compete with others

Introduction

Axie Infinity is a strategic battle game where the players use a team consisting of three of their Axies to defeat the opponent’s team of Axies. The game’s PVP mode (Arena) challenges the player to outthink the opponent and respond accordingly to their plays. When you build a team of Axies you must be smart and creative. The game has a unique gameplay inspired by Pokémon and collectible card games like Magic: The Gathering or Hearthstone. Axies as NFTs (Non-Fungible Token) have a lot of different aspects of value since they, alongside being collectible, are used to battle and breed with.

Axie Infinity is a play-to-earn game, where people can earn their money in cryptocurrencies, for this game, SLP (Smooth Love Potion) and AXS. This is not a free-to-play game, but players can start playing for free via a scholarship. This means that someone else buys Axies, then rents them out for a fee.

Gameplay

Creating a team in Axie Infinity can be anything from a straightforward process to extremely complicated but in general, the classic formation of an Axie team is as follows.

• Frontlines are often higher health and lower in dealing damage.

• Midliners are medium health but deal a lot more damage than frontline.

• Backliners usually mostly focused on doing as much damage as possible and as a result are very vulnerable.

The stats of an Axie depends on its body parts. As you can see each Axie consists of six different parts: Eyes, ears, back, mouth, horn, and tail. All of these except for eyes and ears carry a card. So, in total, each Axie will have four cards that belong to different body parts. These body parts also determine the Axies stats.

• HP — This stat will determine how much health your Axie will start with. This is the most important stat point for frontliners.

• Morale — Morale determines the likelihood of whether your Axie will deliver critical hits or not and if your Axie will enter Last Stand (which means your Axie will get a few more actions before dying) upon receiving fatal blows.

• Speed — This stat tells you in which order the axis will attack. If your Axie has a higher speed than the other Axies your Axie will use its cards first.

• Skill — This stat will affect the added damage of cards when “comboing” cards, which means using more than one card on a certain Axie. The higher skill you have the more damage is added when using a combo.

Each separate part on an Axie dictates their stats differently if they’re from another class.

• Plant: 3 HP + 1 Morale

• Reptile: 1 Speed + 3 HP

• Aquatic: 3 Speed + 1 HP

• Bug: 3 Morale + 1 HP

• Beast: 3 Morale + 1 Speed

• Bird: 1 Morale + 3 Speed

The classes of Axies belong to three different groups creating a rock-paper-scissors scenario, where one group of cards has a favorable matchup versus a second group of Axies, but negative versus the third group and so on. For example, Plant, Reptile and Dusk cards has a favorable matchup versus Aquatic, Bird and Dawn Axies and that group of cards deals 15% bonus damage.

The groups are as follows:

Playmodes

In Axie Infinity there are two game modes to choose from, Arena (PVP) and Adventure (PVE).

Arena:

Axie Infinity has two play modes as of now, Arena and Adventure. In the Arena, the game offers a vast variety when playing different teams of Axies. The possibility to change your team composition and positioning of your Axies makes the play experience nuanced, enjoyable and competitive.

Axie Infinity employs a good ladder system, that is very responsive and quickly places you at your skill level, this is calculated using a matchmaking rating system (MMR). You get paired based on your MMR with opponents on the same level as you, if you lose you get a lower MMR and if you win you get a higher MMR, and the same goes for your opponent. You also get rewarded with more SLP, in relation to your MMR, creating a good feeling climbing up the ladder.

You are rewarded with SLP whenever you win a game. Depending on your place on the ladder you are rewarded with a certain amount of SLP, higher MMR and you receive more SLP. To gain SLP in Arena mode you spend Energy (that resets every day). The amount of Energy you have is dependent on how many Axies you hold.

Adventure

In Adventure mode you play against the computer. In this mode, you can level-up your Axies, which only affects the power of the Axies in the Adventure mode. The Adventure mode is played on different Ruins where it gets harder and harder with each Ruin level, but it does not offer that much variation in gameplay. However, you can earn 50 SLP per day by doing the daily quests and it is a good way to get to know the game mechanics when you are new to the game.

Breeding

Breeding Axies is when you pair two axies and create offspring, how the axies will look and what they can do is based on what genes their parents carry. Breeding Axies cost some amount of SLP and AXS and has historically been a good value proposition for players to increase their holding in Axie Infinity.

Marketplace

At the Axie marketplace you can put up your Axies for selling and find Axies to buy.

Team

Sky Mavis

Sky Mavis is the company behind Axie Infinity, which is a Vietnamese company that started up in 2018. Sky Mavis only project as of now is Axie infinity. Axie Infinity is the leading NFT game with over $ 2.3B in late 2021. The team has been consistent in delivering on their timeline and keeps innovating in the NFT gaming sector.

• Jeffrey Zirlin, Co-Founder, @Jihoz_Axie

• Trung Nguyen, Co-Founder & CEO, twitter, @trungfinity

• Alexander, L, COO & Co-Founder, @Psycheout86

Partnerships

Sky Mavis with Axie Infinity is the biggest NFT Game to date with many developers wishing to become the next version of Axie Infinity or to join their forces. Currently, they have raised $161 million.

In May 2021, Sky Mavis held their first funding round that raised 7.5 million dollars. During this fall Sky Mavis added many institutional investors as partners with their company through a Series B funding of $152 Million. One of the Investors, Andrei Brasoveanu, Partner at Accel said the following about the company:

“As soon as we met Trung, Aleks, and Jiho and immersed ourselves in the Axie Infinity universe, it was clear that Sky Mavis had the power to revolutionize the gaming world as we know it,”

Andrei Brasoveanu, Partner at Accel.

Assets & Ecosystem

Besides Ethereum Axie Infinity currently uses three main types of assets that make up the backbone of the ecosystem: the two utility tokens AXS and SLP and of course Axies.

On the Axie Marketplace, you use Ethereum to buy and sell Axies. Sky Mavis has also created their own DEX called Katana where you can swap ETH, SLP, and AXS tokens.

• The governance token AXS is hosted on the Ethereum blockchain, the token is also a part of the breeding fee for creating a new Axie. The max supply of AXS-tokens is capped at 270 million AXS.

• SLP is the in-game currency you can get by playing the game, both in Arena and Adventure mode. This is used for breeding new Axies and might also become even more useful when land becomes a bigger part of Lunacia!

• Land is scheduled to become a bigger part of the Axie experience later this year and is an NFT that is already trading for high prices.

How to get started

You will need to own three Axies to start playing this game. Currently, the only way to play the game for free is through a Scholarship program, where another player lends you the required Axies to play with and you in return give up some percentage of your SLP gains.

Play to earn

As of this moment there are various ways to earn crypto while playing the game. The most common is just playing adventure mode, finishing your daily events, and winning on the ladder. This will reward the player with SLP.

Aside from this placing in the top 1000 at the end of each season will reward players with prices increasing the higher up they place. First place for season 19 was 135,000 mAXS which roughly equates to $10,000 at the time of writing.

Another way to earn money while playing Axie Infinity is playing in tournaments that are hosted regularly and very often are generous in their price structure. These are incredibly competitive and offer a different format of playing the game since the usual tournament format is Best of 3 games.

How to purchase Axies and start playing

To start from scratch without prior knowledge, you begin with setting up your Ronin wallet, and then go ahead with buying wrapped ETH using the Ramp service. Next you create an account on the Axie Marketplace and buy your first Axies. Now you download and install the client from the Sky Mavis homepage and then you are ready to play the game!

Additional information:

• For further instructions here is a that will help you get started.

• This game is available on Mac, Android, and PC.

• As of this moment to play Axie Infinity on iOS, you will need to visit and request an invitation. This will require you to play on TestFlight.

• Twitter