Axie Infinity Review

Axie Infinity is a game universe filled with fascinating creatures, Axies, that players can collect as pets. Players aim to battle, breed, collect, raise, and build kingdoms for their Axies.

With over $3.6 billion exchanged in their marketplace, Axie Infinity is the third most-played game in the Play To Earn ecosystem.

In this Axie Infinity Game Guide, you will learn everything you need to know to get started in Axie Infinity!

Axies are little creatures you can use to explore the World of Lunacia and interact with its participants. At the moment, the main gameplay is a card-based battler.

Each Axie comes with different characteristics

A class (beast, aquatic, plant, bug, bird, reptile, mech, dawn, dusk)
Battle Stats (health, speed, skill, morale)
Six Body parts
Four abilities
A rarity attribute (eg. mystic, japanese)
A purity level (from 0 to 6 and from 0 to 100%)
Breed Count (from 0 to 7)

Each battle is a 3vs3, and the minimum you need to play the game is one team. Three axies equal to 12 abilities in total, 4 each.

Fights can happen in PvE (adventure mode) or PvP (arena mode). PvE is a multi-phase linear battling system, while PvP is a turn-based battler.

In Adventure mode, you fight a sequence of monsters and face occasional boss, while in PvP you focus on buying the best Axies possible to win over your opponents and earn in-game SLP tokens.

Although both modes give you benefits and reward you for your effort, PvP is definitely the most important gameplay mode right now and should be your focus.

Axie’s gameplay is simple and resembles Pokémon mechanics, but the multiple classes can get confusing and building your team plays an essential role.

About Axie Infinity

Axie Infinity has been the most important game developed on a blockchain in 2021. At its peak, the marketplace was making millions in sales every day, and Axies were selling for thousands of dollars each.

The game focuses on breeding and collecting the cute creatures, named Axies, and using them to explore the World of Lunacia.

In the future, Axies will be used to possess and create land, burned for upgrades, and will be exchanged for in-game items. The scope of the game is not to be a card battler, but to create a metaverse where Axies can dominate Lunacia.

Sky Mavis, the team behind Axie Infinity, managed to amass a community of millions of players worldwide, with a focus towards third-world countries that literally used Axie Infinity to lift themselves out of poverty, thanks to investors buying teams for them and sponsoring their battles.

The team received support and sponsorships from huge and respectable companies, such as Ubisoft and Samsung, and managed to develop a sidechain named Ronin to avoid the insane gas fees on the Ethereum Blockchain.

Ronin enabled users on the chain to exchange and sell in-game assets for no fees whatsoever up to a generous amount of transactions per day, facilitating the circulation of value inside the marketplace.

Axie Infinity led by example and grew a lot in the past year, announcing new ways to burn Axies to get in-game items and with the community enabling more people to play by creating scholarships.

Axie Infinity Play-to-Earn Mechanics

Players in Axie Infinity can earn by collecting the daily rewards, adventuring in PvE, or winning games in the Arena. The only coin players can earn in-game is called SLP (Small Love Potion), and can’t be used as a governance token. Top PvP players can earn AXS by ranking in the top 50.

The governance token, AXS, can be bought and exchanged on the most popular exchanges and can be staked in Binance. Axie Infinity will feature an in-house staking mechanism soon.

In the future, players will be able to earn SLPs by hosting events on their lands, playing different games in Lunacia with their Axies, and generally having a fun time in this creative environment.

In terms of real-world money, all in-game assets are NFTs and can be traded in the open marketplace, which is one of the best and most complete NFT marketplaces in the World. With over 3.6 billions in transactions, you might imagine they did quite a good job there.

Marketplace data can be accessed by APIs and led the way to multiple tools and external resources, such as Axie Zone.

Initial Investment

The initial investment in Axie Infinity varies wildly depending on your goals. One year ago, starting could cost you up to $1500, but it’s now way cheaper, with a balanced entry point around $200.

At first, you should focus on building a team that can battle through PvE and win 5 games in Arena per day, as that’s the minimum requirement for your daily mission:

10 Adventure Plays
Daily Log In
5 Wins in the Arena

To build a good team, you’ll need a tank, a middle-laner and a back-laner. The best resource to pick the right Axies to buy is the Axie Zone card’s list.

In the card list, you will see the most important cards by class. Then, head over to the Marketplace and search for Axies with those cards in there. You will see all Axies matching the criteria.

Another good way to start is looking at the leaderboard and clicking on the top 10-15 players. Axie Zone will show you their most used team. Click through their Axies, and search for some similar combinations in the Marketplace.

A good Axie can cost anywhere from 40 to 100 dollars at the moment. We suggest you start before land play becomes a reality, as that will likely make the prices of Axies skyrocket.

Remember we refer to prices in $ to make it easier to understand, but all transactions happen in wETH. More on this in the “How to get started” section.

Axie Inifinity Rewards System

There are three ways to earn SLP in Axie Infinity:

Complete the daily mission (+25 SLP per day);
Complete missions in Adventure (+0-50 SLP per day). Doesn’t consume energy to earn SLP, but consume energy to earn EXP;
Win games in the Arena (+0-21 SLP per win). Consumes energy to earn SLP.

How much energy you have depends on how many Axies you have stacked in your account.

3-9 Axies get you 20 energy, with a refresh of 5 every 6 hours;
10-19 Axies get you 40 energy, with a refresh of 5 every 3 hours;
From 20 Axies, you receive 60 energy, with a refresh of 5 every 2 hours.

Your daily and per-activity rewards change based on your level and experience. In PvE, you will earn a different number of SLP depending on the level you’re facing:

Lvl. 1-4	1 SLP per win
Lvl. 5-9	2 SLP per win
Lvl. 10-14	4 SLP per win
Lvl. 15-16	6 SLP per win
Lvl. 17-20	5-10 SLP per win
Lvl. 21-36	10-20 SLP per win

Also, you will get a one-time bonus battling special levels in Adventure Mode:

Ruin 21	200 SLP
Ruin 36	300 SLP

In PvP, you will earn SLPs based on your ranking in the Leaderboard. Your ranking has a value called MMR. Depending on your MMR, these will be your rewards for each win.

MMR	SLP
0-800	0 SLP per win
800-999	1 SLP per win
1000-1099	3 SLP per win
1100-1299	6 SLP per win
1300-1499	9 SLP per win
1500-1799	12 SLP per win
1800-1999	15 SLP per win
2000-2199	18 SLP per win
2200+	21 SLP per win

There’s a cap to how many SLPs you can earn without a winning team in the Arena, specifically 25 from the Daily Mission + 50 from the PvE mode, for a total of 75 SLP per day.

However, 75 SLPs won’t get you very far. If you want to earn serious money playing Axie Infinity, you have to master the Arena. Imagine you get to 2000 MMR, very good but still not top 10 players per say. If you have 20 or more Axies, you will get 60 energies in the day.

With a 80% win ratio, you would get 48 victories per day, totaling 864SLP from Arena + 75SLP from Adventure and Daily Mission. Even without considering the +5 energy buffer you’d get every 2 hours, your total SLP per day would be 939.

If you get in the top 50 of the current season, you can also get a reward in AXS – the much more valuable governance token.

In short, focus on PvE when you’re starting out, but definitely move towards PvP as you move on.

In the past, one of the best ways to earn money playing Axie was breeding Axies together, as two Axies can be parents and breed. However, breeding Axie is not suggested nowadays as it costs AXS, which is likely going to be more expensive than the value of the offspring.

Axie Infinity Tokens

Tokenomics in Axie Infinity is actually quite simple. There are only two tokens: SLP and AXS.

SLP is only used in the game and can be exchanged for fiat money or another crypto on famous exchanges like Pancake Swap, and even on Binance.

As of now, SLP is mostly used as a reward mechanism, and has no real in-game utility other than breeding. However, breeding is too expensive for the average player to turn a profit, and that’s one of the main reasons SLP lost value.

However, if you’re interested in investing in the game’s future and submitting proposals, you’ll need AXS – the governance token.

Axie Infinity Shards are an ERC 20 governance token for the Axie universe. Holders will shape the future of Axie Infinity by signaling their support for upgrades to the ecosystem and directing usage of a Community Treasury.

AXS will be accepted as currency within the Axie NFT marketplace. AXS may also be used to determine eligibility for participation in certain sales/auctions conducted by the Axie team.

Additionally, AXS holders receive revenues generated by Axie Infinity as well as a portion of staking rewards.

In short, SLP is only used inside the game, and is the coin you can earn by playing Axie Infinity. AXS can to be purchased outside of the game or earned if you make it to the top 50.

SLP’s value is quite low right now and wildly depends on the current game balance. Sky Mavis had to intervene quite frequently to avoid sudden increases or drops in price.

AXS’s value is quite stable and only grew in the past year, as it’s the one determining the future of Axie Infinity and managed by investors rather than players.

How to Get Started

To get started in Axie Infinity, all you need is a Ronin Wallet and 3 Axies. Ronin Wallet is your boarding pass to a new digital nation.

This browser extension allows users to play Axie Infinity and other decentralized applications running on Ronin, an Ethereum sidechain built specifically for Blockchain games.

You can use the wallet exactly like you use a Metamask wallet, including creating multiple accounts. However, remember Axie Infinity bans multi-account players, so the only use case for multiple accounts is if you have friends or scholars playing for you and you need to manage their Axies in the Marketplace.

To buy 3 Axies, you need to access the Marketplace and have enough wETH for the purchase. wETH is a form of wrapped Ethereum, and you can purchase the required amount from Ronin.

Remember that, in this transaction, you will pay Ethereum gas fees. Starting from your next transactions, such as purchasing Axies, you won’t pay the gas fees as you’ll be using the Sidechain and transact in wETH already.

You can buy wETH through other channels as well and/or move existing wETH you hold into your Ronin account.

If you never played PTE games and you know nothing about blockchain technology, don’t worry! Ronin allows buying wETH through credit cards in most countries.

Once you have enough wETH to buy 3 Axies in your Ronin wallet, log into the marketplace and follow the instructions mentioned above to pick your first team.

After you play for a bit, you might want to redeem in-game SLP. You can redeem and stack them in your Ronin wallet just like your wETH – they run on the same blockchain. You can only claim SLP earned from the game every 2 weeks.

Tips for a Good Start in Axie Infinity

Axie Infinity has a strong user base and can be quite competitive at times. To kickstart your success in the game, we suggest you take a good amount of time studying this guide and the resources available at GameWith and Axie Zone.

The game also has an active subreddit where users share their best combos, team-building strategies, and insights on the game.

Playing Axie Infinity is not rocket science, but investigating a bit more before investing in a team can help you save money and stress in the future. Remember to always take a look at the leaderboard and what top players are using in their teams before your purchase, and make sure the Axies you buy have top-tier cards.

Useless cards can damage you in battle, and also makes the Axie a lot harder to sell if you decide to change team in the future.

Speaking of Team Upgrades, do consider the game as an ever-evolving battler. A team that works today won’t work in two months from now. The meta always changes, as it happens in card games nowadays.

Follow the market trends and buy early into new combinations of Axies, it will save you tons of money over the long term.

Once a team of yours stops performing like it should, try to find the best timing to sell out and buy a new team. You won’t incur any fees selling and buying Axies in the Marketplace. This is one of the main benefits of the Ronin sidechain.

Always use all resources available in this guide and tools developed by third parties, and don’t forget to check our magazine on a recurring basis as we publish tons of news on all things PTE. Below is a video review from our YouTube channel on Axie Infinity Origin:

Axie Infinity Closing Thoughts

In our best play to earn game guide, we scored Axie Infinity 5/5 for its complex mechanics, great gameplay, entertaining metaverse, and growing team and community.

Nowadays, Axie Infinity is not what it once was, and many players are withdrawing or waiting for Sky Mavis to update the burning mechanism to keep the in-game economy alive.

While Axie Infinity could be a good investment in 2022, make sure you clearly understand the risks involved with getting yourself in the game right now. Even if the team promised new mechanics to increase the value of SLP, none of them have been released yet, and the token devalued from $0.36 to $0.01 in a relatively short timeframe.

People that were once able to make tens of thousands of dollars per month from selling Axies gave up on breeding, and active players in the Arena are the only ones being able to justify the time spent in Axie Infinity when compared to the earnings they get out of it.

In short, there’s no guarantee your investment will return, and ROI can take a while to manifest. If you don’t plan to play in the Arena, and only want quick profits, Axie Infinity is not the game for you.

However, if you genuinely enjoy the gameplay and the metaverse Sky Mavis is building, entering the ecosystem now will benefit you in the long term, as Axies and Items are very cheap right now and won’t likely stay like this for long.

Involve yourself in Lunacia if you plan on ranking up the leaderboard and enjoy the card battling system with your friends and fellow players!