First:
What are the different classes of Axies?
There are 6 different classes of Axies:
- Beast (orange)
- Plant (green)
- Aquatic (blue)
- Reptile (purple)
- Bird (pink)
- Bug (red)
Each of these classes has a specific ability tendency that they are best known for. Beasts and Bugs have higher morale, which means higher chance of critical hits in battle. Birds and Aquatics have higher speed, which means they attack first/faster. Plants and Reptiles have higher health (HP), which means more damage can be taken. This does not mean they do not get the other traits, these are just the abilities that they are known for (think fish are usually faster than say, a turtle, which is why it has more speed). The more of the class traits an Axie has, the more of that ability they have.
Each Axie has 6 different parts/traits. From top to bottom (check image above), they are: eyes, ears, mouth, horn, back, and tail. In battle, only the bottom 4 traits are used (mouth, horn, back, and tail). There will be future use cases for the mouth and ears, as of right now they are aesthetic. Also as of right now, Axie traits cannot be leveled up, however in the future this will be one of the many cool things you can do with your Axies!
Purity:
What does purity mean? Purity is the number of traits that matches the class of the Axie. For example, an aquatic with 6/6 aqua traits is considered a “pure” aquatic.
The highest stat an Axie can have for each ability is 61. This aquatic Axie above would have a speed of 61.
If a beast (like the one first Axie picture) has 3 beast parts (orange), than the purity is considered to be 3/6. The higher the purity, the higher the value of the Axie because of its breed-ability and its rarity (pure Axies are hard to get).
Second: Breeding
Before tackling breeding, it would be best to understand the different stages of Axie life. The first is the egg:
It takes the Axie 1 day to grow from an egg to a larva:
The Axie grows in the larva state for 2 days before it morphs into a petite (this requires a transaction):
At the Petite stage, you can see the traits that your Axie has. It takes 2 days for the Axie to grow from Petite to Adult (also requires transaction), which is when you can battle and breed with your Axie!
Back to breeding…
In an Axie’s lifetime, it is only ever able to breed 7 times, each time requiring more and more experience.
Axie’s are born with 400 experience already and the first breed requires 700 experience. This means that the Axie will need to battle to gain more experience (as of right now, battling is the only way to gain experience, but there will be different ways with land in Lunacia!).
The breed number and experience are:
Before we get to battling, it is important to understand the genetic structure of the Axie. The trait that is shown visually on the Axie is called its dominant trait. Axies have a dominant trait and 2 recessives (R1 and R2). Similar to humans, the dominant trait has the highest chance of passing down to the Axie child, 37.5%. The R1 trait has a 9.375% chance, and the R2 has a 3.125% chance. There is also a percentage of randomness built into the Axies, however it is a very small percentage.
When breeding, the class of the Axie (plant, beast, etc.) has a 50% chance of being passed down. This means if a beast is bred with a plant, the offspring has a 50% chance of being a beast and a 50% chance of being a plant. In order to truly understand the breeding process, lets do an example.
Lets take this aquatic:
And breed it with this bird:
Thanks to Freak, an Axie player, we can easily see the percentages of the different traits:
The percentages for the 2 Axies above are:
You can see from these percentages, the higher the percentage for the trait, the more it shows up in the gene history (more dominant it is). For example: Sandal must be both a dominant and recessive gene for one of the Axies because it has over 37.5% chance of being bred onto the offspring.
After analyzing if we like the possible traits with this pair, we can breed!
The first step is to go to one of the Axies that you want to breed. Then to click on the “breed” button.
This page will show up:
Since we have a pair for this Axie, we want to click Breed with My Axie.
After clicking, this page appears:
We want to click on the “Select an Axie” so that we can choose our Axie. After selecting this, it will show all of the Axies that we have available to breed. We want to make sure to select the correct one.
Then you will click on the Axie you want to breed with, in our case it is Axie #21473. Once selected, this will appear:
All you hav left to do is click “Start Breeding” and your Axies will breed! (this will require a transaction and a breeding fee: 0.002 ETH) After you confirm your transaction, this should appear:
That means your Axies have bred and you will see an egg in your My Axies page.
There are endless possibilities* when it comes to Axie pairs and breeding, this is only the beginning!
*You CANNOT breed relatives together, as in Axies that share the same parent cannot be bred together or a child cannot be bred with a parent.
Third: Battling
Battling is when the game truly becomes strategic, challenging, and FUN!
The first thing to understand about battling is that it takes 3 Axies to make a team to battle. They can be of any kind and any position, but there has to be 3. When you win a battle, your team gets 30 Experience, or 36 if you used Bean’s Blessing. When you lose a battle, your team gets 15 Experience, or 18 if you used Bean’s Blessing (Bean’s blessing, 20% extra EXP, is good because you gain experience faster). You can only battle once every 4 hours or 3 times every 12 hours. So it pays to make the best teams so that you can win and gain experience faster (and breed faster).
When battling, Axies attack the front Axie of the other team first (unless it has a special trait like Toothless Bite or Shrimp, which attack the back Axie). What does it mean to be the “front” Axie? It is simply the one closest to the other team.
In this case, the Axie on the far right will be attacked first, followed by the Axie in the middle, then the Axie at the left end.
There are many different ways of positioning your Axies to strategically save the Axies with low HP from getting attacked first and dying. This is when having a good idea of the Axies and their abilities comes into play.
When battling, a trait is used every time your Axie turn is up. This is why Axie traits have both Attack and Defense. When you click on an Axie, and then on its traits, you can see its abilities, Attack, Defense, and Accuracy (how often it can hit its max attack). For example, the tail Nut Cracker part has an Attack of 19, Defense of 5, and Accuracy of 90. This means that when Attacking the Nut Cracker tail trait does 19 damage 90% of the time. However, when you are not attacking and your Axie uses the Nut Cracker tail part, it has 5 defense against the opponents attack. It is important to pay attention to these numbers because some Axie traits have high defense, low attack, and some Axie traits have high attack, low defense.
A “Critical Hit” is when an Axie (typically with high Morale) has an attack that does more damage than what its Attack is. Critical Hits do more damage to the opposing Axie, making them game changers! Since Beasts/Beast Traits have higher Morale, they have a higher chance of a Critical Hit.
You can edit the order in which your Axie uses each trait in the Edit Team option under the Battle Lobby. Send to Arena is where you send your Axie team into battle! Unranked is where you can Challenge another player, a friendly battle that gains no experience but good practice! (more on that later)
After you click Edit Team, you will see your team and its positioning. Axie stats and traits are on the right. It also shows how many battles that has stored (blue) and charging (orange). As you can see this team can’t battle because it has no battles stored, it is charging/healing:
The order from top to bottom is the order in which your Axie will use that move. For the top Axie, it will use Single Combat, then Hennery Bolt, then Sunder Claw, then Critical Escape. This cycle will repeat if used more than 4 times.
It is important to order your traits so that you are attacking when you want to attack and you are defending/healing when you want to heal! This requires a little experience and practice to master.
You can view the result of your battle in the Battle Lobby. The “eye” allows you to see the result of your battle and the summary of what happened.
The Play Button allows you to watch your battle in action!
As you can see, in this battle I lost!
Types of Axies:
Tanks
Tanks are Axies that have higher HP and take more damage. Typically tanks are Plant or Reptiles because they have higher HP. Having a good tank that could heal itself (traits have the power to heal themselves) gives you a big advantage in battle. Tanks typically have parts that can either heal your Axie, like Shiitake, Rose Bud, Zig Zag, etc.,. Or they have traits that have high defense, Pumpkin, Hermit, Red Ear, etc.. Freak has another great tool for this that allows you to sort by Attack, Defense, or Accuracy to see where each trait falls.
DPS (Damage Per Second)
DPS Axies are Axies that have traits that are high in both Attack and Accuracy. This is good because it means that these traits will have a higher chance of hitting their max attack. Examples of DPS moves are: Ronin, Hare, The Last One, Axie Kiss, etc. Basically, any trait with a high attack and a high accuracy would be a good DPS. There is a trade-off, however. High attack parts usually have lower accuracies, so finding a balanced attack is key. It is important to also note that these traits usually have low defense, leaving them vulnerable when attacked.
Fourth: What makes an Axie valuable? What would be a good first purchase?
There are several factors that you should consider when buying your first Axie: the number of breeds, the amount of experience, the purity, if it has any tags (what is a tag?), and if it is a mystic (what is a mystic?).
Number of Breeds:
The number of breeds is important because of the time it takes to gather the experience needed to breed. The first several breeds do not require a lot of experience (breeds 1,2, and 3). This allows for you to gain more offspring at a faster rate. If you are looking to breed, it does not make sense to buy an Axie with a higher amount of breeds because 1) you can’t breed it as much, and 2) it will take you forever to gain all the needed experience for that Axie to breed. That is why it is important to get Axies with low breeds so that you can breed them faster and gain more Axies.
Experience goes hand-in-hand with number of breeds: the more experience, the more you can breed.
Purity:
As mentioned earlier, the purity of an Axie is how many traits match its class. This is important to consider when buying because Axies with higher purities are harder (percentage wise) to breed. This low percentage makes them rarer and more valuable. Plus, if you get an Axie with a high purity and breed it with an Axie that has a high purity, you will have a higher chance of offspring that are purer (HOWEVER, it does not always work out that way!).
A tag:
Tags are labels that are put on Axies that tell what season they were sold in. So far there are only 3 general tags: Origin, MEO, and MEO 2. Origins are the original Axies, they were the first class of Axies ever sold in the Axie Lab. Then after that initial release, comes the MEOs and then the MEO 2s. What is important about a tag? The importance of a tag is that it can’t be passed down when bred. Only the Axie with the tag can be Origin, MEO, or MEO2, making it more valuable and more rare. Typically, if you are looking to invest in a long term Axie, the Origin are the ones to get because it means it is one of the first Axies ever sold. There are only a select few that have these tags.
A Mystic Trait:
When the Origins were being sold, they had a 1/3 chance of getting a part that was Mystic. Mystic parts are extremely rare for that reason, there aren’t that many of them. How to detect a mystic trait? A mystic trait will be colored in blue on the Axie:
As of right now, the value that Mystics have are their rarity, which makes them an ideal collectors item. Some Axies have more than 1 Mystic trait, this makes them even more rare because the initial percentages for getting more than one mystic trait was low.
However, in the Axie Land Sale it was noted that mystic Axies will allow for higher level items to be produced. This adds higher level utility for mystic traits in Lunacia.
If you have ANY questions about the gameplay, join the discord and ask away! The Axie Infinity Community is very open to helping you get started, there is even a scholarship program which may gift you some free axies!
