Finally, I did it: FOMO won and I decided to enter the Axie's metaverse.

Being the internet already full of Axie 101 tutorial, I decided to take a broader prospective for this article, and describe how has been my experience after a week as a pure Axie newbie.

For who lived on another planet in these last months: Axie is a "Play to earn" videogame on blockchain, where fantastic creatures named "Axie" battle in a Pokemon style arena. 

Setup of the game

Setup of the game is straight forward. There is also an app, not downloadable from the store but offered as an APK, to install manually on your mobile device. Be aware that Axie has really strict ban rules, and one of these is that you can't play at the same time on desktop and on mobile.

Being a total newbie, the first surprise is that the game is free, but to play you have to own at least 3 Axies. Axies are sold as NFT on Axie's Marketplace, and have a wide range of prices. Entry prices start from approximately 0.04 ETH. The purchase experience is not really user friendly and requires a good knowledge of how to use digital wallets.

Purchase of the Axie

I had some Ethereum on a Coinbase account. I transfered them to Metamask, and then to Ronin through the bridge. It was a a blood bath in network fees, and I landed on the marketplace very disappointed by the whole mechanism. 

Luckily, from that point, things started to flow smoothly. I choosed three basic Axies, for a total purchase of 0,12 ETH, and after the purchase they become available in my dahsboard to be used for playing the game.

When you buy your Axies, you should follow some tutorials on how to form a good starter team: there are some properties of the Axies that must be balanced, like race, shield, damage, and all the stuff like that. If you fail to build a team well balanced you may have to suffer some frustration in the first battles, when your Experience Points are still low.

Gameplay

I found the first days of gameplay boring and frustrating, and the only thing that motivated me to continue playing were the SLP dropped in my inventory. 

SLP are the famous Small Love Potions, the in-game coin that you receive winning battles or completing daily tasks, They can be used in game to breed Axies, or sold on exchanges like Binance or Kucoin to gain real money.

Battles in Axie are very similar, and in the beginng you must have a lot of patience to raise your levels of experience. Even when you start to power your team, the level of difficulty in the game is always high, and you will experience several losses.

After some practice, I must admit that I started to appreciate more the battle system. After having better known the card system, you can start to develop strategies that can effectively have impact on the result of the game.

The graphics of the game are really cute, and the OST relaxing. 

After some days of playing, I began to appreciate Axie as an entertaining moment to take a break from trading sessions. I am not an hardcore player: in average, I farm from 30 to 40 SLP a day, collecting them by completing the daily tasks plus some battles I do to gain experience points.

Community

One thing that can hook you to Axie is the community. They are very passionate and, if you like art and painting, there are a lot of competitions involving creating CG, meme or fan art. There are lot of Twitter's account dealing with Axie that are very entertaining. 

There are a lot of things happening around Axie: you can battle tournaments, know interesting people, or getting involved in the Scolarship mechanism, where you can lend or borrow Axies in exchange for a quota of the farmed SLP.

My experience

In conclusion, I think Axie is a good experience that has enriched my understanding of the crypto scene and entertained my time.

Speaking of profits: even if I entered lately in the game, I think there is still an opportunity to make some profits, by earning SLP or reselling the Axies when they will have become more powerful.

But the impression is that it may be a little late for the real money. If you enter the Axie as a way to make a living, you must really be prepared to dedicate lot of hours per day, if not considering it as a real part time job. You must be prepared to battle against teams with years of experience that will make climbing the arena ranks a real nightmare.

Is Axie a pyramidal scheme?

Well, definitely no. Axie is an awesome project that has received an amazing success, and now has to deal with the aspects of it, which involve also managing the difficulty for newbie users to play against established teams. 

Axie's development team is making a lot of effort to adjust the mechanics to allow newcomers to experience a good balance of difficulty. 

That said, as everything else in the world, whoever arrives first, stays better.