We’re excited to announce official FC Bayern Munich Player Cards (non-fungible tokens) NFTs are now for sale on OpenSea! These NFTs were created by Stryking, one of the first blockchain-based platforms to offer officially licensed sports digital collectibles.
There are five rarity tiers for all FC Bayern Munich Player Cards: Common, Uncommon, Rare, Epic and Legendary, with Legendary being the most rare. Some of them are limited edition cards which are more scarce and have a distinctive tint. Examples of limited edition cards are the upcoming FC Bayern Munich Legendary Christmas and New Year Editions.
Stryking’s first auction
The initial offering of these digital FC Bayern Munich Player Card tokens was conducted recently. There were 18 first print Legendary Player Cards auctioned off, including one of the top goaltenders Manuel Neurer, FC Bayern Munich top striker Robert Lewandowski, and the “Little Magician” Phillipe Coutinho. Robert Lewandowski Player Card was sold at the highest price – 3.8 ETH!
Exclusive Christmas Edition Auction
The second auction starts today, and this time Stryking is auctioning Legendary Christmas Edition Player Cards featuring all 24 FC Bayern Munich players of the 2019/2020 season. There are only two sets of 24 cards each for this special edition. One set will be auctioned in six bundles of four cards each; the other set will be auctioned in one complete bundle of 24 cards.
In addition, Stryking will hold auctions for additional prints of the FC Bayern Munich Legendary Player Cards and Legendary New Year Edition Player Cards. All auctions are held in time period from 20th December until 6th January 2020.
All auction winners of these NFTs are protected by the Stryking’s money-back guarantee, which provides buyers with security and peace of mind for their purchases. After an initial 3-month cool down period, auction winners will have 30 days to return the FC Bayern Munich Player Cards to Stryking for a full refund (minus applicable gas fees; the cool down period for each Player Card begins when the auction for that item ends). More information of the money-back guarantee can be found at https://medium.com/stryking-io/introducing-the-nft-money-back-guarantee-7e99d86d52a1.
More about Stryking
Stryking is one of the first out of the gates blockchain based platforms to offer officially licensed sports digital collectibles. The company is building a truly global hub where sports fans meet to collect and trade as well as play with their digital collectibles. Stryking was acquired by Animoca Brands in September 2019.
Collectible card games (CCGs) appeal to a wide audience. Players range from “kitchen table” casuals who play and explore the CCG for fun, to collectors who collect cards for emotional or financial value, to professionals who compete to be the best in the world. The main motivations of CCG players are social, mastery, or creativity, based on game analytics firm Quantic Foundry’sgamer motivation model.
CCG players are generally driven by the competition aspect of the social motivation, the strategy aspect of the mastery motivation, and the discovery aspect of the creativity motivation
Players driven by “social” and “mastery” motivations generally play to win, and need the best decks. Therefore, they must acquire the strongest cards to form meta (the most dominant) decks. Meanwhile, players driven by “creativity” generally play to explore deckbuilding possibilities. Thus, they need to buy lots of cards to try out different combos. This is where card flippers come in.
Card flippers maximize market efficiency in CCG economies, buying low and selling high to ensure all cards are sold at their appropriate market prices. There are two types of card flippers:
1. Arbitrageurs who purchase underpriced cards on one market and resell it on another one, taking advantage of price differences of the same product in different markets.
2. Investors who identify and purchase cards that may increase in value (ex. a card that has the potential to become meta in the future), hold on to them, then sell them at a later date if their prices increase.
Card flippers are essential to healthy CCG markets, as they ensure that the markets are efficient, which maximizes aggregate player fun (more on this later).
“Black Lotus” from Magic the Gathering’s first set, Alpha, once sold for $27,302. It is one of the most coveted cards for investor card flippers.
Card flipper communities exist for all major CCGs. r/mtgfinance, for instance, is an active subreddit with 55k members where people discuss sales strategies, card preservation techniques, and form theses behind card investments. r/Flipping is a more generalized subreddit with 148k members used to discuss flipping tactics for various assets and CCGs. In a way, flipping is a game within a game, creating additional value for players on top of the actual gameplay of the CCG.
So how can blockchain technology make the game of flipping even more appealing?
How Blockchains Change the Card Flipping Experience
Arbitrageurs and investors who flip blockchain-based CCG cards as non-fungible tokens (NFTs) can derive many benefits. In a recent blog post, Tony Sheng highlights the idea that cryptomarkets offer “more assets, markets, [and] liquidity.”
1. More Assets
NFT token standards like ERC-721 decreases the barrier of entry for people to create their own CCGs, thereby increasing the number of tradable assets. Anyone can mint a ERC-721 token in a matter of minutes by following tutorials and distribute the tokens to a wide audience via token sales or airdrops.
The design space of NFT-based CCGs is also greater than that of physical CCGs, as NFTs are programmable, which introduces new game mechanics (ex. Hearthstone’s RNG heavy dynamic) that were previously impossible. This leads to not just more CCG assets, but more types of CCG assets. With more possible mechanics, game designers can make games with more complicated rules and card types. This increase in the diversity of assets exposes card flippers to more profit opportunities.
Yogg is one of the most controversial cards in Hearthstone as it casts random spells from the entire spell pool. This is a mechanic only possible in digital CCGs.
Not to mention, CCGs only account for a small fraction of NFTs that flippers are able to profit off of. Out of the top ten NFT dapps, only two are CCGs. CCG arbitrageurs and investors can thus have diverse portfolios and hedge their risks as they can venture beyond CCGs and into other types of digitally native collectibles.
An additional benefit of NFT CCG cards compared to physical cards is that card condition is no longer a factor for asset depreciation. Unlike physical cards, NFTs cannot be bent, burned, or broken. As a result, NFT flippers do not have to worry about the conditions of their assets.
On the flipside (no pun intended), like physical cards, NFTs can still be lost or stolen if owners lose access to their wallets. Therefore, best practices for asset management (ex. distributing your NFTs across multiple wallets) and wallet security (ex. using cold wallets) are crucial for successful NFT flipping.
2. More Markets
Improved asset discovery is another major benefit of building CCGs on blockchains as flippers can easily find cards. Due to NFTs being digitally native, their marketplaces are also digital. Card flippers now have an easier time finding items to flip as they no longer have to go through massive piles of cards in people’s yard sales. Instead, NFT marketplaces are searchable on the internet and can be easily parsed. Players can also easily spin up marketplaces for new CCGs using decentralized exchange protocols like 0x to earn trading fees and contribute to their CCG’s network of marketplaces. Cryptomarkets are on 24/7 unlike your local brick and mortar card stores.
Savvy NFT flippers can even code bots that filter online marketplaces to find all available listings and automatically purchase items that they deem underpriced. Now, the arbitrageurs can facilitate trades across jurisdictions (more likely to have price differences), and investors can easily obtain diamonds in markets that were previously geographically unavailable to them. This enhances market efficiency and brings greater margins to card flippers.
However, this improved efficiency may lead to a decreased number of flippers as assets get concentrated to flippers who can build the most effective flipping bots. While it will increase the overall earnings for the best flippers as they make large numbers of trades, it also will likely increase the barrier of entry for people interested in flipping NFTs. During the CryptoKitties mania, many of the most successful kitty flippers used this exact strategy to extract large profits. Nevertheless, it is possible for new strategies to emerge that can beat out trading bots in the future.
Many CryptoKitties flippers made large profits during the CryptoKitties mania as some kitties reached prices as high as $170,000.
3. More Liquidity
The greatest benefit of blockchain based CCGs is increased card liquidity. As NFTs are digitally native, there is lower friction in asset trading. Card flippers no longer have the financial costs of shipping fees and card maintenance, and they can bypass the time costs of filtering through, valuing, and mailing the cards. They only have to pay a transaction to the marketplace and a gas fee to the network, and can use tools that automatically tells them their assets’ market prices.
The biggest winner from the increased liquidity is the CCG player. Players can now receive their new cards instantly and purchase cards at overall lower prices, thanks to a more efficient market. Other than that, they can more reliably verify the authenticity of the asset they’re purchasing by verifying its legitimacy with a blockchain explorer.
The best outcome of an efficient open trading card economy for the game developer is that the same level of fun is now achievable by a wider audience as the pay to play threshold decreases. Most CCGs with card trading economies are, by nature, pay to play. Beginners have low pay to play thresholds as they are mostly playing for fun and only need basic cards to get going. However, the pay to play threshold rises as players start to play competitively, because they now need specific strong cards to make meta decks. The pay to play threshold reaches its peak at the professional level as those players need as many meta cards as possible to keep their decks powerful and flexible.
The importance of lowering the pay to play threshold of a CCG can be demonstrated by comparing closed economy card games like Hearthstone (only way of acquiring cards is to buy card packs from Blizzard) to open economy CCGs like Gods Unchained (players can buy packs from Immutable and trade peer to peer on marketplaces). To simplify the example, we will disregard the card forging mechanics in the two games.
In Hearthstone, in order for a new player to build a meta deck, the player must keep buying packs until he/she gets every single card that composes the deck. This leaves the player’s ability to get the necessary cards up to luck. An unlucky player may even end up with stockpiles of bad cards that he/she has no use for, creating a sunk cost. Though this provides Blizzard a lucrative revenue stream in the short term, it can push away players who do not want to invest such large sums in a game, resulting in a long term loss for the company.
Gods Unchained is the token child of CCGs taking advantage of blockchain and open trading economies’ benefits.
In GU, new players who want to build a meta deck have two ways of doing so. The first way is to buy card packs until the total value of their cards equals the total value of their desired deck. Unlike Hearthstone players, they can trade their extra cards with other players for their desired cards. Though this method has a time cost (takes time to find trades), the monetary cost is significantly lower. The second way is to buy all the cards that make up the deck directly from a GU marketplace. This is the most efficient method as it has low monetary and time costs.
Though open trading card economies may be less profitable in the short run for the company, their lower pay to play threshold reduces the barrier of entry for players, which makes the game more attractive to gamers. This dynamic likely results in more long term growth for the game as less players drop off when the meta changes (lower cost for constructing new meta decks), more players join the ecosystem over time (lower pay to play threshold leads to more players), and more players can advance to the competitive scene which helps grow the game’s esports community. This could be one of the contributing factors of why Magic The Gathering has been the king of CCGs since 1993.
As demonstrated, the pay to play threshold influences the growth potential for games as it creates a barrier of entry for new players and limits poorer players from competing and discovering. Thus, it is important for companies to lower the pay to play threshold to maximize long term profit. Thanks to increased liquidity brought from blockchains, trading card markets can become more efficient. This helps overall pay to play threshold decrease and all players are now able to enjoy the game at a lower cost, thereby increasing aggregate fun of the game. This aggregate fun may even compound due to the inherent network effects of CCGs.
All Eyes on the Gods
Capitalizing on these aforementioned benefits, the Immutable team launched their feature CCG Gods Unchained. The game is one of the most anticipated blockchain based games since the CryptoKitties hype in 2017. In fact, this month’s ERC-721 transfer counts have already surpassed peak CryptoKitties transfer counts thanks to Gods Unchained. GU is a turn based, digital trading card game built on the Ethereum blockchain with cards that are tradable ERC-721 tokens.
Within a week of the Immutable team launching card trading, total trading volume has already surpassed 1700 ETH. One of the mythic cards (one of six cards that only have one copy), Prometheus, already has an offer of 115 ETH on OpenSea. Card flippers are already hard at work arbitraging across sellers and investing in cards that they think will increase in value when Immutable releases more content. We’re anticipating card flippers to build out flipping bots that maximize their profits, valuation software to help them price their cards, and tools that we haven’t even thought of yet! In addition to attracting more people to adopt crypto, Gods Unchained will also help the NFT ecosystem develop by being a living example of how NFTs can enhance the CCG experience.
Gods Unchained has overtaken major blockchain game titles like MyCryptoHeroes, CryptoKitties, CheezeWizards, and Decentraland in trading volume.
If you’re interested in learning more about Gods Unchained, go to their website to learn more and download the game! There are also many great streamers such as TuskTusk, BitcoinLouie, and Majincraft who share educational content about the game. Finally, if you’re interested in taking advantage of the market benefits of a blockchain based CCG, hop on over to OpenSea’s Gods Unchained marketplace and start flipping cards!
Remember the iconic lines “Leave the gun. Take the cannoli” and “A friend should always underestimate your virtues and an enemy always overestimate your faults”? To celebrate its upcoming platform launch, Terra Virtua is partnering with OpenSea to launch a number of limited edition posters from the Godfather movie series.
Portraying iconic imagery taken from the original movie posters, together with some official, never-before-released content, this limited release includes Rare and Epic editions of officially licensed “The Godfather” artwork, including scenes, quotes and characters.
Who is Terra Virtua
Terra Virtua is a entertainment-themed collectibles platform that brings immersive experiences to mobile, AR, and VR. It’s a place for users to collect, complete, and showcase their NFT collections to other players. Whether you own unique art and want to show it off in AR or if you want to show off your digital collection of vinyl album covers in your personal VR lounge, it will all be possible in Terra Virtua. You can now own unique NFTs from world class brands that you and your friends can share, trade, exhibit, play, and enjoy.
The company collaborates with global brands like Paramount Pictures to bring their IPs to crypto collectibles. CEO Gary Bracey is confident of delivering on this vision. “Putting great content out is the first step on our journey and we are proud to share our first Godfather NFTs on OpenSea.” Company executives come from well known game and media companies like EA, Warner, Sony, and more.
Kicking Off
OpenSea is proud to provide the platform to launch Terra Virtua’s first NFTs, and we’re excited to see how Terra Virtua will bring The Godfather fans to adopt NFTs! Here’s the distribution of collectibles:
Common
Rare
Epic
Golden
Iconic Sets
145
85
65
35
Vito
135
65
50
25
Unforgettable
90
55
40
18
The Vault
80
45
25
10
The Don
65
35
18
5
As part of the partnership, 500 “Be My Friend” cards will be available on OpenSea for free (stay tuned for more details on these cards)! Additionally, Terra Virtua will be auctioning, exclusively on OpenSea, a complete collection of the 1st minted editions of the entire collection of 20 posters, which will include a one-off, licensed cover NFT! Users will be able to bid on these items in an English auction. Given that some of the editions are limited to only 10 pieces, this set is very likely to be a true collectors item in the future. First come, first served!
To stay tuned for more announcements regarding the launch and to learn more about OpenSea, join us on Discord, check out our subreddit, and follow us on Twitter!
We’re going to make you an offer you can’t refuse.
There have been hundreds of thousands of ENS-related events on OpenSea, going well beyond their initial collaboration on short ENS names. It is a fun and intriguing ecosystem, revealing echoes of social, economic and psychological goals, from personal names (willie.eth) and economic big ideas (unbank.eth) to less-than-subtle adult themes (*******.eth). I was curious if I could predict the price of a domain from the domain name itself, using simple out-of-the-box NLP tools.
I used OpenSea’s API to pull down about 150,000 ENS events from the platform. Almost 9,000 of these are successful domain purchases. There are about 50,000 bids in these data, and 50,000 successful transfers. About 5,000 unique addresses are associated with domain purchases. In total, these data appear to represent about half of the ENS domains reported on the OpenSea platform.
Here are some quick observations. Like many economic metrics, the frequency of ownership shows a Pareto-like distribution. In these data, the biggest ENS “whale” owns about 1,700 domains, and the next 1,000 domains. Most (73%) only own 1 or 2. Click here to visit an interactive plot on my site. On that plot, you can click to see an address profile on OpenSea.
A power-law distribution holds over address ownership, common across many economic, social and physical domains. There are a few whales, and many minnows.
Perusing the domains reveals interesting patterns, as reported earlier by Makoto Inoue at ENS. There are homoglyph attacks in waiting, such as medicarе.eth, and a quick pick up of niсk.eth to match Nick Johnson’s nick.eth. The longest domain in these data is:
Many domains in other languages are present: French, Spanish, Marathi, Chinese, and more. My favorite Chinese domain is 毛主席语录.eth, which Google translates to “Chairman Mao’s quotes.”
It’s fun just to wander ENS domains and look over basic statistics. But the goal in this post is to show that ENS is now at a scale allowing prediction of market value using features of the product itself. These features can be extracted even from the single string of characters making up a domain. Features might include: How frequent is a domain’s word? How semantically positive or negative? Does it have a mixed character set? Does it mix alphabetical and numeric digits?
I coded up a multiple regression model on successful OpenSea purchases for which I had WETH pricing — about 8,100 domains. I used a variety of features using NLP and some other wrangling in R: length, word frequency, sentiment analysis, character and alphanumeric mixtures.
The log of WETH value can be predicted quite well with a handful of such features. The model accounts for over 20% of the variance in ENS domain prices. See the figure below, plotting predicted WETH by observed WETH. The best features, in order of strength and also of intuitiveness, are: log(length of domain), log(Google word frequency), positive sentiment, and trust sentiment.
Predicted by observed WETH (log transformed). Basic regression with simple features can account for over 20% of the price variability.
There is enough data in ENS now to plug in a domain name and get a decent prediction of what its market value may be. Obviously length and familiarity are the greatest factors, but subtler NLP variables, like sentiment, can help with accuracy.
In an interesting way, ENS is very quickly approximating economic dynamics in other domain services (though you can do a lot more with ENS!). This is revealed in various patterns of economic strategy (squatting, homoglyphs, etc.), along with the “at-scale” product-market predictability. With an understanding of such dynamics, ENS implements aggressive anti-squatting policies in the registration service. Perusing and aggregating over the countless thousands of events on OpenSea, you get the sense this was a very good move.
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