Wizards & Dragons NFTs Leapfrog Bored Apes in Latest Play-to-Earn Rally

NFTs for Wizards & Dragons, a new project, has shot to the number two slot in the OpenSea weekly volume rankings at 8650.59 ETH as of Dec. 6. That’s quadruple the volume than the migrated form of Wolf Game, which Wizards and Dragons forked. It’s also leapfrogged Bored Apes Yacht Club and CloneX NFTs.

Wizards & Dragons is a strategy game in which players use NFTs to acquire the game’s currency. Players can mint or buy either Wizard or Dragon NFTs, each of which follows their own set of rules in the quest to attain Gold Pieces (GP), the in-game currency.

GP has real value — the tokens are going for $0.014 as of Dec. 6 though GP hit an all-time high of $0.137 on Dec. 3.

Maximize Earnings

Gameplay for Wizards & Dragons centers around players staking their Wizard NFTs to earn 12,000 GP a day, according to a document put out by the project. At GP’s all-time, that’s $1,644 per day. This is where the Dragon NFTs come in though — they take a 20% cut of all the Wizard NFTs’ earnings.

Players can own both Wizard & Dragon NFTs — the tokens are simply assets used to maximize GP earnings.

Dragon NFTs also have a 50% chance of taking all of a Wizard NFTs’ earned GP when a user unstakes them to permanently pocket the currency.

Dragon #35994

Dragons’ ability to effectively tax or sometimes steal Wizards’ earnings has led the market to value the scaly-NFTs more highly than their magical counterparts. The floor for Wizards is .18 ETH and for Dragons it’s .7 ETH, as of Dec. 6.

Just like GP, the floors for each type of NFTs was higher on Dec. 3 when it was .54 ETH for Wizards, and 2.49 ETH, over $10,000 at the time, for Dragons.

In the past 24 hours, there have been over 500 unique buyers of either Wizards or Dragons, according to analytics provider, Nansen. On Dec. 3, a local high for the project, there were more than 3,000 unique buyers of Wizards or Dragons.

Wizard #23830

The primary deflationary mechanic for GP is that users must use the token to pay for new NFTs. There’s a 90% chance of minting a Wizard and a 10% one of minting a Dragon. A mint gets progressively more expensive in GP terms — minting currently costs 36,000 GP, or $504 at Dec. 6 prices. There’s also a 10% chance that a Dragon steals your mint, contributing to the NFTs’ premium.

Wizards & Dragons also has an upcoming mechanism called Treasure Chest, which, if held in a user’s wallet, reduces the likelihood of a Dragon stealing a mint to 5% from 10%. A Treasure Chest will cost 25,000 GP, or $350, as of Dec. 6.

Wizards & Dragons differentiated itself from other forks of Wolf Game by fixing an issue with the randomizer, which dictates whether users get a Wizard or a Dragon. “Wizards & Dragons has fixes developed for all known vulnerabilities affecting the open source Wolf Game contracts, including Flashbots bundle protection,” said the project in a Medium post.

Lost Momentum

A vulnerability suffered by Wolf Game has forced the project to go through a migration process. This entails locking away the game’s original NFTs and replicating in a new smart contract which has been debugged.

Wizards & Dragons has further deflationary mechanics coming up, called “tribute” and “sacrifice,” which allows users to burn their GP, Wizards or Dragons in exchange for as yet unannounced items, according to the project’s explainer piece. The items will be useful in what the project calls Act 2 and Act 3, which have yet to be initiated.

For now and despite lost momentum over the weekend, Wizards & Dragons appears to be out in front of its originator, Wolf Game.