Starting an Axie Breeding Farm

tl;dr;

To start a profitable breeding farm you will need three high purity (>90%) Aqua Axies that have the following body parts: Sponge (back), Risky Fish (mouth), Shoal Star (horns) and Nimo (tail). If purity needs to be sacrificed for affordability do it on the eyes and ears of an Axie.

Update: The research for this article was done previous to Sky Mavis announcing changes in their reward system that had a ripple effect on the Marketplace decreasing the value of some types of Axies.

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As I mentioned in a previous article, the mechanism that I’ve selected for investing in the game is by setting up a “breeding farm” so I can mint my own NFTs called “Axies” and then sell them in the Marketplace for a profit.

There are a couple of questions that I need to answer before I start working on setting up the breeding farm and those are:

• What types of Axies are the most frequently traded (most liquid) in the marketplace?
• What types of Axies have the highest profit potential?

To answer these questions I’m going to try to extract some information from the Marketplace.

Marketplace Analysis

In the marketplace it’s possible to see the selling price of the last 100 Axies that will give me a pretty good idea of which of the 9 classes of Axies are the most “liquid” ones. I don’t want to get into the details of what makes those 9 classes different or how they are used in the game, I just want to understand which ones are the easiest to sell once my breeding farm gets started.

Upon inspection of the recently sold Axies it was clear to me that the 3 most popular ones are: Plant, Beast and Aqua. Of the three, Plant seems to be the most liquid one of all probably due to the fact that almost every team needs to have one on their ranks given that they act as a defensive wall to protect the other two. Comparing that ad hoc information with the number of Axies per class listed for sale in the marketplace shows a similar trend as shown in the figure below.

Figure 1. Distribution of Axies listed for sale on the Marketplace by class for any level of purity and breeding count

Figure 1 can give you an idea of how much competition there is on each of the top 3 most liquid types of Axies. The higher the competition the lower the potential selling price, at least in theory. Plant is not only the most commonly traded type but also the most readily available in the Marketplace.

There are two main characteristics that influence the selling price of an Axie, their pureness and their breeding count.

Purity

An Axie consists of a body and 6 different body parts: mouth, ears, eyes, tail, back and horns. Every Axie has a base class (Plant, Beast, etc.) and each body part is also associated with a class that can be different from the base class. The level of alignment between the base class and the body part’s classes defines the purity of an Axie.

Figure 2. Example of an impure Axie

For example, the Axie shown above has a base class of “Plant” but it has body parts that belong to Beast, Bird and Bug. This Axie is considered to have a purity of 7% because of the combination of classes. On the other hand we can find an Axie where its base class and all the body parts belong to the same type as shown below.

Figure 3. Example of a pure Axie

This Axie has a base class of Bird and each body part belongs to the same class so it’s purity level is 99%. Just like with dogs or horses, purebreds are more expensive and thus more lucrative to breed. You might be wondering, why is the purity 99% and not a 100% if all the classes are the same? The answer lies in “genetics”.

Genetics

Each Axie has dominant (D), recessive (R1) and minor recessive (R2) genes. Each type of gene has a different probability to be passed down to an offspring:

• Dominant (D): 37.5% chance to pass this gene to offspring
• Recessive (R1): 9.375% chance to pass this gene to offspring.
• Minor Recessive (R2): 3.125% chance to pass this gene to offspring.

The sum of those 3 probabilities is 50% because the other 50% of the genetic material will come from the other parent. We can inspect the genetic composition of an Axie by installing a Chrome extension developed by someone from the community (it’s not an official extension).

Figure 4. Genetic composition of the Axie from figure 3

Here we can see that all the genes are of the class Bird except one minor recessive one that belongs to Bug. In practice this means that although this Axie is a purebred, an offspring has a 3.125% chance of not being a purebred. Because you need two Axies to create a new one, if both Axies are 99% pure, the probability of an offspring also being pure is 93.75%

When it comes to defining the base class of an offspring the math is simpler, there’s a 50% chance that it will inherit the base class from parent 1 and 50% from parent 2. Therefore to guarantee that a breeding farm will only create Axies of the base class you will have to find parents of that same base class to start with.

Breeding Count

An Axie can be bred at most 7 times and on each successive time, the amount of SLP needed increases making breeding more expensive. In a previous article I analyzed this in more detail but suffice to say that a “virgin” Axie (one that has not been bred) can be sold for a higher price than one that has been bred multiple times. To better understand the impact of the pureness and breeding count on the selling price we can go back to the Marketplace and do an analysis of the three most liquid Axie’s classes.

Table 1. Impact of purity and breeding count on price

Update: The average price of some Axies has decreased significantly in the last few days. As an example, the lowest price for a pure and virgin Aquatic Axie now starts at $400 instead of $600. The floor price is still very similar though.

From the table above we can see that on average a high purity and virgin Axie can be sold for double the price of a non pure and non virgin Axie and that the effect is most visible on the Aqua based Axies. The second thing to notice is that Aqua based Axies are the most profitable out of the three most liquid classes if we focus on creating pure and virgin Axies from our breeding farm to sell.

Cards

So far we can conclude that the most profitable type of Axie to breed is a pure and virgin Aqua based Axie. However, there’s a third factor that impacts the price of an Axie and that’s the cards that are associated with it. Those cards provide special bonuses and combos that affect how useful an Axie is in a battle (that’s the whole point of the game after all) and in turn defines how sought after a particular Axie is.

This is where things get more complicated. As I mentioned before an Axie has 6 body parts and each body part can be associated to a particular class that can be different from the base class. On top of that, a body part can be of a different “type”. For example, you can have a purebred Aqua that could have one of four possible types of mouth: Lam, Catfish, Risky Fish or Piranha. On any purebred Axie, there are 4 types of mouth, and 6 types of each other body part.

Figure 5. The 4 different types of mouths and cards of class Aqua (source)

Each Axie gets assigned 4 cards that can be used in battle. Those cards are determined by the combination of the class and type of the back, tail, horn and mouth. The eyes and ears of an Axie have no influence on the cards assigned to it (but they still affect its base stats).

Figure 6. Example of cards assigned to a purebred Aqua Axie

To understand which cards are more valuable without having to learn how to play the game I’m relying on this Youtube video as the person has plenty of experience playing the game. Another option would be to use this website as a reference that ranks every single card by class in different tiers starting with S as the highest and then using a scale of A to F as F as the lowest.

From the Youtube video, two main types of purebred Aqua Axies are proposed for a double Aqua build (2 out of 3 Axies being of class Aqua on a team) which seem to be popular these days.

Option 1: Backliner

Body Part	Main Type	Alternative Type
Back	Goldfish Card Name: Swift Escape Energy: 1 Attack: 110 Shield: 20 Apply Speed+ to this Axie for 2 rounds when attacked.	Blue Moon Card Name: Scale Dart Energy: 1 Attack: 120 Shield: 30 Draw a card if target is in Last Stand.
Mouth	Lam Card Name: Angry Lam Energy: 1 Attack: 110 Shield: 40 Deal 120% damage if this Axie’s HP is below 50%.	Risky Fish Card Name: Fish Hook Energy: 1 Attack: 110 Shield: 30 Apply Attack+ to this Axie when attacking Plant, Reptile, or Dusk targets.
Horns	Shoal Star Card Name: Star Shuriken Energy: 1  Attack: 115 Shield: 10 Target cannot enter Last Stand if this card brings its HP to zero.	Oranda Card Name: Hero’s Bane Energy: 1 Attack: 120 Shield: 30 End target’s Last Stand.
Tail	Koi Card Name: Upstream Swim Energy: 1 Attack: 110 Shield: 30 Apply Speed+ to this Axie for 2 rounds when comboed with another Aquatic class card.	Nimo Card Name: Tail Slap Energy: 0 Attack: 30 Shield: 0 Gain 1 energy when comboed with another card.

Table 2. Recommended body parts for an Aqua backliner

On the marketplace there are right now 222 Axies of high purity for sale with the “main type” body parts. The starting price for such Axie is $487.

 Option 2: Midliner

Body Part	Main Type	Alternative Type
Back	Sponge Card Name: Shipwreck Energy: 1 Attack: 60 Shield: 90 Apply Attack+ to this Axie if its shield breaks.	Goldfish Card Name: Swift Escape Energy: 1 Attack: 110 Shield: 20 Apply Speed+ to this Axie for 2 rounds when attacked.
Mouth	Risky Fish Card Name: Fish Hook Energy: 1 Attack: 110 Shield: 30 Apply Attack+ to this Axie when attacking Plant, Reptile, or Dusk targets.	Lam Card Name: Angry Lam Energy: 1 Attack: 110 Shield: 40 Deal 120% damage if this Axie’s HP is below 50%.
Horns	Shoal Star Card Name: Star Shuriken Energy: 1  Attack: 115 Shield: 10 Target cannot enter Last Stand if this card brings its HP to zero.	Babylonia Card Name: Shell Jab Energy: 1 Attack: 100 Shield: 50 Deal 130% damage when attacking an idle target.
Tail	Nimo Card Name: Tail Slap Energy: 0 Attack: 30 Shield: 0 Gain 1 energy when comboed with another card.	Koi Card Name: Upstream Swim Energy: 1 Attack: 110 Shield: 30 Apply Speed+ to this Axie for 2 rounds when comboed with another Aquatic class card.

Table 3. Recommended body parts for an Aqua midliner

With only 98 Axies for sale the competition is lower for an Aqua Axie with the main type body parts and with also a higher starting price of $673.89.

Conclusion

After this extensive analysis it has become clear that the best type of Axie to use on a breeding farm is an Aqua Axie with the body parts Sponge, Risky Fish, Shoal Star and Nimo. Ideally both parents should have the same body parts and their purity should be above 90% to guarantee that their offspring are also purebred and can be sold at a premium.

If a compromise needs to be made in terms of purity it should come at the expense of the eyes and ears as they don’t affect the cards of an Axie. Although there’s a premium for selling virgin Axies, the parents needed to get the breeding farm started don’t need to be virgins as well.

Time to reach out for the credit card and put the theory into practice. I’ll keep you all posted on the results.