Axie Infinity, the Crypto Game That’s Grown Over 200x This Year Alone

Tracy Alloway (0:10)

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (0:15)

And I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway (0:17)

Joe, I feel like we may have had this conversation before, but did you ever play Magic the Gathering growing up?

Joe Weisenthal (0:25)

No, I never did, and I kind of think it's weird because maybe I'm like the type of person who would have. You were right, you did, right?

Tracy Alloway (0:33)

Yeah, I did, but so I can see you sort of being interested in it from a poker slash maths perspective.

Joe Weisenthal (0:40)

Yeah, yeah, no, it should have been, it should have been.

Tracy Alloway (0:42)

Yeah, I was more into it from a collecting perspective. I mean, I did play, but for me, I just liked collecting all the cards. But the reason I bring it up is because one of the interesting things about Magic the Gathering was there was this whole ecosystem built around this card collecting, card playing game. And the company that ran it was called Wizards of the Coast.

And every once in a while, they would encounter major problems where the price of cards would suddenly get out of whack, or the game wasn't as much fun to play because they'd released a bunch of cards that had like special powers and things like that. And then they had to figure out ways to fix the entire system.

And it was really interesting to sort of see them do it and manage to, I guess they sort of managed to avoid the fate that has overtaken so many fads over the years. Like think about Beanie Babies, right? Those are the classic example. But like, imagine if the gathering has been going for years and they managed to like keep the system going.

Joe Weisenthal (1:45)

Totally, and people are still really into it. And somehow, even in the year 2021, people are still playing it. And I think you make a really good point, which is that they've kept it successful, despite the fact that there is clearly a lot of speculation in cards. Like one could imagine a scenario in which people are just in the cards for like the monetary aspect and then the gameplay sort of falls off because maybe they get too expensive or whatever.

But somehow they seem to have struck a fine balance where yes, people pay a lot for cards. And in fact, I think like recently there are like some record card sales, even like just in the last like several weeks or months, but the game itself is still played enthusiastically by a lot of people.

Tracy Alloway (2:27)

Yeah, exactly. That's a really good way of putting it. So the reason I bring it up is not because we were going to be talking about Magic the Gathering specifically.

Joe Weisenthal (2:35)

Though we should at some point.

Tracy Alloway (2:36)

Yeah, I was going to say, I would love to do that episode. But because we're going to talk about a sort of brand new game that gives me a lot of flashbacks to Magic, but it's very much a new game in the sense that it is, it sort of brings together everything in the world of crypto, like cryptocurrencies, NFTs, non-fungible tokens, blockchain, it brings them all together into-

Joe Weisenthal (3:01)

Metaverse.

Tracy Alloway (3:02)

Yeah, exactly. Into one ecosystem, and it's just exploded in popularity in recent years.

Joe Weisenthal (3:11)

Right, and I'll let you do the proper intro, but one thing, just going back to Magic real quickly before we move on, is like, one of the things with Magic is like, you own your cards, right? You own your deck.

And with typical games online, you don't, you think about some, I don't know, a game that people play. Yeah, I don't want to sound boomer, so I like, it's like World of Warcraft. I don't know if anyone still plays it, whatever. It's like, you don't really own your character in the traditional sense. Like you log into your character, but it's not yours.

And so with this idea of like crypto gaming, and really it's crypto in general, and NFTs in general, et cetera, is this bridging of the notion of ownership, that this is a thing, whether it's a character, whether it's a token or whatever, it's yours, and you can move it from one environment to the next. And so kind of like magic, you own your card. In this world of crypto gaming, there is this sense of ownership that hasn't existed in online or video gaming previously.

Tracy Alloway (4:12)

Right, and of course you can make money from that ownership as well. So if you earn cryptocurrency in this gaming system, you can take it to a crypto exchange and convert it into something else. So maybe we should just get on with it, because we do have tons to talk about. We're going to be talking about Axie Infinity.