Cyball First Impressions
I’ve spent over $4,000 learning Cyball this past week, as YGG pilots its first batch of scholarships in this fledgling P2E game. Disclaimer: I used all my own personal funds to buy the NFTs necessary to play this game. I did not receive or borrow any assets from YGG. I have no direct relationship with the Cyball team other than a Telegram group where I’ve been reading development updates throughout February. This is not a full review, but simply a list of first impressions after my first week playing the game.
In case you’ve missed Cyball in the flurry of all these new P2E projects, it’s a turn-based strategy game with a cyborg soccer theme and it’s available on the BNB Chain. It borrows more than a few ideas from Axie Infinity, so veteran players will basically spend no time at all getting into this. My general impression of the game is that it’s still a bit rough around the edges and not so deep strategically, and indeed, a new updated version called Cyball Reborn is scheduled to be released later this month that will probably address at least some of my concerns. That being said, the game benefits from 3 years worth of learnings from Axie Infinity, and is already much more refined in its initial version as a result.
To get started with Cyball, you need at least 3 Cybloc NFTs, which represent the soccer players on your team. Each Cybloc character has six traits, like Tackling, Passing, Shooting, etc., and each of these traits have a numeric value. You score a point by comparing the trait value on your chosen Cybloc against the stats of your opponent’s chosen Cybloc. For example: if the active trait for the current round is “Tackling,” and your Cybloc has a Tackling value of 50, and your opponent’s chosen Cybloc has a value of 40, you win that round. Essentially, this means that a well-rounded Cybloc needs to have high values in all six traits. (These values also increase as your Cybloc’s experience grows.)
The rarer (i.e., more expensive) Cyblocs have high values in more of these traits, and the more common (i.e., cheaper) ones tend to have lower numbers. Like Axie Infinity, you win tokens (CBT is their version of SLP) when you win duels against other players, but the rarity of the Cyblocs you use has an effect here as well. My team is composed of a gold, a silver, and a bronze Cybloc, and the difference between the earnings of a bronze Cybloc vesus a gold one is about 80%. There’s no exchange for CBT yet so at the moment all you would be doing is accumulating tokens.
Like Axie Infinity, a player only has a certain amount of energy per day, which prevents them from grinding games excessively. Disappointingly, once a player has run out of energy for the day, they can’t queue up for any more matches, with or without rewards. (I’m hoping that they’ll have a no-stakes “practice” mode soon, otherwise it’ll be too hard for people to learn the game.) In any case, Cyball allows players to earn from up to 20 games per day, so we can derive how profitable this game could be for the average scholar with an all-bronze team. With a theoretical exchange rate of at least PHP 2.00 (USD $0.04) and a player win rate of 55% or more, the average Pinoy Cyball scholar could gross approximately 7,000 pesos per month. If you were to apply YGG’s standard scholarship ratio of 70%, then the scholar makes 4,850 pesos net. (Note that I’m not speaking for YGG with this calculation, and this is not an official statement from the guild.) The floor price for a team like that is about $1,000 in the Cyball marketplace, so it looks like the ROI timeframe is about 9 months if you wanted to actually buy your own team.
There’s also a breeding component, which is confusingly called “mentoring” in the game. Your Cybloc has to be at least 5 days old in order to be eligible for breeding/mentoring, but the good news is that you can “breed” a new junior Cybloc using just one older Cybloc. Like Axie Infinity, the cost for breeding increases with every new attempt, and a Cybloc can only breed three times. I’ve been told that we’ll see Cyball’s breeding functionality go live sometime in March, which means that their CBT token will go live then as well. Additionally during the initial week of breeding, the cost will be discounted substantially, which will allow early players to breed a whole bunch of Cyblocs fast.
Overall it’s looking like Cyball is heading in the right direction in its early stages. With more game modes like 5v5 coming soon, we can expect the strategy to become more complex. Because I’m personally invested in their NFTs, I’m motivated to keep monitoring the ecosystem and making sure my investment is healthy, so you can look forward to more updates about Cyball over the next few weeks.
PS. We just finished YGG’s first Managers Summit this morning, and we brought together the entire Philippines-based team over 3 days for the first time. We announced some ambitious new projects that I’ll also be writing about in depth soon, but for now, suffice to say that 2022 is gonna be a wild year.
See you all next week, cryptofam!
YGG go go go!!!