~12 hours ago, Wildcard Alliance sold 4,444 Genesis Wildpass NFTs for 44 MATIC each (~$48). The collection proceeded to almost 4x, and the floor price is now ~150 MATIC -> 240% above the mint price.

The collection sold out seconds after going public and hit roughly 80 ETH in volume within the first 5 hours. Not bad for a gaming project launching on Polygon. The mint also netted the project ~$200,000 in revenue, but this pales in comparison to the $46M in private funding they announced last year.

Wildcard is a third-person MOBA being created by Playful Corp, which is led by a team of experienced game developers who have worked on titles such as Age of Empires and Words With Friends. This first collection of NFTs will act as a battlepass or core community access token, with holders provided with the following utility:

• Future allowlist access
• Holder-only airdrops
• Private discord channels and events
• Early access to the game and ownership opportunities within the future Wildcard League ecosystem

There are a couple of things I’d like to unpack here. Firstly, pay to mint an NFT that lets you pay to mint more NFTs should never be considered great “utility,” IMO. However, in this case, future mints refer to in-game character cards, which are essentially pay-to-win items that will provide an in-game advantage in PvP (provided you mint a decent card). This means there is potential for the better character cards to be in high demand once the game is live.

Secondly, “future airdrop opportunities” are great for creating FOMO and fit quite well into the current free-to-own meta. I expect these to be fairly obvious price catalysts when/if the teams lean into using them for marketing purposes. That being said, fellow F2O collection Digidaigaku has demonstrated that the positive effects of continuously watering down supply with supplementary NFTs tend to wear off over time.

Overall, I’d call this mint a success for the team, but they could have potentially achieved better results by minting on Ethereum. I expect prices to drop in the near future and will personally be looking to pick up a third NFT at some point.

There is an early access build of the game available to all holders, so expect a more detailed review, as well as some in-game footage soon.