If you grew up opening Ultimate Team packs on FIFA and are a crypto degen, this is for you. It’s time to use your pack-opening and trading skills and start spending time on Twitter productively.

There’s a new game in town, Fantasy Top (FT)!

It seamlessly merges Twitter’s social aspect with a card-playing game, where users can buy packages, open them, and buy and sell cards to make their own decks.

FT took the concept pioneered by Friend Tech of linking the incentives of KOLs and crypto personalities with that of retail users and went even further, linking the gaming aspect of the game with the real-life performance of your cards.

How? Let’s go step by step, introducing FT, explaining how it works, and highlighting its elements and exciting mechanisms.

An Intro to Fantasy Top

FT is a card-playing game based on Blast.

It can be conceptualized as a “social trading card game”, combining elements of collection and card trading with strategic thinking:

• Trade/Upgrade Cards
• Strategize on the social activity of your favorite CT influencers

The second point is particularly interesting, as any period will have different waves of influencers performing better. For instance, as we move closer to Blast TGE, Pacman’s card has skyrocketed in value as users expect heightened activity and engagement from him.

Cards are divided into four rarities with different multipliers:

1. Uncommon: Multiplier of x1 for Hero Score
2. Rare: Multiplier of x1.5
3. Epic: Multiplier of x2
4. Legendary: Multiplier of x2.5

FT players can build their own deck with their favorite characters by buying packs or purchasing cards in the marketplace. All marketplace trades are subject to a 3% fee. Then, they can participate and earn rewards during FT tournaments.

Kinda crazy that over 17k people have registered for Main Tournament 1.

How does the Game work?

Users can join the game by signing in to their Twitter account.

Once registered, a new on-chain Blast wallet will be created, which users can always export.

As the FT testnet has been live for a few months, early users got access to free/discounted packages. Travis (FT team) repeatedly mentioned their strategy of providing outsized rewards to their early users.

Testnet participants could play and test the features in advance and receive additional FAN Points and Packs at launch.

Once logged in, users must get some cards if they want to play, either by:

• Buying packages
• Purchase cards in the marketplace.

Once they collect enough cards, users can select their team of 5 heroes, create their own deck, and register to participate in tournaments. The user ranking and positioning in the tournament are determined by the collective score of your team, which is based on their Twitter activity.

In fact, the Main Tournaments are the best way to earn rewards and improve your deck. Rewards are distributed in the forms of ETH, Blast Gold, FAN Points, free packs and more.

Users are divided into 5 different leagues, and advancing to a higher league is possible by being among the top-rated players in the current division (the opposite goes for relegation).

Talking Strategy

If you are familiar with these card games, there are two main strategies:

• Buying Packs
• Trading cards

Buying packs is often inconvenient, as the cards inside rarely cover the cost. The price of packs is determined by an auction mechanism with:

• A price target of 0.1 ETH
• A daily release schedule Target

Therefore, the price of packs is dynamic and based on demand and supply. If the packs sell quickly, the price increases, and vice versa.

You might want to wait for less demand to get a better deal, but since launch, the price of packs has only increased.

If you’ve played Ultimate Team in FIFA, you know that packs are rarely advantageous. This is reflected in the behavior of the top users, who prefer to trade cards and only open packages when they are gifted as tournament rewards.

However, trading card users must be aware that the supply of cards minted every week increases as there are more participants.

Users can get more information on card inflation by clicking on each card. The higher the number, the more cards are minted.

Furthermore, we can observe their stats, earnings, and “inner circle,” the people they interact with most.

Nonetheless, heroes’ price has also been skyrocketing:

How are Heroes scores calculated?

Heroes scores are calculated based on several parameters of their social engagement. As those are easily gameable through engagement farming and botting, FT is implementing several mechanisms to mitigate these:

• Anti-botting system to identify bot-driven interactions better
• Distinguishing replies from main tweets
• Reducing heroes’ variance to make the game more fair for everyone

Heroes participating in FT are given a share of revenue from:

• 1.5% fee from the trading volume of their card
• 10% of pack sales split equally across heroes
• Free edition of their own card

Very interesting visualization of Heroes’ followers vs Rank and fan score:

This week, only FT is projected to share over $1.25m among heroes, 7.5k FAN pts per hero on average, and 2.4k Blast Gold.

The community is already wondering what FAN points will be for - we’ll learn more about them soon.

Referrals introduce an additional layer of gamification: referring a friend earns you 11% of their FAN Points + 3% of anyone they refer.

If you haven’t joined FT, feel free to do so with my code: francescoweb3.

How to level up cards?

Cards can be leveled up, with a consequent increase in their points.

Users must buy and burn 5 of the same hero to level up a card.

Card Level 1:

Card Level 1.5:

And so on…

Leveling cards is fundamental to having a higher score in your team.

To do so, users must purchase and burn 5 cards of the same hero.

Leveled-up cards have a higher score: if we observe the teams with the highest score, they all have a leveled-up team.

Leveling up your hero can also lead to rank changes, which might get your hero 1 or 2 levels higher than you thought was possible.

This opens up new strategies: as each card has its own supply, is it more convenient to purchase and level them up? Or should we just purchase the basic ones in anticipation of a supply shock as more people level their own cards up and will need more basic ones?

Those who purchased cards when FT launched are up considerably, given the increased demand to level up cards during the first few days.

This is the team of the current leader of the Main Tournament are insane, with all heroes leveled up.

Getting on the leaderboard is increasingly competitive…

And Eric has a pretty good deck…

Moving Forward

The FT impact on heroes is already there.

If you see someone writing nonsense well, they’re just pumping their card!

FT is also one of the Blast apps that received the most gold even before the full launch, with over 750k in Gold distributed among its users. This ensures that the tournament rewards will be juicy.

80% of the Fantasy Devs Airdrop will be returned to FAN holders.

What’s interesting about FT is that compared to other SocialFi platforms - Friend Tech in particular - it does not have any friction, as it is directly linked to a Twitter account that people already use, without the need to move over to a new social network.

This provides a perfect alignment of incentives with players and the heroes involved. Imagine being paid to go mental on Twitter.

During the first week, FT has already accumulated:

• Over 7k ETH trading volume
• 33k users
• 3.4k ETH in treasury
• 236 ETH in marketplace fees

It’s also interesting to observe the distribution of users. The majority are traders, with a recent increase of minters (which might be due to the claim deadline) before a sudden drop.

How can we use this information? The card inflation was initially fairly high due to the airdrop: many users got discounted and even free packs and opened them in mass.

This ended yesterday, together with the airdrop claim, and is reflected in the pack purchases, which are down over 90%.

How are you playing the FT game?

More charts: https://flipsidecrypto.xyz/hildobby/fantasy.top-QHNB0u

Last, I’d like to highlight some “issues” with FT.

As with any other crypto SocialFi app, it relies heavily on influencers. However, compared to other platforms, it does so in a way that is perfectly aligned with their incentives, which, IMHO, mitigates this dependency.

Secondly, it relies on having a Twitter account to log in.

A friend of mine just had his account suspended (for no reason), so he could not log in to FT and claim his rewards—RIP.

Nonetheless, FT has demonstrated incredible PMF only in its first week (and already during testnet). Will it be able to sustain the initial hype?

I’m sure the team will slowly roll out increasing features, including but not limited to new heroes and game dynamics.

FT is the most widely used app on Blast, and things might get even more interesting as Blast TGE approaches - expected end of May.

Disclaimer：

1. This article is reprinted from [Francesco’s Joint]. All copyrights belong to the original author [fraxcesco]. If there are objections to this reprint, please contact the Gate Learn team, and they will handle it promptly.

2. Liability Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not constitute any investment advice.

3. Translations of the article into other languages are done by the Gate Learn team. Unless mentioned, copying, distributing, or plagiarizing the translated articles is prohibited.