Axie Infinity is a NFT game with play-to-earn elements that combines components of a competitive card game and cute monsters called Axies. Axie Infinity distributes Smooth Love Potion (also known as SLP) cryptocurrency tokens to players when they win a game, either against other players in Arena Mode or against computer-controlled opponents in Adventure Mode.

In order to maximize your profits in Axie Infinity, you’ll need to win a lot of games against players in Arena mode. Every time you win, you get some SLP and Match Making Ranking(MMR) points, while you lose MMR every time you lose. The higher your MMR, the more SLP you get.

Here are some tips and tricks to improve your win rate and climb the ladderboard of Axie Infinity efficiently.

Count Energy

Keeping track of your opponent’s energy per turn is one of the most basic ways to improve your win rate. If you’re able to discern how much energy your enemy has every turn, you can make decisions based on whether you think they’re going to attack into you or pass their turn.

Each player starts an Arena match with 3 energy. Every player gains two energy every turn, and most cards cost 1 energy to play. However, there are a lot of cards that manipulate energy, and those cards are fairly common, so it can be a headache to track.

It can be a little hard to track energy just using your memory, so if you’re having trouble, try using something to track the enemy’s energy. There are a lot of apps available that can track how much your opponent’s energy is, and you can also opt to use a physical object like an abacus to see how much energy your enemy has at any given point of time.

Keep Track Of Your Opponent’s Cards

The way that Axie Infinity cards work is that your deck consists of two of each of your axies’ cards. You can only draw two of each card per axie until you run out of cards in your deck, and it gets reshuffled. With this information, you can track which cards your opponent has used and know which ones they can still potentially play.

For example, if your opponent uses two Vegetal Bite cards on the first round, they won’t have another Vegetal Bite card until the deck reshuffles, which is usually around round 4 or 5. If you’re able to track your enemy’s cards successfully, you’ll have an easier time knowing what they’re going to do next and react accordingly.

Predict Your Opponent’s Moves

Predicting what your opponent is going to do next is one of the best ways to win games, but is also the hardest to implement. This requires you to have an in-depth understanding of both your team of axies as well as your opponent’s. All of this comes with practice and time. The more you play, the more sense you’ll get of how your opponent will play as well.

This goes hand in hand with card and energy counting, and can be the difference between winning and losing. It’s the hardest to implement because you don’t know exactly what cards your opponent might have drawn from the last turn to the next, but with some deduction and practice, you can correctly predict the next move your opponent is going to take.

Manipulate Your Opponent’s Resources

In an Arena game, you and your opponent start with the same resources; 3 energy and 6 random cards drawn from your deck. Every turn, you both gain 2 energy and draw 3 cards. With this information, you can make it a little bit harder for your opponent to play the game optimally by stealing and destroying energy, or discarding their cards.

There are a lot of cards out there that steal or destroy energy, such as the Plant card Vegetal Bite, and the Beast card Piercing Sound. You can also discard their cards with Bug cards like Sunder Claw and Third Glance. This kind of tactic will prevent your enemy from using their optimal combo against your axies.

You can also use various debuffs like the stun from the Reptile card Chomp, or the fear debuff from the Bug card Terror Chomp to keep your opponent from getting full value from their own cards. This does mean that your playstyle will be slightly altered, but it’s very worth it if you can get some easy wins under your belt.

Play Arena When Players Aren’t Playing Their Best

This last tip is a little bit unorthodox, but can give you a couple of easy wins here and there. When you play an Arena game, Axie Infinity will try to match you with players close to your geographic location, which is done to prevent lag during your match.

You can use this fact to get some easy wins by playing very late at night or very early in the morning, when your potential opponents aren’t paying as much attention and focus as they would be in the daytime. There might even be a couple who fall asleep during the match, or forget that they’re playing, leading to easy wins for you.

Just remember not to fall into the same trap, and play your best when you’re trying to improve your win rate. It might take some adjustment of your body clock, but if it leads to easy wins, then it could be worth the sleepless nights in the long run.