The Ultimate Guide To Making Money With ICE Poker Wearable NFTs

An analysis of Ice Poker Wearables as an investment (Just my opinion — not financial advice — DYOR)

As a Crypto Degen, I’m always on the lookout for good NFT projects to invest in, and — as a Degen in general — gambling plays have a special place in my heart. Ice Poker is a project that caught my attention about a month ago. At first, I was outraged at the price of the Decentral Games NFTs but I soon learned that they were well worth the price. Here’s my analysis of Ice Poker NFTs from Decentral Games.

What is Ice Poker?

Ice Poker was developed by Decentral Games to be a Metaverse poker game in Decentraland. Each table has a maximum of 6 players and the stakes are 10/20. Ice Poker is free to play once you own the NFT and the total amount of chips you have available depends on the number of wearables you’re using (a minimum of 3000 chips with one wearable and a maximum of 5000 chips with 5 wearables).

I don’t see a benefit to using multiple wearables for one player, though. You’re giving up potential earnings just to have more chips and that doesn’t give you any benefit (more on that later). Ice Poker doesn’t reward you for the number of chips you have. It rewards you for completing challenges and for the number of chips you win. Let’s look at each separately.

How Do You Earn Money in ICE Poker?

Completing challenges is the primary way to earn money in ICE Poker. Every day you get three challenges to complete. Completing these challenges provides you with your ‘base pay’ for the day. Here’s what the challenge looks like and all are paid using the in-game currency: Decentral Games ICE.

First — you get 3 ICE for winning your first hand. That’s not one of the challenges, but I still wanted to call it out since it gives your daily take a little bump.

Challenge One (14 ICE Reward) — This one is easy. It’s usually something like ‘See the Turn 15 Times’ or ‘See the River 10 Times.’

Challenge Two (57 ICE Reward) — The second challenge is a little harder. Examples of this challenge include ‘Win 10 Hands’ or ‘Get Two Pair 7 Times.’

Challenge Three (114 ICE Reward) — Challenge three can keep you playing for a while. Examples of this challenge are ‘Get three-of-a-kind 3 Times’ or ‘Get One Full House.’

As I said, the ICE you receive from completing challenges is your base pay for the day. If you complete all challenges, your base pay is 188 ICE. (Click Here To Check The Current Price Of ICE)

Your actual payout can be more or less than 188 depending on your Leaderboard ranking and your wearable multiplier. Let’s go over each of these starting with your wearables.

How Do You Earn With ICE Poker NFTs

ICE Poker is free to play once you own one of their wearable NFTs. These NFTs give you two ways to earn more ICE than the 188 base pay. The first way is to wear more than one NFT. Here are the multipliers if you’re fortunate enough to have several ICE Poker NFTs:

That means wearing 5 NFTs brings your base pay up to 263. ICE Poker also allows you to delegate NFTs to other players for a share of their winnings. Later I’ll show you why you’re better off delegating your wearable NFTs rather than stacking them on one player. For now, let’s talk about the other way your NFT earns you more — the NFT multiplier.

Each NFT has its own multiplier that earns you more ICE. The multiplier is chosen randomly within a range depending on the NFT’s level. Here’s the chart:

Now that you have an understanding of how the base play and NFT multipliers work, let me show you why you’re better off delegating a second wearable rather than stacking them on one player. For this example, we’ll pretend that we have two Level 1 wearables each with a 4% bonus and we’ll ignore the leaderboard multiplier (more on the leaderboard in the next section).

Scenario 1 — Stacking Wearables to a Delegate

Base Pay 188 * Two Wearable Multiplier 1.1 * Wearable Bonuses ( 1 + 0.04 + 0.04) = 223.344 * Owner’s Share 0.40 = 89 (rounded)

Total Earnings: 89

Scenario 2 — Delegate Each Wearable to a Different Player

Wearable 1: Base Pay 188 * Wearable Multiplier 1.0 * Wearable Bonus ( 1 + 0.04) = 195.52 * Owner’s Share 0.40 = 78 (rounded)

Wearable 2: Base Pay 188 * Wearable Multiplier 1.0 * Wearable Bonus ( 1 + 0.04) = 195.52 * Owner’s Share 0.40 = 78 (rounded)

Total Earnings: 156

That’s a big difference!

By now you’re probably wondering if you need to know how to play poker to earn money on ICE Poker. Not only do you need to be a good player (or delegate to one), but the ICE Poker system has a great way to reward people who play well while punishing wild players. It’s time to talk about the leaderboard.

How Good Poker Players Crush It In ICE Poker — Understanding the Leaderboard

ICE Poker is free to play, but has an interesting mechanic to make sure that your chips matter. Earning chips will give you a higher multiplier and losing them will give you a lower multiplier. Your place on the leaderboard will change depending on how well other players are performing. Here’s what the leaderboard looks like:

If you find yourself in the top 5%, you get a 2x multiplier. Drop to the bottom 4%, however, and you get a 0.05x multiplier. Let’s see how this concept works in practice. We’ll continue to use the same Level 1 wearable with a 4% bonus as an example to see the effect the leaderboard has on earnings.

Scenario 1 — Delegate Makes Top 5%

Base Pay 188 * Wearable Multiplier 1.0 * Wearable Bonus ( 1 + 0.04) = 195.52 * Leaderboard Multiplier 2.0 = 391 (rounded) * Owner’s Share 0.40 = 156 (rounded)

Scenario 2 — Delegate Makes Bottom 4%

Base Pay 188 * Wearable Multiplier 1.0 * Wearable Bonus ( 1 + 0.04) = 195.52 * Leaderboard Multiplier 0.04 = 8 (rounded) * Owner’s Share 0.40 = 3 (rounded)

Skill in poker makes a big difference. Scenario 1 nets you around $18 a day while scenario 2 give you about $0.36

How Do You Buy ICE Poker Wearables?

After you do your research (I am, after all, a Crypto Degen and not a financial advisor) and decide to ape into ICE Poker, you have two options to buy: Minting and buying off the secondary market.

Minting

Like any NFT project, minting is preferable to buying off the secondary market. ICE Poker’s last two mints were roughly 1.50 ETH and 1.05 ETH while the floor for an after-market wearable on Opensea was about 2 ETH. Minting these NFTs will take some work. Here’s how you do it:

Step 1: Join the Discord

Mints are regularly announced in the Announcements section of the Decentral Games Discord which you can join by clicking here. You can also watch the Decentral Games Blog for news on mints.

Step 2: Get Some wETH

ICE Poker mints are usually paid in wETH on the Polygon network or ICE — also on Polygon. You’ll need to bridge your ETH over to Polygon before you can use it for the mint. You can bridge it using the Polygon Bridge.

Make sure you bridge over more than you need — especially if the mint is using ICE. You’ll need to have 1000 xDG to be eligible for the mint either way, so let’s talk about that first.

Step 3: Get Some xDG (and maybe ICE)

xDG is the staked form of the Decentral Games token (DG). You must have at least 1000 xDG to be eligible to mint wearables. You keep your xDG even after the mint and it’s a good idea to keep it around if you plan on minting again in the future. Decentral Games will occasionally take a snapshot of accounts with at least 1000 xDG and whitelist them before announcing a mint. There’s zero chance of you getting a mint if you’re not whitelisted when they do that.

Once you have your wETH on Polygon, go to Quickswap.exchange.

First — Swap some wETH for DG. NOT xDG! This step is very important. You will lose a MASSIVE amount of value if you try to swap wETH for xDG. The liquidity isn’t there. Again — Make sure you swap some wETH for DG.

Next — Swap your DG for xDG. Make sure you get at least 1000 after fees. It’ll take a little more than 1:1 once fees and slippage are considered.

ICE Mints Only — If the mint is in ICE and not wETH, you’ll need to swap your wETH for ICE. Make sure it’s Decentral Games ICE.

Now go to the Decentral Games Marketplace you’ll see a link by the upcoming mint that will allow you to check to make sure you’re ready for the mint. Click the link. If it says you’re ready, then you just need to wait for the minting.

Step 4: Mint!

Make sure you’re at your computer and logged in with your wallet connected on minting day. The site auto-refreshes but you’ll have to click the mint button FAST when it shows up. I haven’t seen a mint last longer than 5 minutes and most are sold out in less than 2.

After Market

You can always buy on OpenSea if you don’t mind paying a premium to get your wearable. The floor as of this writing is around 2 ETH. Here are the pros and cons of buying off secondary marketplaces:

Pros:

• No waiting for a mint. You can get your wearable and start playing right away
• You can use regular ETH to buy (though you’ll still need DG to activate your wearable)
• You know the multiplier you’re going to get — A Level 1 Wearable will have a random multiplier between 1% and 7% when you mint but you can see the multiplier before you buy on the secondary market
• You can buy a higher level wearable — Everything is Level 1 when you mint, but you can buy any level on the secondary market. Just be prepared to pay. The floor for a Level 5 is 4.19 ETH as of this writing.

Cons:

• It’s more expensive to buy on the secondary market. Mints have always been significantly below the price on the secondary market.
• You have to pay to activate the wearable. Activating a wearable off the secondary market costs 500 DG as of this writing. That means you’ll still need to get DG off Uniswap.

Once you have your wearable and are earning some ICE, you’ll be faced with a decision — Should you upgrade your wearable or save your ICE for the next mint. Let’s take a look at your options.

Upgrading Wearables

Wearables are minted at Level 1, but can be upgraded to Level 5. Each upgrade costs you ICE, XP, and DG. Here’s the chart again to show you what each level costs:

We’ve already talked about how to get ICE and DG, but what about XP?

XP are experience points and they always go to the owner of the wearable — even if it’s delegated to another player. You get XP for every challenge you or your delegate complete. It’s a smart mechanic that prevents people from minting an NFT, instantly maxing out the upgrade, and then selling it.

Now that you know how to upgrade, let’s talk about whether or not you SHOULD upgrade.

Should You Upgrade or Mint?

If you have enough funds to mint two wearables, do it. It will make you more money than upgrading as we showed when we talked about whether to stack wearables or delegate them to different people.

In my opinion, you should only upgrade under two circumstances:

You No Longer Want to Mint

At some point, you’ll have so many delegates that it’ll be a full-time job vetting new ones to replace people who have become owners and started playing for themselves. Once you hit the maximum amount of time you want to spend running your guild, it’s time to stop minting and start upgrading. That way you can earn more with the wearables you have.

The real pro move is to mint, flip for 1.5–2x, then use the profits to mint more until you’re ready to upgrade.

You’re Making ICE Faster Than You Can Mint

Let’s file this one under ‘possible but very unlikely.’ Past mints were around 0.5 ETH, but recent mints have been in the 0.5–1.5 ETH range. It takes a lot of ICE to be ready to mint at those prices. You’ll have to make between 25,000 and 75,000 depending on the mint price. If there was only one mint a month, you would need to make between 850 and 2500 ICE a day to make that work. No problem if you run a guild with 8–25 wearables. Any ICE over mint price can be used to upgrade your wearables.

Should You Upgrade If You Want To Sell Your Wearable?

Is it worth it to upgrade your ICE Poker wearable before you sell it? Maybe. You’ll need to research the prices on OpenSea and the current price of ICE to determine if it’s worth it. As of this writing, You can make a little more by upgrading your wearable up to Level 3. After that Level, you would make more money if you sold your wearable at Level 3 and liquidated the rest of your ICE. The takeaway here is to do your research. Don’t blindly list your wearable or sell your ICE.

Should You Delegate Your ICE Poker Wearable Or Play Yourself?

Most people buying ICE Wearables for an investment will delegate them out. It’s a passive and scalable way to make money. But a few hardcore degens, myself included, feel like they have to play. And why not? You get to keep all that sweet ICE to yourself.

Let’s revisit a previous example to see how much more you can make by playing yourself. We’ll continue to assume we have a Level 1 wearable with a 4% bonus.

Scenario 1 — Delegate Your Wearable

Base Pay 188 * Wearable Multiplier 1.0 * Wearable Bonus ( 1 + 0.04) = 195.52 * Owner’s Share 0.40 = 78 (rounded)

Scenario 2 — You Play

Base Pay 188 * Wearable Multiplier 1.0 * Wearable Bonus ( 1 + 0.04) = 195 (rounded)

That extra 117 ICE every day. At current prices, that’s about $14. The problem is the amount of time it takes to play. It will take an average of 4.5 hours for you to complete your daily challenges which makes that $14 worth around $3.11 an hour. The money alone isn’t worth it.

Use your wearable if, like me, you like to play poker. Don’t do it for the money. It’s much better to delegate your wearable to someone who loves poker and collect your passive ICE from their play.

Summary

ICE Poker wearables are one of the best NFTs you can buy. They’re instantly worth significantly more than mint price and they earn you passive income daily. You can take your earnings and roll them into another wearable, upgrade your current wearable, or use the funds to ape into another project. I make sure I’m ready for every mint to add to my portfolio. Part of me didn’t want to share this gem to keep the competition down, but the Crypto Degen in me can’t help but share. After all, WAGMI.