PFL Buying Guide

11 min readJun 7, 2022

Last Updated April 2023 to fix broken links

TLDR

Buy a Gen 0 ticket to race and breed in the game (inc. the beta). Search on the platform for the best ticket(s) for your budget based on grades, boosts and preferences, then follow the link to buy them on Magic Eden (UPDATE: Now that the game is launched you can ALSO buy horses directly from the marketplace)
Buy PFPs for the in-game perks and for airdrops of the $CROWN governance token

Introduction

Photo Finish Live (PFL) is a highly anticipated P2E NFT horse racing game on Solana built by Third Time Inc, a game studio led by gaming veterans from EA Sports, FanDuel and Zynga. Players can earn via racing, breeding, and in the future, track ownership and wagering.

The Photo Finish beta is now live (https://beta.photofinish.live/races) and so far it’s been incredible to watch and play. (Update: The game is now live! Visit https://photofinish.live) The AAA team has been executing since October 2021 and seeing them reach this milestone has led to an influx of new players and investors looking to buy in.

This post aims to be a guide for how best to buy into the game via the two main ways, (1) the Gen 0 tickets for racing and breeding and (2) the Profile Picture (PFP) NFT collection of Stylish Studs and Marvelous Mares for $CROWN token airdrops and other in-game perks.

PFL Recap

We won’t cover the basic mechanics of the game in this post, so if you’re gonna read/watch anything I highly recommend that you watch the roadmap video (at 1.5x speed) and check out the Getting Started articles.

Let’s recap some basics:

Horses have overall grades made from the average of grades for each of their 6 stats, (start, speed, stamina, finish, heart, temper). See this link for an explanation of each stat. Grades range from D- to SSS+ but the Gen 0 tickets’ grades range from from B- to S+ meaning that the very best horses in the game are yet to exist!
Horses have 3 preferences with a score ranging from 0 to 3. Direction (right/left), Surface type (dirt/turf), Condition (firm/soft)
A horse’s stats determines how it races at various distances. The horse will perform best when it is placed in races that match its preferred distance and track preference. Horses in races that don’t match their preference can easily be beaten by lower grade horses that do. Direction and Surface are determined upfront but Condition is determined by the weather which can vary from the forecast.
Tickets have “boosts” that are used as inputs to determine the actual grades of the horse’s stats when the ticket is converted into a horse. This process has some variability (nicknamed the “roll”, for dice roll) and so the distribution of the ticket’s boosts may not be reflected in the actual horse’s stats in the game. However, the preference score (0–3) will be exactly how it is on the ticket. (See examples below)
Tickets were produced from breeding the Stylish Stud and Fine Filly profile picture (PFP) NFTS. The grade and boosts of the ticket were determined by the rank and number of “attribute matches” the PFPs had. Higher match count is better for breeding. After breeding, Fine Fillies became Marvelous Mares. The PFPs will not be used for breeding again.

Example 1: A (strong) gen 0 ticket represented on Racer’s Edge

Example 1: The horse in the beta that was produced from the ticket, note how the distribution of stats doesn’t quite match up with the distribution of boosts due to the “roll” but it’s pretty close

Example 2: A solid A+ Gen 0 ticket with 3 boosts for Stamina, Finish and Heart

Example 2: Woah, what a roll! Start rolled way higher than expected. Finish way lower. Overall it’s still an A+. The preferences are exactly as they are on the ticket

Buying a Gen 0 Ticket

Gen 0 tickets are needed to join the beta and eventually to race. They can be purchased on Magic Eden here or in private deals with members of the discord but the easiest way to shop for tickets is to use the ticket page. You can sort and filter by for sale status, grade, gender, stats and preference and it shows the number of matches too.

Once you have a ticket you can go to the website and redeem it for a horse in the game.

Which tickets and how many you should buy depends on your strategy (racing, breeding, both) and budget. Different folks have different strategies and you’ll always find the community members in the discord who are happy to help with buying decisions.

If it’s your first time using Solana check out this guide for using the Phantom wallet and transferring SOL.

Some of the strongest horses in the game have lots of siblings and zero matches, what does that all mean? Read on! Here are some aspects to consider when buying.

Grade + Boosts/Preference points

Higher quality horses (based on grade and boosts) have more earning potential and obviously are worth more. You’ll want the highest grade/boosts as you can get for your budget. The boosts for the 6 stats go up to 3 and the points for the 3 preferences goes up to 3, so the maximum number boosts/points is 26. Anything above 14 is considered a solid number, 20+ is very strong.

Ideally you’d end up with a horse that has good stats in combinations that are suited for certain distances e.g. Start/Speed for short distances, or Stamina/Finish for long ones. However, since the distribution of the horses stats may be different to what appears on the ticket, maximizing the boosts will help ensure you’ll increase your chances of an outcome at the top of the range for that stat.

Preference points are very important in racing in the beta and they are correlated with number of boosts. Tickets with high boosts (and preference points) definitely trade at a premium, but there are still good deals to be found.

When shopping based on Grade, don’t forget to take into account race entry fees. The best horses will have compete for the highest stakes. We don’t know what the fees in the live game will be but if they are anything close to the beta (top graded races have entry fees of $5,000 to $10,000) then you may want to buy a lower grade horses and compete for lower stakes, especially as you’ll need to spend money on race entry fees to figure out what distance your horse prefers.

Preferences

Racing in Photo Finish Live is all about choosing the right race for your horse. You only have to beat the other horses in that particular race. This means it’s likely to be much better to specialize and be exceptional in a particular area than try to be good across many areas.

If you take the 3 preferences (direction, track and condition) you get 8 combinations (Right/Left x Grass/Dirt x Soft/Firm). Race distances range from 4 to 12 furlongs. To keep things simple let’s say there are 3 ranges, short, mid and long.

So now you have at least 24 niches (8 preferences x 3 ranges) in which to target for specialization. Some are going to be more competitive than others and you can see that using the Horse Metrics page on Racer’s Edge.

The Horse Metrics page on Racer’s Edge showing the distribution of horses across the 8 preferences.

Some observations:

Right Dirt Firm (RDF) is the most populated preference and has the most S and S- horses.
Right Dirt Soft (RDS) is very rare
Left Grass Firm (LGF) couldn’t be bred! This was unintended but if you breed an LGF horse in the subsequent generations (Gen 1, Gen 2 etc) you’ll have an advantage
5 preferences don’t have S+ horses

How competitive a niche is also depends on how many races there are for that type and distance. The distribution of races is expected to be fairly even so these percentages matter a lot. Competing in RDS races could be less difficult and so currently, RDS tickets trade at a premium.

Preference distribution is also important for breeding too as demand/supply for a certain preference/niche will drive the stud fees and filly prices in that niche. The distribution of horses across niches will impact foal prices and this distribution will naturally change over time, so you must anticipate the breeding needs of the current and future horse population. For example, breeding strong LGF horses could be VERY lucrative at the start, until the market balances itself a few seasons in.

Attribute Matches

As discussed, high numbers of attribute matches between the parent Stud and Filly will confer a higher likelihood of strong genes. This means that for the best breeding you’ll want to have Gen 0 tickets with as high a match count as possible in addition to having high boosts on your stats. 3 of 5 is good, 4 of 5 is great, 5 of 5 is exceptional, but rare (only 40 potential matches exist).

You can see the number of attribute matches on Racer’s Edge if you scroll to the right. In addition, the Temper stat is directly linked to number of attribute matches. 0, 1, 2 and 3 attribute matches result in 0, 1, 2 and 3 temper (4 and 5 matches still get 3 temper), so you can use temper to gauge number of matches below 3.

High match tickets are certainly trading at a premium though and it’s not clear whether this premium is too high and you’d actually be better off buying a ticket with one or two matches for a much reduced price

Gender

The average filly is worth more than the average colt, but top colts appear to be worth more than top fillies. This is due to the expected breeding dynamics: most of the breeding action goes to a few of the top colts, whereas every filly can produce foals and these foals will be needed by new players as the game expands.

Right now there is no difference between genders in terms of racing in the beta but it’s expected that eventually colts may have a higher max potential than fillies.

There is typically a power law distribution for males (i.e. most foals are bred from the top males) and we saw this already with the Stylish Studs PFPs. Most mid-rank to low-rank studs weren’t chosen for breeding and this will likely happen with the in-game horses too. This means that it can be lucrative to have a very strong male in your particular niche.

However, if PFL is similar to HRM (their prior game that PFL is the sequel to), then breeding will produce better results if the horses aren’t too far apart in Grade. The way that Temper works in the game may be similar to how it works for breeding the PFPs (i.e. more alignment, higher temper). So there’s possibly room to have many top breeding males at every grade level. The team has also said that it’s important to have matching genetics, but it’s not clear how much.

For females it’s less important to have the best one in the grade since you’re the one making the choice of who to breed with, however you’ll want to have a good idea of incoming and existing players and the types of horses they’ll want.

Number of siblings

Inbreeding is bad and there are penalties in the game for doing so. Per the breeding blog post, if two horses share even 1 great grandparent it’s likely that some genes will get demoted by one Grade so you’ll want to avoid this. This means that when you’re choosing a horse you’ll want to pay attention to the number of siblings (you can see this on Racer’s Edge) and avoid those that have too many. What’s too many? We don’t know yet, but with every purchase you must factor in having a reduced pool of horses to breed with in the future (if you want to avoid inbreeding penalties!).

Stable Size

How many horses you can manage will depends on how much time you want to spend on the game. If a horse is running once every 2 days and you can put them in races ahead of time then it’s not that time consuming but it could be if you have 30. The average stable has 4 horses, the largest (BigBrainStables) has over 100 but they also have dedicated full time staff!

Internal vs External Breeding

Since it’s cheaper to breed within your own stable, you may want to buy multiple Gen 0 tickets within a particular niche so you can produce high quality foals more cheaply, however there’s no guarantee that the horses you buy will actually be a good match so this could be a risky strategy.

Live Beta Ticket Redemption (Update: Not applicable for live game)

Remember, once a ticket is redeemed in the beta it can’t be redeemed again so if you want to play the beta you’ll need to either find a ticket that hasn’t been redeemed or use the fake $DERBY you get given in the beta to buy a horse from the beta marketplace.

You can check whether a ticket has been redeemed by navigating to https://beta.photofinish.live/horses/[ADD_TICKET_TOKEN_ADDRESS]

Buying PFPs

Buying PFPs is much simpler and is also done on Magic Eden (here). You need 5 to get racing reports and 20 to get free breeding reports. Holders also receive airdrops of the $CROWN governance token. PFPs are in high demand (for the perks and of the 15,008 in the collection less than 300 are listed (2%).

Each NFT in the collection gets a different amount of $CROWN airdropped based on its rank but at the end of the day if you’re buying for $CROWN then you’re just looking for the one with the most $CROWN per SOL spent (Crown per SOL, CPS). The PFP page on PhotoFinish Live conveniently shows you the best one.

The $CROWN token hasn’t launched yet and so isn’t available to buy on an exchange but the Fully Diluted Value implied by the current CPS is about $12M which certainly seems small relative to other crypto tokens and if the game does well there’s a lot of potential $DERBY earnings to be made by $CROWN holders and commensurate effects on $CROWN price. For more on $CROWN tokenomics and speculation, check out this blog post.

(Update: The $CROWN token has launched! You can buy it via the Jupiter aggregator)

Get buying and join the game!

Thanks for reading this far. This post hopefully has covered all of the basics of the buying decision and has delved into some strategy. For more details or more advanced questions check out the links below and hop into the discord.

Once you have your ticket go redeem it and start to get a feel for the game:

Go to https://photofinish.live/tickets
Connect your wallet
Choose your new Gen 0 ticket, and click redeem!