How to Play the AdaCards Fantasy Staking NFT Game
The AdaCards NFT game, Fantasy Staking, is currently in beta testing. We’d love to have all of our AdaCards collectors try it out and give us your feedback. In this post, we’ll give a quick tutorial on how to play. You can also see a full walkthrough and a brief discussion on strategy in our AdaCards introduction video.
Create an AdaCards Account
The first step is creating an account:
Your account will let you easily track your AdaCards collection and see how you stack up on the leaderboard:
Build Your Deck
Drafting a Fantasy Staking team requires that you own a common or uncommon rarity AdaCard for at least five different stake pools. Don’t have enough cards, or looking to improve your deck? Head over to our card shop, where Series 2 is currently for sale!
You can browse your AdaCards collection by clicking on the link under your account page:
Join a Fantasy Staking Season
Under your account details, you’ll find the currently running Fantasy Staking seasons:
Each season runs for a specified range of Cardano epochs — each epoch is a separate game.
Draft a Team for Each Game
The draft period for each game is open from 5 days before the start of the game up until the game starts (at the beginning of the specified epoch). Under the season’s Game Standings section, you’ll see a link to draft a team if the draft is open for any of the games. You’ll also be able to see a list of the players who have already joined the game.
On the draft page, you’ll see a list of all of the stake pools that are eligible to be drafted to your team (based on your collection). In order to draft a pool, you must own one of that pool’s common-rarity cards.
If you own multiple cards for a pool, a score modifier will be automatically applied to boost your score for that pool. The maximum total modifier is 25% and is calculated according to the following rules:
- Legendary card: 10% (max 1)
- Epic card: 8% (max 1)
- Rare card: 5% (max 1)
- Uncommon card: 2x common modifier (max 15% between U & C)
- Common card: Variable modifier (see below) (max 15% between U & C)
Common & Uncommon cards will have variable modifiers based on the number of cards released for the pool. This is being done to account for the fact that pools at or near the card cap of 400 have a lot of common cards that are relatively easy to trade for, while for smaller pools, even common cards are considered “rare” and are hard to come by (thanks to @Goldboys for suggesting this). So we’re going to give a high modifier to these smaller pools. The following are based on the total number of U & C cards across both series:
- 0–50 cards: 15% modifier (both U & C)
- 51–100 cards: 7.5% C / 15% U
- 101–150: 5% C / 10% U
- 151–200: 3% C / 6% U
- 200+: 2% C / 4% U
Note that you’ll still need to play 1 common or uncommon card to “activate” the pool, which will not count towards the modifier. If this is confusing, don’t worry — the combination of pool cards that give the maximum modifier will be automatically chosen when you select each pool.
Select five pools for your team by clicking on the pools you’d like to draft and then click the Submit button.
View Teams Drafted by Other Players
Under the Game Standings section of a season, you can click on a player’s username to view all of their drafted teams, or click on their score to see their team for that particular game.
Score Points at the End of Each Game
Points are earned by each pool on your team based on the pool’s performance for that game’s Cardano epoch. Performance is calculated as actual blocks minted / expected blocks - this is equivalent to the "luck" percentage displayed by AdaPools.org. This is where the strategy comes into play. Small pools have a higher variance, so they have the potential to earn more points than a large pool, but also the potential to earn 0 points if they don't make any blocks. Large pools will usually give more consistent performance. (This is just like how actual staking works; we hope playing the game will teach people about the staking process and evaluating stake pools).
There are 100 base points for each pool on your team. This is multiplied by the pool performance percentage and your score modifier (based on the card rarities you hold for that pool). For example, if you have a score modifier of 20% and the pool's performance for that epoch is 110% (they made 10% more blocks than expected), your score for that pool would be 100 points + 10% + 20% = 130 points .
At the end of the game, each player will earn Season Points based on their rank in the game leaderboard. The winner will earn points equal to the number of players in the game, 2nd place will earn one less point than the winner, 3rd place will earn one less point than the 2nd place player, and so on. For example, here are the points that would be earned for a game with 4 players, based on their game leaderboard rank:
- 1st place: 4 points
- 2nd place: 3 points
- 3rd place: 2 points
- 4th place: 1 point
View the Season’s Standings
Under the Season Standings section, you can see the Season Points earned by each player thus far in the season. At the end of each season, the player with the most points will win. If multiple players have the same number of points, their Total Score across all games will be used as a tie-breaker.
