ONE Shogun Play-to-Earn NFT Card Game Preview
Evolution of Gaming Series — Part 1
This is the first in a series of articles looking at how NFTs are disrupting the gaming industry by examining a variety of different projects in this new and diverse landscape. From Hearthstone style card games such as ONE Shogun, to action-packed arcade adventure games like Sipher, and Star Atlas — a big budget production with team members from the ambitious and always-in-production Star Citizen, NFT games all come in different flavors and promise a wide range of experiences. Thanks to the underlying NFT technology, they offer the players a true decentralized ownership of game elements that not only provide entertainment but also means of generating passive income and game asset appreciation. Enter a new era of gaming.
Brave New World of NFTs
Last year’s NFT boom oscillated mainly around the PFP or “profile-picture” phenomenon with Bored Apes becoming the holy grail reaching highs in the 140 ETH (~half a mil USD) range, sparking the imaginations of many in and outside the scene. Projects like these helped NFTs break out of obscurity by bringing mass media attention and resulted in a proliferation of copycat productions that saturated the market and quickly became redundant. Many of these projects followed the same “pump and dump” pattern exposing an inherent lack of utility behind vast majority of these NFTs.
In the shadows of the generative profile pictures were several NFT gaming projects, most of which lived in relative obscurity, all-the-while building sometimes simple and sometimes very elaborate ecosystems with one thing in-common — significant future utility. At first glance, it’s easy to mistake the underlying NFTs from these gaming projects as just other PFP projects with anime or comic inspired art styles. While many people may showcase these gaming character NFTs as their avatars on their social media accounts, that’s the only similarity between these aforementioned projects, as there is much more under the hood of the gaming NFT ecosystems already transforming the gaming industry.
In the traditional pay-to-play gaming model a user would purchase a game — and often in-game items, purely for entertainment. All the character experience grind and acquired possessions would become abandoned and devoid of value once the player lost interest in the game. NFT based blockchain technology transcends this into a play-to-earn framework. Players can purchase an NFT character or gear allowing them to participate in the game ecosystem, level the NFT up, boost its value and sell for profit while also providing the owner with an ability to rent the NFTs out to other players. The process of renting an NFT and splitting rewards with the owner is called a scholarship and games such Axie Infinity have already showcased how effective and sometimes transformative this can be. Incidentally, a lot of quality development in this sphere originates from South-East Asia where clan based gaming is very popular and well established.
Despite some FUD and negativity following a recent Axie hack which may temporarily dampen the hype it’s worth watching this eye opening documentary to see how people in the Philippines survived the pandemic with profits from playing Axie to get a better understanding of the potential this industry represents:. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yo-BrASMHU4
ONE Shogun
To start, let’s dive in and have a closer look at ONE Shogun, a Play-to-Earn strategy card game featuring 5000 unique ninja NFTs pitched against 5000 samurai NFTs. At its core, the game is promising to “help solve unemployment in emerging countries by providing an alternative source of income by delivering a fun, fast paced card game with advanced Tokenomics and the world’s first guild management dashboard” — something that games such as Axie use third party apps to manage.
The journey of ONE Shogun is a story of perseverance against all odds which is a testament to the tenacity and commitment of the individuals behind these projects. Pre-sale minting opened on September 9th, 2021 followed by a public mint (initial pre-reveal sale) with the NFT art reveal slated for the 24th. From the start, ONE Shogun was plagued by a number of issues beyond the team’s control such as “bots, spammers and scammers using fake links” which according to the project’s founder InQuEsT was “a calculated, synchronized movement that was intended to spread FUD” resulting in only 3473 out of the 10 000 Shogun NFTs being initially sold. The rest of the shoguns are planned to be minted closer to game launch.
On September 19th, InQuEsT posted an announcement outlining the issues the project endured to date including “Website DDOS attacks, Bots Spam attacks, mass private messaging of fake links, concerted FUD on launch day, minting and reselling in Opensea at a loss to increase FUD, being mass reported as fake collection in Opensea and getting de-listed” and ominously finished the post by asking “what’s next?” As if in response to this question, the developer that was initially hired to help with the art reveal and game development suddenly disappeared. Once again the team pivoted and immediately set out to hire a brand new, reputable dev team, and adjusted the roadmap and vision of the game to start rewarding existing NFT holders from the outset. An updated website was launched with a simple training mechanic allowing Shogun NFTs to gain experience as well as accumulate pre-launch reward crates. Just a few weeks later ONE Shogun published a robust white paper outlining the grand vision, detailing all features of the game and tokenomics.
The team endured these adversities and continued to press on and advance the project offering free airdrops to members who got scammed and showcasing true tenacity, never losing sight of the ultimate goal while keeping everyone informed and engaged throughout the tumultuous journey. These actions helped galvanize the discord community with many members who endured the early hurdles staying active till this day, something that can’t be said true of many other projects facing similar obstacles.
Whitepaper
The ONE Shogun whitepaper describes the game as “mix of Hearthstone and Heroes of Might and Magic” where “players engage in fast-paced, turn-based battles.” Players “summon Infantry, don Gear, and employ Tactics with customizable card decks constructed via ONE Shoguns’ comprehensive Deck Builder UI”. This user interface endeavors to “bridge the gap between investors and people all over the world who are seeking an alternative source of income.”
Interestingly, the first mint Shogun NFTs will not be playable cards or commanders, they will instead be employed on a more strategic layer as province rulers boosting player resource generation and in turn boosting their army’s capacity to be more effective on the battlefield.
“Shoguns provide experience points (EXP) on the Province (Land) assigned to them, which would improve that Province’s rate of production of in-game currency.”
It’s the champion NFTs (not yet released) that will lead the player armies (common cards) into battle.
Champions have Legends, which are the “genes” of the NFT that determine its characteristics such as Health, Damage, Speed, and Armor and Blessings.
Common cards include infantry (archers, catapults, monsters, etc), gear (armor and weapons that can be attached to Champions or Infantry) and Tactics (spells and maneuvers) which can be acquired via booster packs or in-game Marketplace.
The legends (or genes) which determine the statistics and look and feel of the Champion (three legends) and Infantry (one legend) provide the players with a wide range of units such as archers, swordsmen, artists, bandits, and priests to list just a few. Each comes with their own matching weapon and attack types. Archers may be blessed with a higher critical chance for example, bandits may get a second strike while priests may be able to ignore armor.
Champions, infantry, gear and tactics may be further modified by elemental strengths such as fire, earth, water, air and metal with each element being strong against two others while being weak against the remaining to provide even more tactical options.
The game will allow players to go on PVE solo quests with multiple stages and progressive difficulty, participate in ranked PVP one-on-one duels in 6 divisions or play in the Risk-like strategy based faction wars where “players attack their opponent’s regions or defend their own, with each victory providing a slight increase to that faction’s control of the region. Once a faction gains majority control of a region, they claim it as their own and it’s counted towards end-of-season victory tallies. At the end of the season the faction that has majority control of the map wins.”
Tokenomics
Finally let’s have a quick look at tokenomics. As with most blockchain games “token utility plays a vital role in the ONE Shogun ecosystem. Several types of tokens will be featured both before launch, and within the game” including Koku, Koban and Silk that “can be used to purchase in-game assets from the marketplace, craft Champions, and upgrade provinces.” Finally there is “ $SHOGUN which is the coin that brings true Play-to-Earn value to our audience by bringing real word currency into the game as players exchange fiat for $SHOGUN in order to purchase booster packs, deconstruct cards and various other functions. This is the token that will enable us to fulfill our end goal, to support the betterment of our Shogun family by providing a real way to infuse additional income into their lives.” The team has carefully crafted the tokenomics to create a sustainable ecosystem, by allowing adequate recycling of each token to ensure balanced supply and demand.
For more information on tokenomics read the full Whitepaper here: https://oneshogunbusiness.gitbook.io/one-shogun-whitepaper/
Earn Guild
Since One Shogun promises to deliver “world’s first guild management dashboard between Daimyos (Managers) and Warriors (Scholars)” shogun NFT owners are already organizing to recruit scholars to join their Samurai or Ninja clans locally on the One Shogun discord. However, to ensure rapid growth and to tap into a large existing player base a strategic partnership has been announced with Earn Guild — a tier-1 player guild. Earn Guild is “ one of the fastest-growing guilds in Play-to-Earn gaming, backed by a cadre of investors including MasterVentures and Trustswap. Earn Guild was able to raise over 8.1 million dollars to fund their cutting-edge approach to Play-to-Earn gaming and guild management.” Earn Guild will purchase their own shoguns and lease them out to their members ensuring availability of critical mass of motivated players. The innovation being brought by the guild merits a separate article but the partnership promises a solid path to engagement retention and growth. It’s important to note that guild membership is not required as One Shogun is free-to-play casually on desktop and mobile by anyone.
One of the more unique features of One Shogun is the “first-of-its-kind management dashboard” which “employs advanced analytical tools to help players make important decisions that impact earnings and performance.”
Community
One Shogun discord is blessed with an engaged community and fantastic moderators who readily answer questions, provide guidance to new members and administer engaging community activities which are a fun part of the One Shogun discord economy rewarding participants with coins which can be later exchanged for card packs and other prizes.
Roadmap
It’s an industry standard to have delays and postponements of milestones but One Shogun has one of the most ambitious roadmaps of all the NFT gaming projects with the game slated for release in Q3 of 2022. Thus far they have stuck to the timelines delivering on all the promises including initial NFT sale, whitepaper release, website update, launch of a trailer, announcement of tier-1 guild partnership and alpha game play showcase.
Follow https://twitter.com/ONEShogunP2E for up-to date info on the project and be sure to check out the recent Alpha Prototype Game play: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U198ZvEjCu4
Don’t just stand there, get a Shogun
So why own a Shogun NFT at this point you may ask? For one you get a chance to level up your shoguns via existing training mechanism and get reward crates which will contain a variety of goodies such as one of three in-game currencies/tokens such as Koku, Koban or Silk. You may even land a champion in one of those crates. Most importantly though, the Shoguns are the feudal lords that oversee the provinces which generate resources for the player and leveling them up early is paramount as once the game starts these trained Shoguns which will dramatically “increases the resource production rate and also the amount of in-game currency the player can convert to real-life tokens.”
It’s an exciting project with a lot of potential in this new landscape of NFT gaming and I’d advise anyone interested in NFTs or gaming to give a good look whether one is thinking of purely enjoying a good strategy card game, dipping their feet in NFT investing or generating some passive income. NFT gaming is still very young and as with any fledgling space there is a lot of inherent risk but judging by the amount of activity and talent engaged in developing these projects it’s here to stay and positioning yourself early may come with a significant pay off.
By Raftor
Disclaimer: The author owns NFTs in several projects referenced in the article and therefore may present a biased opinion. No information contained in this article should be used as financial advice.
https://twitter.com/RaftorTSE2
Special thanks to the amazing One Shogun mods @Doctorphil and @Wicked for editing & content input.
Learn more:
One Shogun Twitter
https://twitter.com/ONEShogunP2E
One Shogun Website
One Shogun Opensea Collection
https://opensea.io/collection/oneshogun
One Shogun Whitepaper
