Angel Battles
2018 Blockchain Trading Card Game
Many fellow NFT Archaeologists will be familiar with Angel Battles. It’s a 2018 blockchain trading cards game that was killed off by the rising Ethereum gas fees and is now a part of NFT history.
I have worked with the project developers over the last few months to develop a wrapper for the project and a strategy for them to honor the original NFT contracts while transitioning the game to Polygon.
DISCLAIMER: Anything you do after this is 100% on you. Any lost funds, failed investments, or other unforeseen consequences are 100% on you. I am not responsible in any way. Turn away if you do not accept 100% responsibility. Please read everything before proceeding and DYOR.
I am not being compensated in any way by the Angel Battles team or anyone else. At the time of this writing, I believe I hold a few (<5) Angel Battle tokens that I minted in 2021 when I first found the project. And while I expect to purchase some Angel Battle tokens after I publish this article, this in no way should be interpreted as financial advice for you to do the same.
2018 Launch
Launched on January 22, 2018, Angel Battles was one of the more complex early blockchain games, with three NFT data contracts and many gameplay contracts. Here is a list of all the known contracts for transparency. Obviously, with more than 100 contracts, mistakes are possible, but I wanted to provide it to show the scale of the project.
Here’s the Reddit post announcing the game launch, which hit the top 5 on DappRadar at one point.
Gameplay
The 2018 video above is a good introduction, but basically, Angel Battles is a card game that featured both “player vs. computer” and “player vs. player” mechanics and was built around three types of NFTs — Angles, Pets, and Accessories.
Angles: These were the main cards that each had one of six aura colors. They were purchased by the player and earned experience by winning arena battles.
Pets: Pets could only be captured in battle and were bred to create even stronger pets.
Accessories: These were purchased by the player and helped in gameplay.
Angel Battles was also an early play-to-earn game where players could earn ETH. With a sponsored leaderboard, a company could open a leaderboard to display its logo, and top-ranked players shared a percentage of the prize money (in ETH).
You can see the old Medium posts here for more details.
2019 Wrapper?
In 2019 the team made a new contract to enable users to convert their original cards into ERC-721 tokens and mint new cards. Gotta get on Opensea, right?🤣
This was not what we would now think of as a “wrapper” today because owners were required to burn their original tokens.
You can see the contract here:
https://etherscan.io/address/0xdc32ff5aada11b5ce3caf2d00459cfda05293f96
At the time of this writing, only 110 tokens were ever issued from this contract, and only a handful of players converted 2018 tokens to ERC-721 tokens.
In a spirit of fairness, the devs recently airdropped identical cards to anyone who burned their 2018 cards or purchased cards from this wrapper. So for any of you archaeologists who minted off this contract, check your wallets!😁
Note: This contract will not receive support from the devs going forward. It currently has issues with metadata on Opensea and should not be used.
New Wrapper and Minting
I’m summarizing here, so for more details directly from the devs, including the wrapper, Halo tokens, and airdrops for the game, see the Angel Battles Mirror page here and chat directly with them in the Angel Battles Discord.
The devs have built a wrapper and interface that will enable you to mint directly to the 2018 contract and wrap the NFTs all in one seamless experience.
Important: Any cards you mint today will be 2022 NFTs on the 2018 contract.
Here is the website: www.angelbattles.com/historic
**Remember you are minting at your own risk. I know the devs have worked hard on this, but wrappers break, contracts get messed up, NFTs get locked, etc. So make sure you are comfortable with the risks before proceeding.**
Supply
Here is the total number of cards in each category:
Angles: 24
Pets: 19
Accessories: 18
In total, that's 61 unique cards. And as collectors seem interested in complete sets, I think it's important to note that the maximum number of complete sets — 61 cards in a set — is only 25. As both the Lucifer and Michael cards only have 25 cards available.
When you connect your wallet to the minting website, you’ll notice two numbers directly below the image; the number on the left is the amount that has already been minted, and the number on the right is the total supply of that card.
In the image below, you’ll see that “Horse” has a total supply of 250, and 182 were minted in 2018. Leaving 68 cards available for minting.
Contract Questions
You may notice that the devs can place a pause on the new wrapper contract. However, this can only pause the minting of new cards and does not affect existing NFTs in any way (wrapping, unwrapping, or selling).
On the 2018 contracts, the devs control write access which is often seen as a risk to NFT ownership.
The devs have assured me that they will relinquish ownership of the contracts — by setting the contract owner as the 0x00 burn address — shortly after the NFTs are all minted, and the Polygon airdrop is finalized. This would remove that vulnerability.
Polygon Airdrop & Game
Owners of the newly minted/wrapped historical cards will also receive exact copies of their cards airdropped on Polygon, with a couple of exceptions here. These Polygon NFTs will enable gameplay on the second version of the game.
For historical NFT collectors, it’s important to note that these are a new collection on Polygon. After the airdrop, you will now hold duplicates of your cards. You will still have the historical tokens on the 2018 contract on Ethereum in addition to the new polygon tokens that are playable in the second version of the game.
The snapshot for the airdrop is expected to take place on December 9, 2022.
The devs have made significant changes to the way Angel Battles 2 functions.
Under the first version, all of the Matic that players spent to purchase cards from the store was sent to the battle mountain, and then it could be credited to players who held cards on a randomly chosen panel on every condition change (24 hrs).
The new (second) version will send all Matic earned from cards purchased to the Gitcoin Matching Funds Wallet. This money will fund grants, voted on by community members, for deserving projects. In this way, the devs hope that Angel Battles will live on as a public good.
The devs also wanted me to note that voting for the Angel Battles DAO is 100% on-chain, so it will be possible for the HALO token holders to choose to implement the first, second, or any other model of value flow in the future.
