Mythereum — 2021 Resurgence
There has been an Awakening, can you feel it?
A look at the first successful game release on Ethereum
Mythereum released officially on February 4th 2018 according to its date and time stamp. It began development in 2017 and had a successful pre-sale of its “Genesis” set. With NFT Summer underway — collectors and investors alike are looking into the deeper history of Ethereum and finding gems such as Mythereum.
Mythereum is a “Fantastically distributed Trading Card Game” on the Ethereum blockchain. One of, if not the first successful Ethereum games to implement NFTs into their project as playable assets. Additionally, Mythereum also boasted Mythex as its standard ingame currency, an ERC-20 token earnable by playing the game. Mythex was also implemented into early Opensea as a useable currency to make offers on items such as Mythereum Cards.
A trading card game where users own, trade, sell, and battle on the Ethereum blockchain. Mythereum’s nft cards are non-fungible tokens minted in limited amounts and limited editions. First edition, “genesis” cards, are capped to 5000 cards and are the rarest cards available.
Most Mythereum games were played on their private sidechain. Because of this, playing a game of Mythereum was entirely free! Periodic tournaments with real ETH prizes were hosted by the Mythereum team and funded by ongoing card sale proceeds. Mythereum offers both free-to-play tournaments and paid-entry, and players only needed to have a qualified deck to enter.
Mythereum’s claim to fame is having designed, built and fully implemented the very first interoperability cross-project bridge dubbed “The Forge”. This tool allowed users to mint playable nfts using nft’s from other projects — most notably Cryptokitties into Mythicats. Originally implemented and built in mid-2018, The Mythicat Katurday events became so popular, Cryptokitties and Mythereum teamed up for the very first Project Collaboration, which you can read all about in this article: Cryptokitties Mashup. The reward for winning the event was the very first Sparkles to ever be minted!
*Even in 2021, very few, if any projects have this capability — putting Mythereum light years ahead of its competition.
Above you can see a concept design for the upgrade to the original Forge. You can also read more about forging in Mythereum HERE. Below is an OG image of the original forging process. Both Mythicats and Survivors (their free-to-play cards) could be both minted and played with at any time. There was little fees associated with onboarding cryptokitties into Mythicats, which made it additionally attractive — find a use for your kitties that bred but were just hanging around!
The final form of Mythicats before the project went into hibernation culminated in the picture here. Not just regular (or God forbid, Founder) kitties could be forged, but so could exclusives and fancies!
This one here — Glitter — was released around the same time that Mythereum hosted the collab event. These were fairly difficult to mint, and only had a small window of opportunity to breed. Thus very few, if any were forged into Mythicats.
Recently, this very Mythicat went for 4 Ethereum — approximately $11k USD value at the time of the sale!! The transaction and card can be seen here: https://opensea.io/assets/0xc70be5b7c19529ef642d16c10dfe91c58b5c3bf0/8213
There has been a renewed interest in Mythereum, and specificlaly Mythicats. Only 547 remain as the hard cap and given the age of the project as well as the wallets associated with it, the soft cap is likely even lower as some of those holders have not been active in several years as of writing this article. It is also believed that approximately 6 FOUNDER Grade Cryptokitties are locked into a Mythicat. Some of these have recently sold for over 150 Eth each.
As of the time of this writing, Mythereum has accumulated a massive amount of sales, thrusting it up into the top 40 of all dapps on Ethereum. (When Mythereum was initially active, there wasn’t even 40 dapps to compete with!). For many OG Mythereum holders, this has been a major windfall. Major NFT enthusiasts, collectors and even investors have taken an interest in Mythicats pushing the floor up to 1 Eth minimum each, and only a dozen or so available for purchase.
NFT influencers, primarily on Twitter, have taken up to making a campaign out of raising awareness about Mythicats.
Mr. Daryl Morey apparently took some interest in Mythereums unique, historical Mythicats and nabbed up a couple for himself!
Brain Genius has been very active in the archaeological digging around the Mythereum roadmap, and produced several tweets raising awareness and promotion medium articles written about or for Mythereum.
You can join in the discussion in the Mythereum Discord HERE.
Mythereum was first launched publically on Ethereum February 4th 2018, and began development back in 2017.
Mythereum first released its Genesis Edition Set, hard capped at 5000 and never again to be printed and was quite successful. At the time of launch the big crypto crash had happened and alot of projects fell through, however Mythereum shined where others failed.
Opensea and Mythereum had a major partnership way back when Opensea launched, and the devs on both teams worked hand in hand on alot of things, including the first iterations of the Opensea market. Mythereum cards were even used to test the first mechanisms and to help find bugs to further improve the initial version of Opensea. Both Alex and Dan were core collaborators with Mythereum and certainly helped each other out in a multitude of ways.
Mythereum wasn’t an obscure project either. Appearing at all the major conventions, major influencers and top industry leaders such as VitalikButerin himself knew of Mythereum and the team behind it.
Kenn Bosak is a major influencer in the Crypto Space, and he was one of the first adopters and a player of Mythereum as well as other OG games on the network.
Many days I myself spent on calls and streams with Kenn, commentating on, and playing various Mythereum tournaments. These were great times, and filled with intense positive energy!
Mythereum enjoyed its fair share of publiclity, but it never truly received the attention it deserved. Below is a commercial advert designed for getting the word out about Mythereum back in 2018!
Its little gems like these that really stand out when looking backwards in time and finding a project such as Mythereum being so ahead of the line. Besides being launched in 2018, having an interoperable bridge was revolutionary. Further, they hit milestones that was far beyond any other project at its time (such as hitting 500 active users), which today seems like a drop in a bucket, but that was a major milestone back then. There were few less people in crypto, it was more complicated to enter/onboard, and even fewer who understood how nft’s worked, and then to play a game with them — was amazing.
During the course of the game’s lifespan — 3 full sets of acquirable cards were released, with two additional unique sets: Mythicats and Alchemists offered as well. Genesis, Awakening and Survivor Cards made up the core of the games playable assets.
Circa 2017–2018
Genesis
Mythereum initially released with the Genesis Edition of cards. Only 5000 were ever minted and permanently hard capped. Today less than 4k can be seen on exchanges, and many less likely to ever return.
Initially offered in a pre-release set during 2017, Genesis cards quickly swept the market taking prices of 1 or more eth during the crypto craze back then (some 2k value?) and held the 1+ Eth floor for most of the game’s lifespan. Few Genesis cards after the initial release ever changed hands. It was ahighly sought after, and pridely kept asset. Having a genesis asset in Mythereum was a form of status Quo. Noone could enter the Genesis Sphere without someone with a card making it available. No simple feat!
2018
Survivor Card Edition
In an effort to curve the limited edition impact on community, Mythereum released it’s first ever Survivor Edition — a completely free-to-play edition. Players could log on and claim a deck of 10(30) card Survivor Edition generated completely at random.
These cards would initially begin “off-chain” and would require 100 matches played with the card to “on-chain” it. The strength and versatility of these cards varied greatly, and thus tiers of Survivor cards began to emerge. The top cards were Parona, Kusegitas and Velarus. Survivors allowed new players to collect and play Mythereum seamlessly and in good fun without much worry of balance.
2018-2019
Awakening Edition
In 2019, Mythereum players saw a release of a new set of cards — specifically the Awakening Edition. This set was set to 50k cards, and had a pack sale price that increased incrementally based on amount of packs purchased. By the end of initial life cycle, approximately 5000 awakening cards had ever been minted. To date, the contract is still interactable and persons interested could technically purchase a pack, however when one recently was done, the cards would not render, but all of their metadata registered to the blockchain. The future of Awakening lays deeply in the future hands of Mythereum players to come.
2018–2019
Mythicat Forging
Beginning in early 2018, and seeing extensive use throughout 2019, Mythicats were Cryptokitties forged into Mythereum useable-cards.
A player would simply exchange their cryptokitty via a forging mechanic and receive a playable Mythicat card. The formula for determing stats was eventually reverse engineered, and you can read about that HERE & HERE.
Historically, it is important to note that eventually Mythicats were desirable due to their powerful potential once the recipe was revealed. Players could for the first time stand up to players with Genesis cards using certain Mythicats. So much so, that the team eventually decided to close Mythicat production, and provide incentives for players to unmint their V1 Mythicat in preparation for a release of a V2 Mythicat formula (which would also include modern cats beyond the first years worth of metadata). All in all, Mythicat collaboration with Cryptokitties really set aside Mythereum from any other project of its time.
2020
Alchemists
Back in late 2019, Mythereum ran a player involved event that allowed players to submit Artistically enhanced images of themselves, roleplaying as a Mythereum “Alchemist”, a Wizard of sorts that would be the leader of a deck of warriors.
As seen above, Elbeau was the very first of these releases. The team ran a reward for submissions that passed art submissions standards, and Elbeau won the #1 prize — you can read more about it HERE.
Of all the 25 or so winners, only 3 Different Alchemists ever made it to print. Only a handful of each were ever minted, and each player could only claim 1 of each if they were qualified to receive them. If I remember correctly, Elbeau had a hard cap of around 25 were ever printed.
2021–2022
A few months before the project went into hibernation announcements were made about a new set to be released.
That set is now returning to be review and updated for an upcoming relaunch of the project!
Cards originally had Health, Attack, and a special mana triggering effect. With the set that was previously set to release in 2020, cards will have additional “active abilities” added to them.
These will have a variety of different effects on the game play, some will be active, others passive, and yet others triggered by certain events. So as the Team gets closer to updating the project, keep your ears out on how to obtain one of these new releases!
RECAP
That covered alot of territory and it is my pleasure today to have presented to you about one of the most historical projects ever to hit the blockchain!
Mythereum released in February of 2018 and was the first successful game on the network. It operated as a trading card game, but also had RPG elements such as a functioning economy using its off-chain token, Mythex. Guilds built up around collecting resources in-game such as wood, metal and food to build your Warlord’s Citadel. This provided unique functions that increased your ability to level up your cards, thus making your deck(s) more potent.
Links:
You can follow them on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/mythereum
You can join their Discord and chat here: https://discord.gg/4XuBYF6
You can discover other articles here: https://medium.com/mythereum
You can check out their collection here: https://opensea.io/collection/mythereum
