Yuga Labs has turned Bored Ape Yacht Club into a trading card game. Mudwater is a competitive two-player card game with digital cards on Solana and a planned physical side. It’s playable now online. The first collection, Swamp Origins, gives existing Ape and Mutant owners free packs.
How Mudwater plays
Matches are short. Two players take turns placing cards on a three-by-three board. When a card goes down, its numbers are compared with the cards on the edges next to it, and the higher number captures the opponent’s square. Stronger cards have to be built up level by level. When the board is full, the player who controls the most squares wins.
Matches played with owned NFTs carry a stake. Each player has to put up one randomly selected card, and the winner keeps both.
That rule doesn’t apply in Exhibition, the entry-level web2 mode. Exhibition has computer opponents, matchmaking and games with friends, so you can play without collecting any cards.
The Swamp Origins collection
Swamp Origins has 120 designs. Some come as foil or serialized versions, and there are eight unique cracked-ice editions. Supply is fixed at 240,000 packs of ten cards each, which comes to 2.4 million cards. Collectors can chase rarities on top of putting together a deck that works in matches.
Sealed product is tradeable too. Twenty-four digital packs combine into a box, and ten boxes combine into a case. Both steps can be reversed. Cards, packs, boxes and cases each trade separately, so the split between buying singles, opening packs and keeping product sealed works the way it does in physical card games.
Free packs for Ape holders
Each Bored Ape holder can claim ten packs, and each Mutant Ape holder can claim two. Claims close on 19th January 2027. You claim with Totems, which are on Ethereum, but the packs and cards themselves live on Solana.
Existing holders get 71% of the total card supply. Partner communities such as Otherdeed holders get 3%, and only 20% is up for direct purchase.
Physical cards
Yuga describes a system where the physical cards are stored in a vault. Owners will be able to redeem an NFT and have the physical card delivered, or send in a physical card to be tokenized. Yuga lists both as coming soon.
Fees and early trading
Trades carry a 2.5% royalty plus a separate 2.5% reflection fee. The reflection fee buys ApeCoin APE $0.1099 ▼ -10.1%, which is distributed to Mudwater holders.
OpenSea figures show unopened packs as the busiest market so far, with about $620,600 in cumulative trading. The cheapest listed pack was about $72, and roughly 1,700 wallets owned at least one.
Individual cards have done $294,900 in cumulative volume across around 1,825 owning wallets, with a floor of about $0.87. Boxes have done $38,500 in cumulative volume, with a floor of $1,577. Packs, cards and boxes together account for roughly $954,000 in trading volume.
