What is MLB Champions?
MLB Champions, formerly MLB Crypto, is a bobble-head collecting baseball sim started in 2018. In previous years you collected NFT bobble-heads and your teams competed based on real world baseball games. This season they have moved the blockchain side of it to the background and are focusing on a mobile app sim game. Hopefully there will be live game based functionality in the future, but we won’t know until the baseball season resumes.
The benefit to moving away from the blockchain is that the game is now truly free to play. It also has numerous built in controls to limit the amount of bobble-heads generated. Unfortunately it is also harder to mint and trade because of this.
How do I play?
The tutorial walks you through the app and gives you a usable team, but if you haven’t signed up yet, here is a quick summary. Each team has three training facilities which you can unlock. They must be unlocked in order and cost progressively more. Each facility will hold one team of players (nine for the National League and ten for the American League). Based on the players assigned to a facility, you will earn game play charges for the team in that facility. When you have a facility with a full team, you can spend charges to play games and earn more caps. There is a weekly leader board with generous prizes as well.
Charges build up over time and must be manually collected unless you buy and assign a trainer to the facility. If you have a trainer it will auto collect charges until the facility is full. Upgrading the facility will allow you to hold more charges. You can speed up the charge gain process by tapping or paying diamonds.
Once you have enough charges, you can trigger a game. You will then be presented with a series of screens showing your respective division ranks as well as your teams.
Finally the game will play itself. You can watch the score and the game feed, or you can simply skip to the end and see who won and how many caps you earned.
How do I build a team?
While you could simply open up your training facility use the auto fill functionality, that won’t necessarily make the optimal team. You will want to click on each position and choose your player based on numerical power and color rarity. Power is determined by multiplying rarity by the player’s skill. Rarity is determined by the traits of the figure. Your total rarity value will determine which division you are in. There are three divisions, S, A and B, with S requiring the rarest teams but having the best prizes.
How do I get better players?
This is the tricky part of the game. You could buy players in the store for diamonds (which are won as prizes or purchases for real money) and have better odds of getting good players, or you could buy a bunch of crummy players for caps (earned currency) and trade them for something (hopefully) better. This requires sacrificing nine other figures. You need to be careful what you trade though to maximize your odds of getting a good figure.
The total rarity points will determine the odds from the trade. You will typically have approximately 70% chance of getting something higher tier and a 30% chance of getting the average tier of the cards you are sacrificing. There is also a small chance you will get something two tiers higher.
If you receive a player, base, or glove/bat you really like, you can try rerolling the figure. This also requires sacrificing nine figures, and depending on the rarity of the trait you are trying to keep might require diamonds as well. In general I suggest avoiding this as its rarely worth the cost.
You can also double a player’s power by signing them. This requires sacrificing nine figures and paying diamonds. The cost will be a minimum of 50 diamonds, but can increase based on the rarity of the figure you are signing and the figures being sacrificed. In general you want to make sure you the figures you sacrifice are rare enough to reduce the cost to 50, anything beyond that is wasted. Once a figure is signed you will be able to trade it through the website or mint it to the blockchain for an additional 250 diamonds.
That’s the basics of the game. It’s a decent time killer with a lot of potential if they incorporate live gameplay once the MLB season finally starts. Give it a try and share your thoughts in the comments.
