PIP Cards Have Been Awakened (pt.2)

Jay Lawpez
4 min readJan 28, 2022

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Time to Assemble Your Deck

This article follows on from my original article — PIP Cards — The Innovative Cross-chain Gaming NFT (pt.1) - Who Wants to Play Game of Thrones on The Blockchain?

PIPS is a first-of-its-kind NFT generative playing card art project that will enable NFT holders to generate an entire deck of custom cards to be used in cross-chain gaming.

PIPS features high-quality, custom-designed but programmatically rendered artwork built literally to grow (each NFT is a scalable SVG) and will enable each Mint Pass (Card Back NFT) holder to generate a Champion Court Card front (king, queen, jack, or joker) then an entire deck of completely custom cards (yes an entire deck including jokers) — the only deck like it in the world.

The first Kingdom will launch this Saturday (29th January 2022) on the Moonriver ecosystem at 12:00am EST (5:00 UTC). Passes will be available for 2.22 MOVR each. These passes will come in the form of a unique Awakened card back. Early community members had the opportunitiy to join the whitelist this week for select times to mint before the public sale. Head over to https://www.pipcards.com/ to mint come Saturday morning.

In Phase 3, which is planned for 3.22.22, PIP holders can mint their entire deck of cards (a full deck of 54 images including 2 jokers) in a single NFT for an additional 2.22 MOVR. Note that PIP card holders (and only PIP card holders) will be able to mint a full deck.

In order to mint you’re first going to need MOVR. If you haven’t bought or sold MOVR before, it’s an ALT coin and you will need to add the Moonriver network to MetaMask — don’t worry, it’s easy and is all explained at the end of this article.

Why Moonriver?

The Moonbeam/Moonriver ecosystem provides the most upside for the teams cross-chain vision for PIPS.

From day one they envisioned PIPS being a unique NFT project at the intersection of art and utility.

Cross-chain gaming is the ultimate goal for the project, and the ability for decks to be released on different chains throughout the metaverse is imperative to that goal.

The team believes Moonriver is the parachain for EVM smart contracts and a growing community of solidity developers that can help support and grow the project over time.

The building blocks of the cards that we’re creating — specifically the on-chain library we are providing for rarity and card attributes — will create the ability for other developers to make other types of games outside of just playing cards.

It’s always been our vision to let the community help guide and build on our foundational idea of cross-chain gaming, and Moonriver is the gateway to that reality.

With PolkadotXCM, as well as Karura and Acala providing support soon, we can see a future ecosystem of the project ripe with EVM smart contracts and solidity developers that will be trailblazers in the space based on our foundational contributions.

Intelligent Post-generated Rarities

Pip Card traits and rarity will be based on a genuine ‘roll of the dice’. The team call it fair rarity or “fairity”.

All rarity is determined on-chain and this is done by bringing in a VRF (verifiable random function) to the minting process.

Known as the ‘Genesis Seed’, it is a 32-byte word that looks something like your wallet address — Think of it as your PIPS DNA.

How is this possible? Well, a custom rendering engine takes the Genesis Seed as input and outputs a unique Champion Court card (PIP) in a deterministic way parsing it to determine the card value (K, Q, J, Ace, Joker), card suit (spade, diamond, heart, club), color scheme, and card “parts”:

  1. Color
  2. Suit
  3. Race
  4. Head
  5. Body
  6. Weapon
  7. Crown
  8. Hair
  9. Effects (card glam)
  10. Arms
  11. Belts
  12. Etc…

For each of the parts, they also check for four levels or categories of rarity. This first check is to see if the Genesis Seed “rolled” an ultra-rare part (currently 1 in 100). If the roll is missed, then it checks if it is a “rare” part (currently 1 in 25), then “uncommon” (currently 1 in 5). If all of these rolls are “missed” then a “common” part is integrated.

Each PIP’s rarity is based on probability and no one — not even the project team — will have any idea of what each card will look like until they are minted.

If you want to know more, or have any question, hit the Discord where the team will be happy to help!

Discord: https://discord.gg/6zmq36eVnz

New to MOVR? Start Here.

If you haven’t bought or sold MOVR before, it’s an ALT coin and you will need to add the Moonriver network to MetaMask — don’t worry, it’s easy!

You can buy MOVR on a number of exchanges now including Binance.

The alternative easiest way is to use Solarbeam:

  1. You are going to need some MOVR to pay the gas for the exchange and any approvals. On https://app.solarbeam.io/bridge click on the ‘Swap for Gas’ tab and then swap a token for a small amount of MOVR.
  2. Then once complete, go to https://app.solarbeam.io/exchange/swap (connect to the Moonriver network in MetaMask) and swap your COIN for MOVR.

Website: https://www.pipcards.com/
Discord: https://discord.gg/6zmq36eVnz
Twitter: https://twitter.com/pipcards
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pipcards.nft

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Jay Lawpez

I help NFT projects articulate their vision and mechanics