Let's Talk - Statline (Season Alpha)

I know everyone is already aware what statline is, but for formality's sake - statline in its truest sense is the numbers attached to a card. Or not even a card, for other games it is simply the total stats of a certain entity, be it friend/foe/item. It is the most basic principle for any type of game involving combat. Here we dive into the concept, some intricacies and nuances of statline in the context of Axie Infinity: Origins.

The Basics, and maybe Stat Efficiencies

So statline gauges how strong or how weak a card is based on the numbers, right? Let's observe a typical runeless, charmless Axie (hereby referred to as naked Axies).

Typical naked Axies have 320 HP - which is already a statline in itself, but to better understand how you can use this in combat, we need to do a bit more analysis, especially in comparison to attack cards. Without diving too deep into data, the most frequent/average damage stat is 60. Now, let's see how many hits it takes to kill a naked Axie using a 60 damage card:

Hit No.	Current HP
0	320
1	260
2	200
3	140
4	80
5	20
6	0

It takes 6 hits to kill a naked Axie. Interesting, right? Now, let's pump up those damage numbers a bit using the same method, but I'll summarize for simplicity using the table below:

Damage	Number of Hits to Kill
60	6
70	5
80	4

Sooooo, bigger numbers mean faster kills? Thanks captain obvious!

Yes that is correct, but you might be overseeing a really important detail when dealing with statlines. Let's observe the 5th and 6th hit of a 60-damage card again:

Hit No.	Current HP
5	20
6	0

The difference in HP on the 5th and 6th hit is only 20. Which means you're spending 60 units worth of stats to eliminate 20. Which also means your 60 damage card is only 33.33% efficient on the last hit! That's like buying a 60 liters of milk, only to consume 20 liters and letting the remainder spoil itself. A waste of money I'd say! Or in our context, a waste of stats. You could say that the most optimal way to kill a naked Axie is to have 4 hits of 60 damage, and 1 hit of 80 damage (60 + 60 + 60 + 60 + 80 = 320). This way there would be no excess.

Now let's put ourselves in another situation to depict actual arena conditions. Suppose we have the specific board state below: