I don't remember exactly when I started playing Axie, although I think it's probably my second month. I feel like I've improved quite a bit and have come a bit far despite not having a competitive team, but I don't plan on stopping here and hope to keep playing even more.
As far as I know, Axie is no different from any other card game. It's the same as playing Legends of Runeterra or Hearthstone, so I usually try to forget about the "money" factor while playing and focus entirely on maintaining a good calm playing style without getting carried away by the economic factor.
I noticed that I have been playing pretty well because my intern told me that I have my MMR considerably high. I still don't consider myself a good player or anything, because it's amazing how the top Axie players are at +3000 cups. I have no idea how much SLP they give per win in those leagues, but getting there is really exhaustive work.
I remember that one of the worst concerns when they implemented the arena changes was that the best Axies were the ones who were going to win every time. And from my experience I can say that this is not entirely true, but it is true that it is impossible to win if you have a really bad team. I have noticed that many players have cards that simply don't allow them to finish off the enemy team and also not defend themselves enough. You have to have a lot of luck to be able to win with this style of team.
Obviously the most important thing to climb MMR in Axie is to know how to play, I would say that climbing depends on 50% of your experience as a player and the other 50% on the team you have. A good team is really important to have better performance in the game with the cards, many of these really have no real use and do not allow the team to do something significantly useful in the game.
Although it is strange how this works because I have seen teams with some slightly strange combinations, I mean, with cards that are not so common. Because of this style of teams I feel like anyone can start scaling quite a bit, teams with 3 plants, 3 aquas, lots of weird cards. It's really cool how people manage to figure out how to defend themselves with not so good teams, but I really admire all the effort.
My team is not really as good as others, in fact, I have noticed that many, many teams in the top players are quite different. There is no such thing as a perfect team, there are only players who find different ways to get the most out of a team and win their games. It's also amazing how players don't tend to have completely absurd winrates, in fact, I think the best player in Axie has a little over 60% winrate, so it's not as easy as just buying the best team and start scaling.
To play well I had to learn a lot of things and assimilate a few concepts. I didn't know that there were strategies as incredible as card and energy accounting. I feel that Axie is not that complicated to master because deep in the game you can tell that there are not so many things to take into account when playing. Just by taking into account the cards your opponent has played and also the cards you have played you will be able to guess what cards the deck will give you or the cards your opponent has available.
It is also very useful to take into account the opponent's energy for obvious reasons. If you know the opponent's energy, you will have in mind the amount of damage or the amount of defense that can be placed in the next round, but this is not always true because there are some cards that do not require energy to be cast and this can hurt a little the energy accounting.
In any case, anyone can improve! I wanted to show my progress in this game and I'm quite happy to have come this far.
Thank you very much for reading all this.