Yuga Labs Launches Mudwater, a Physical and Digital BAYC Trading Card Game, on Solana

Yuga Labs has launched Mudwater, a trading card game built from Bored Ape Yacht Club art, on Solana. "Mudwater is live," Yuga Labs posted at 23:35 UTC on 17 October 2026, describing it as "a new physical and digital BAYC collection on Solana, claimable now by all Bored Apes and Mutant Apes." The first set, Swamp Origins, has 120 cards and a fixed supply of 240,000 packs, and most of those packs are free to claim for existing ape holders.

The chain is the striking part. BAYC is an Ethereum brand: the apes, the ApeCoin (APE) token and the Totem that unlocks each claim all sit on Ethereum. The Mudwater cards, and the market for trading them, sit on Solana.

What Mudwater Swamp Origins includes

Mudwater's first set is 120 BAYC art pieces, with foil, serialized and cracked-ice variants on top of the standard cards, according to the Bored Ape Yacht Club launch post. The brand calls it "a way of collecting the art of BAYC physically, but rooted in blockchain." The physical run is printed by Orange Cap Games (@ocapgames) on its orange core card stock, the same post says.

The official Mudwater site sets out the structure: 10 cards in a pack, 24 packs in a box, 10 boxes in a case, and a fixed supply of 10,000 boxes. Eight cards make up its rarest tier, which Crypto Briefing describes as serialized cracked-ice 1/1 grails.

Yuga Labs splits the 10,000 Mudwater boxes four ways, according to the site:

• 7,134 boxes (71.34%) for the community airdrop to ape holders
• 2,000 boxes (20%) held as a commercial reserve
• 566 boxes (5.66%) for community onboarding
• 300 boxes (3%) for partner communities

How BAYC and MAYC holders claim Mudwater packs

Each Bored Ape can claim 10 packs and each Mutant Ape can claim two, which adds up to more than 140,000 claimable packs, according to the Mudwater site. Claims close at 00:00 UTC on 19 January 2027. Serialized packs are awarded at random 30 days after the initial claim.

The claim key is a Totem. BAYC wrote that it had "just airdropped this 6551 Totem, paired to all BAYC & MAYC, enabling pack claims." The "6551" refers to ERC-6551, an Ethereum standard that gives an NFT its own wallet address. Crypto Briefing describes the Totem as the container that receives and manages a holder's packs. In practice, an Ethereum-side object attached to each ape unlocks cards that live on Solana.

Totems, packs and cards all trade on OpenSea, per the Mudwater site.

Mudwater's 2.5% APE reflection and royalty

Every Mudwater NFT trade carries a 2.5% "reflection," on top of a 2.5% royalty listed on the Mudwater site. BAYC explains the reflection in its launch post: "That 2.5% buys $APE and sends it to collectors in proportion to how much of the Mudwater collection they hold."

The reflection ties the Solana collection back to the Ethereum brand. Trading on Solana generates the fee, the fee buys APE, and the APE is shared among card holders by the size of their holdings. How much any holder receives depends on trading volume, which no source has measured yet.

What Yuga Labs has not confirmed about the physical cards

The physical side of Mudwater is still partly a promise. The Mudwater site lists conversion between physical and digital cards as "coming soon," and none of the official material names who stores the printed cards or how a holder would take delivery. Crypto Briefing describes each card as linking a physical collectible to a matching Solana NFT. Until Yuga Labs publishes the conversion process, the vaulting and redemption terms are an open question.

Gameplay is early too. According to the site, Mudwater is playable with demo cards in Otherside, Yuga's metaverse, and that on-chain cards "come to the table soon."

Mudwater joins Solana's phygital trading card market

Mudwater lands in the busiest part of Solana's consumer economy. Collector Crypt, which vaults graded physical cards and issues NFTs against them, had tokenized more than 130,000 cards and held about 64% of Solana's tokenized card market by August, according to Crypto Briefing, as we covered in August. Collector Crypt's third-quarter revenue was $433.5 million, almost all of it from packs, per Pine Analytics, whose report we broke down on 14 October. Jupiter JUP$0.287-4.6% said its gacha product hit $9 million in volume in its first five days in July. And on 16 October, Beezie said it would wind down on Base and consolidate its collectibles marketplace on Solana.

Those platforms tokenize cards from existing brands such as Pokémon. Mudwater is different in kind: the brand owner is printing its own cards and choosing the chain itself. Yuga Labs has not said publicly why it picked Solana over Ethereum for Mudwater. The more interesting test is whether a collection launched to an Ethereum community builds a Solana trading market of its own once the free packs are claimed, and the reflection design gives holders a reason to watch that number.