Yuga Labs launches Mudwater trading cards on Solana

Yuga Labs, the company behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club, has launched Mudwater, a trading-card game whose physical cards are each tied to an NFT on Solana. Claims for holders of BAYC and Mutant Ape Yacht Club NFTs opened at about 23:30 UTC on 17 October, timed with the ApeFest 2026 gathering in Charleston, Crypto Briefing reported.

What holders get

• First set: "Swamp Origins", with 120 artworks in four tiers: standard, foil, serialized and "cracked-ice". At the top are eight one-of-one cracked-ice cards.
• Physical plus digital: each card is matched to a Solana NFT, with the physical card held in a vault.
• Claims: run through 6,551 "Totems", ERC-6551 token-bound accounts (NFTs that act as their own wallets). BAYC holders can claim 10 packs, MAYC holders 2; each pack has 10 cards, and more than 140,000 packs are available until 19 January 2027.
• Fees: a 2.5% charge on NFT trades buys ApeCoin (APE), which is distributed to Mudwater holders. Totems, packs and cards trade on OpenSea.

Yuga has a playable demo in its Otherside metaverse and says packs will later be upgradeable into boxes and cases; it plans 10,000 boxes of 24 packs in total.

Our take

The interesting part is not the artwork but the plumbing. Yuga's apes live on Ethereum, yet the cards were put on Solana, where minting and trading hundreds of thousands of small items is cheap. Pairing a physical card with a vaulted NFT is an attempt to give an NFT brand something tangible to offer long after the 2021–22 boom.

The APE "reflection" is a neat loop on paper, but it only matters if cards actually change hands; with 140,000-plus packs, value will concentrate in the rare tiers. Free claims also attract phishing: claim only through links from Yuga's official channels and never sign a wallet request you do not understand. Our guide to spotting crypto scams covers the common tricks, and Fidelity's recent Solana health report looks at the network the cards now run on.