What exactly are Slonks that everyone keeps talking about on the timeline, and how do you play?

Tonight at 8 PM, the $SLOP contract goes live. Get this project figured out in advance.
Slonks is an NFT project with a total of 10,000 units. Each Slonk corresponds to an original CryptoPunk, and then an AI model on the blockchain reconstructs that image. The worse the reconstruction, the higher the slop value, which ranges from 0 to 576. It can be understood as the "AI failure level."
The first went live, and in 5 days, over 500 have been permanently destroyed. There are now 9,505 left, and the destruction rate hasn't slowed down.
How to play
Two core operations.
Merge: Take two Slonks, choose one to stay alive, and the other to die. The dead one is permanently destroyed, and the slop value of the alive one increases.
Destruction minting: Throw a Slonk into the contract, and mint $SLOP tokens 1:1 based on its slop value. If slop is 400, then mint 400 tokens.
Combining these two operations: first merge to raise the slop, then destroy to mint more $SLOP.
Here's an example: before merging, destroying each Slonk could only mint 18 tokens; after merging, a single one can mint 161 tokens, but at the cost of another permanently disappearing.
Where's the opportunity?
Within this collection, there are two completely conflicting logics.
For rare original punk Slonks (like Alien, Ape, Zombie), lower slop is more valuable. The AI restoration that looks more like the original image is better, and merging destroys visual recognition, so no one dares to touch these.
For common punk Slonks, higher slop is more valuable because it can mint more $SLOP .
In the middle, for Slonks that are common but with low slop, they don't fit into either category. They are naturally consumables for merging and are continuously disappearing.
$SLOP hasn't gone live yet, and 500 units are already gone. Once the token price becomes clear, strategic merging will only become more aggressive.
Floor price is around 0.15 ETH, available on OpenSea.
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