The Steem Monsters team has just released two new updates which we're excited to share with you. The first is the ability to delegate cards in your collection to another account, just like you can currently do with Steem Power on the Steem blockchain, and the second is the ability to convert any unopened Alpha or Beta edition booster packs into tokens on the Steem Engine platform that are tradeable on the decentralized exchange! We'll dig into each of these in more detail below.
This was a feature that has been sitting on our to-do list and roadmap for a very long time, and we're excited to finally make it available to our players! Card delegation will allow you to rent or lease your cards to another player without taking on any counter-party risk. You are still the owner of any cards that are delegated, and can remove the delegation at any time, but the delegatee can use those cards to play.
The idea is that a good player who doesn't have much money to spend on cards can instead rent a set of high level cards which they can use to play in ranked battle to earn reward cards or even booster packs at the end of the season, and to play in tournaments in which they can win all sorts of prizes which would not have been available to them without those cards.
Similarly, the delegator can now earn a passive income from renting out their extra or unused cards!
Initially card delegation is very simple. On the card details popup within the collection screen on the Steem Monsters website there is now an option to delegate cards that you own. You simply enter the account name of the player to whom you want to delegate them to and click the button and you're done.
Once delegated, you'll see a small delegation icon next to the delegated cards in your collection. You can click on that icon to remove the delegation at any time. Similarly, the delegatee will now see those cards in their collection with an incoming delegation icon next to them.
The delegatee will then be able to use those delegated cards on their teams in battles, and the delegator will not. Cards may not be combined, listed for sale on the market, or transferred while they are delegated to another player.
When a card is un-delegated, it returns to the owner immediately, however it is subject to the same 7-day cooldown period for ranked play as if it had been transferred. This is to prevent the same set of cards from being used by multiple accounts to move up the ranked play leaderboard in a season. There is currently no cooldown period for tournament play.
We are currently working with the teams at Peak Monsters as well as BuildTeam to offer a leasing market for cards where players can offer their cards for lease at a certain price and other players can browse the available leases and purchase the ones they would like.
The protocol now allows for players to give delegation authority to another account which will allow it to manage their card delegations for them. This way a player can give delegation authority to the market of their choice, and the market can handle all of the delegations on the player's behalf in a completely automated fashion.
Currently, just like with gifting cards, if you want to delegate many different cards through the user interface on the Steem Monsters website you must do it one card at a time, which is slow and difficult.
We are currently working on a complete redesign of the card collection and market screens which, among many other improvements, will introduce the concept of "card sets". This will allow players to group any number of cards into a set and then perform transactions such as delegation or selling on the market of the entire set at once.
We expect these additional features to be ready in the next few weeks.
The second new feature in this update is the ability to convert any unopened Alpha or Beta edition booster packs to tokens on the Steem Engine platform. This will allow Steem Monsters booster packs to be traded on the Steem Engine decentralized exchange!
On the pack opening page of the Steem Monsters website, there is now the option to convert your unopened booster packs into pack tokens. If you click on that option, you'll be asked how many packs you want to convert, and those packs will be removed from the quantity shown on that page (since packs converted to tokens cannot be opened) and the appropriate number of ALPHA or BETA tokens will be transferred to your Steem account.
Similarly, at any time you can transfer any ALPHA or BETA tokens on the Steem Engine platform to the 
This is an important step for us as it is our first integration between Steem Monsters and the Steem Engine platform. The work here will pave the way for our next integration which will be the upcoming in-game currency token, which many of you already know will be called "Dark Energy Crystals" or DEC.
Previously, the contents of each booster pack were generated deterministically based on data from the blockchain at the time the packs were purchased. This caused an issue as the more tech-savvy players could then see what was in the packs before opening them. As a result, we were forced to un-publish the algorithm for generating the cards in the booster packs which decreased the level of decentralization of the game and the card assets.
With this update, the cards in booster packs are now generated at the time the packs are opened. This means that opening packs now requires a transaction to the blockchain which takes a few seconds. Rather than showing the boring loading spinner during this time, we've added a slick pack opening animation created by the amazing 
Even without requiring a blockchain transaction, a cool pack opening animation is something that is present in nearly every digital trading card game, and we feel that it adds to the excitement of opening packs.
Of course, we still offer the ability to open all of your packs at once for those of you who don't appreciate the excitement and anticipation of opening them one at a time :-)
In addition to the new pack opening animation, this update now allows us to publish the algorithm for generating the cards in booster packs. There is now a basic UI to verify the contents of packs based on the blockchain data from the pack opening transaction at this link and those of you who are interested in seeing the actual algorithm can simply inspect the page source and look at the JavaScript code.
