Now that our pre-sale period has ended (much sooner than expected!) we are moving on to the next phase of the project which will include a new Beta edition of the cards and the release of the first version of the gameplay system in the near future.
We want to make sure everyone is fully informed about what is coming up and our plans for the project going forward. As always we welcome and seriously consider any feedback from the community and supporters of the game, so please feel free to speak your mind (in a constructive manner of course)!
Total Capped Supply: 900,000 booster packs
Week of September 17th, 2018
Our Fundition/Kickstarter campaign will run through Oct 1st. We have added some new deals for those who wish to purchase Beta edition booster packs in bulk.
For $5,000, you can purchase 3,000 beta edition booster packs, which represents a 20% increase over the base price.
For $5,600 you can purchase 3,000 beta edition booster packs plus everything in the Monster Master funding tier (beta boosters).
Please note that crowdfunding rewards will not be avaialble immediately once the campaigns end on October 1st. It will take us some time to get everything ready and get redemption codes out to backers. We expect those to be available by the end of October.
Purchases of 100 or more packs in a single transaction will receive 10% additional bonus packs, and purchases of 500 packs in a single transaction will receive 15% additional bonus packs.
All of the same cards from the Alpha edition will be avaialble in the Beta edition; however, Beta edition cards will have a new frame design making them easily distiunguishable from their Alpha edition counterparts. There will also be new filters added to all applicable areas of the website to separate the different editions of cards.
The Beta edition will also contain 10 new Monster cards and 5 new Summoner cards.
There will be one new, epic Summoner for each of the 5 elemental splinters. The Dragon splinter will receive a new summoner from the Kickstarter/Fundition crowdfunding campaign.
The 10 new Monsters will be "neutral", meaning they are not a part of any specific splinter and that they can be summoned by any Summoner. They will have standard rarities (common, rare, epic, legendary), with the same drop rates by rarity, and they will come in regular and gold foil variants.
The "You Are Legendary" crowdfunding tier includes the creation of five (5) new legendary Summoner cards designed by the backers of that tier level. We are not sure how long this process will take, so how those new cards will be released will depend on the number of Beta edition booster packs that have been sold by the time these new cards are ready.
If less than half (450,000) of the Beta edition booster packs have been sold by the time the new legendary Summoners are ready, then they will be airdropped to Beta pack purchasers based on the number of packs they have purchased and then they will be included in the Beta packs as normal going forward.
If more than half of the Beta edition booster packs have been sold by the time the new legendary Summoners are ready, then they will simply be added into the next edition and will not be part of Beta.
As previously announced, When the Beta edition is released, we plan to scale up the XP by a factor of 10 for all of the cards in order to allow for smaller amounts of XP to be given out through gameplay.
Currently, a max level common card requires 756 XP, and each individual common card is worth 2 XP when combining. With the scaling, a max level common card will require 7,560 XP, and each individual common card will be worth 20 XP when combining.
We want to be very clear that the number of Alpha edition cards required to combine to reach each level will not change.
Also as previously announced, the Beta edition cards will be worth less XP when combining than their Alpha edition counterparts. This means that it will require combining more Beta edition cards to reach each level than it does for Alpha edition cards. This will give Alpha edition cards some additional value (beyond just being rare and cool) without affecting gameplay.
This will also apply to Beta edition gold foil cards which will start out with less XP than the same Alpha edition gold foil card and require more cards to combine to each level.
The stats and abilities of Beta edition cards will remain the same at each level as the same card in the Alpha edition. This means that Beta edition cards will have exactly the same value in gameplay as Alpha edition cards. The differences between the same card in the different editions will be limited to the visuals and the amount of XP they are worth when combining, just like gold foil cards.
Also like gold foil cards, there may at times be alpha-edition only tournaments in which beta edition cards may not be played.
Although we had previously announced plans to allow combining of Alpha and Beta edition cards together, we have decided to hold off on this for a few reasons.
We received some feedback from community members and supporters who prefer that Alpha and Beta cards not be able to be combined together, and additionally after starting to implement it in the website we feel that it is too complicated and will lead to a lot of confusion.
So, for the time being, we plan to keep Alpha and Beta edition cards separate. We will keep a close eye on how that goes and listen closely to community feedback and will be open to changing that in the future if necessary.
Initially we did not know how well this project would be received and we had been doing our best to figure things out as we go, including how to use avaialble funds.
Now that we have raised a significant amount of funds and many people in the community have invested in the game through our Alpha pre-sale or our crowdfunding campaign, we would like to be more organized and transparent as to how the funds will be used.
We plan to utilize the funds from the sale of the 900,000 Beta edition booster packs as follows:
Note that 30% of 900,000 booster packs at $2 each is roughly $540,000. This number suggests that if Beta packs sell out within a year we can offer $10,000 / week in sponsored prize pools.
We will do our best to stick to these plans; however, we reserve the right to change these at any time as needed to ensure the ongoing success of the project. We will strive to be as open and transparent as possible with the community about our plans and any subsequent changes.
Steem Monsters reserves the right to use Booster packs for promotional or marketing purposes as necessary. The expectation is that no more than 5% of the total Beta edition packs available will be used for these purposes. Any packs used this way will come out of the total available pool of 900,000 Beta booster packs.
We are working very hard to get the initial version of the gameplay released by the end of September as we had originally estimated; however, a number of unanticipated things have come up which required the attention of the development team.
As a result we are behind schedule on the gameplay system compared to where we hoped to be by this point, and the launch may be delayed until mid-October. Even though this will be an alpha release, which may contain bugs and balance issues, we still want to make sure we put out a solid product. Rushing something out that's not ready will likely cause more harm to the project than good.
We know how excited everyone is to get their cards dirty and we are doing everything we can to ensure that a solid and fun fighting system is released as quickly as possible while also balancing the multiple stakeholder needs of this project.
Steem Monsters Contact Info
Official Account: 
Website: https://steemmonsters.com
Discord: https://discord.gg/CAFJRjY
