Tomorrow, Steem Monsters will open its doors to the public and the battles can begin. We have already played on the testservers with dozens of people over the past few weeks. And I got to say, this is going to be legendary!
A Revolution For Gaming
I have grown up surrounded by games and even became a game tester for Germany's biggest Entertainment magazine company which run a special role play games section for World of Warcraft and co. I have also been a moderate fan of Magic the Gathering, the Lord of the Rings card game and later Hearthstone on the computer. Long story short: I kind of know what I am talking about when it comes to games like this.
Non-Fungible Tokens
The first fact that jumps at ones attention is the ownership and uniqueness of the cards that Steem Monsters creates with an entry on the Steem blockchain. Owning the cards gives you the right to use it any way you like. And the uniqueness gives all cards a certain rarity and drives the price up. You can call them Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT), just like Crypto Kitties, but placed on the Steem blockchain with all its benefits like free transactions (well, they cost Ressource Credits so low SP accounts will be limited in their daily games) and the fast transaction time of three seconds.
Shrinking Total Supply
The Alpha and Beta edition are both limited in total supply. We can never buy Alpha cards again and they have certain advantages, resulting in higher demand and prices. Steem Monsters has created a clever system of combining cards to level them up and get better stats and abilities. The side-effect of that is a shrinking total supply of cards. For an Alpha card with the common rarity it takes 379 cards of the same kind to level up to the highest level 10. For a Beta card it takes even 505 of the same card. NFT's have a massive potential in the future and are easily stored on Steem!
For example, the Dragon Summoner Selenia Sky is a legendary card and hence pretty rare. From the Alpha edition there are only 1633 total Selenia Sky's in existence. Out of them there have been several combined already and limited the total supply down to 1308 cards. This number will further shrink to a minimum of 204 cards when all existing cards are maxed out. That is a very small number for a game and makes the card exclusive to own one day.
Decentralized Market and Gaming
Everyone can use and trade Steem Monsters on Steem. You can create your own market place like Peakmonster and get half of the 5% fees for each card sale. The same goes for the cards and its use in games: if you are a game developer you can now include these cards in any way you can imagine. You could potentially add your own NFT's and enrich the market even further. This is a very interesting concept because it allows an easy transfer of your virtual items into different games. This wasn't possible like that before.
Money Tournaments
There will be constant money prizes to win. So far, there are $100 daily and $1000 weekly prizes, as far as I know. And that for at least one year. This is a fair amount of money to motivate enough people to get more cards and Steem Power. There will be even special tournaments just for Alpha or Gold Foil cards (very rare variants). This will drive up the demand and price of all the cards.
Card Delegation
This is where it gets really interesting: Just like when we delegate Steem power to other accounts but keep ownerships of it, we will be able to delegate cards to other accounts as well. This concept is absolutely mind blowing and opens the room to create a passive income with your cards. Potentially forever! I really don't know where this is going but I am more than curious to say the least.
Amazing Gameplay
When I first read that Steem monsters will be all about preparing your teams and then watch and automated fight I was sceptical. But testing the game in action convinced me otherwise. It is so much more strategic then games like Hearthstone, where you draw cards from a deck you prepare. You never know what you get on your hand. With Steem Monsters you know exactly what you send into the battle.
Before a battle, you create your team by coming up with a strategy of abilities and placements that fits into the current Mana cap. This limit, as well as active splinters and other special rules, will be changed regularly in different conflicts, that have their own timer. Via an overall leaderboard you can track your progress and see the last teams from the other players.
Although the actual battle is automated, it is still fascinating to watch. The animations are gorgeous and and the entire atmosphere really well created. You can also fast forward or skip the game as the outcome of a game is calculated immediately. And all takes place in the browser, without any application to be installed. I am totally shocked to see what is possible to create in such a short time. Respect to 
New Users For Steem
Last but not least, all players of Steem Monsters will have their own Steem accounts thanks to the easy account creation process that came with the hardfork 20. This will help in onboarding new users like poentially no other app on Steem before. The gaming industry is massive and beautiful games like Steem Monsters, that even give you so much value, are easily adopted by thousands of gamers. If we see tons of young people jump over to Steem for the first time to play the game, then we know that Steem Monsters is a Killer Application.
Like all in the crypto world this is a big speculation. Nobody knows what will happen. But from my gaming perspective I must say that it looks really good for Steem Monsters and with it for Steem. Either way, when tomorrow the battles begin, we will start a new era for Steem in terms of innovation and entertainment!