Hi Steemit friends and Steem Monsters,
With already 4 distinct Editions
- Alpha (59)
- Beta (79)
- Promo (4)
- Reward (30)
with beautiful art design, Steem Monsters has grown into 113 unique designed monster cards, thousands of card owners, traders and players, different discord communities, a official trading market, a few secondary markets like peakmonsters, ranked play battle and currently the automatic tournaments in preparation. It all started last May 2018 and soon Steem Monsters will celebrate it's first birthday.
If you compare that to the famous and well known Magic the Gathering (MTG) it is still tiny. This famous trading card game has grown in the 90s to about 20 million collectors and players and was a true phenomenon at the time. Nearly 14,000 uniqe designed cards exist today. One of the most famous is the Black Lotus which is traded for prices up to 5 figures!
If we look for equivalent in Steem Monsters you could draw a gold foil legendary from the first alpha edition like the Angel of Light
They could be sold for 3 figures in USD and if you are lucky and own a gold foil Selenia Sky it could be even 4 figures.
Why was MTG so successful?
One reason was true ownership of the cards. You bought them as a booster pack like with Steem Monsters today but they were physical things you could touch, trade, sell and use for battle. You owned them unless someone stole them or you gave them away for any reason.
Nowadays we have them on the blockchain đ linked to your Steem account. That's similar but digital. You cannot smell, touch or feel them but they are basically yours.
What i mean with basically?
To see and touch a paper card you have just to pull your drawer and open your MTG box but to see and use your Steem Monster Cards you have to use a web frontend which visualizes them beside a Unique Identifier on the Steem blockchain. The graphics are not part of the blockchain, they reside on a central server. Unless you print them like i did for fun they are still a bit elusive.
So basically they are your cards because you have the proof of ownership as long the Steem blockchain is running which is much more decentralized like the Steem Monsters Server but also not optimal. But put this aside because Steem is on a good way with this strong community and we'll find ways for more decentralization and security for such non fungible tokens (NFT) with a given market value what the cards represent.
The current Gameplay
Summarizing the current gameplay is like "Who is the best deck builder and then let it go". First you have to pick a summoner who determines what's your splinter (fire, water, green, life, death) how much mana you have left, which special abilities, battle values you'll get and overall how are your winning chances. The decision for a splinter is also dependend on the rule set of the current conflict and if your splinter is allowed to play.
Second you choose your battle cards đš within a selected splinter to complete your deck. This is the most complex task because you have to decide who is the tank in front, who is the healer, do you want use strong magic or melee or have a sneaky ninja like card who goes through the rows of your enemy. A timer pushes you to decide fast and leads inevitably to the battle decision. The battle runs fully automatic. Your fate is determined by your card choice and RNG (random generated numbers) in the case of a mirror deck.
Climb the Ranks
With each victory â you gain points and climb the ladder of the rank list. If you reach a certain number you'll enter a new league and with that you get more rewards at the end of a season (which is usually 14 days currently).
Season Rewards
From Bronze to Champion you'll get more reward cards. These can be traded or used to level up your monsters to strenghten your deck.
Additionally the top players đšī¸ will get booster packs for their achievement. Each booster packs contains 5 random cards.
If you wanna reach the top ten you have to buy and collect a serious amount of cards đ, if not you can get at least the rewards for entering a certain league at end of season and if you were lucky like me you'll get sometimes a legendary card which is always a happy event for a player.
If you are extremely lucky you can get the gold foil card like my Rusty Android above. Each card can be simply collected, traded or sold.
What's next in the Steem Monsters Universe
The next milestone will be automated tournaments on the main webpage. This will simplify the whole organisation and participation of tournaments which were held on another webpage called Challonge in the past with the support of discord chat. The impact of the automated tournaments is not clear currently but it is a improvement for sure and there will be a big prize of 20,000 STEEM đ in March!
The tokenization of booster packs, card delegation, market updates and a new Steem Monsters Token is also in the pipeline. The latter is a hot topic today because Steem-Engine inspires the whole Steem Community to create and distribute new tokens.
The DRAGON Token!
This one is from the german Legendary Dragons Discord Community around Steem Monsters and was created to reward users for different engagement related to Steem Monsters and maybe other things:
Please read for more details in the great post about it from 
Conclusion regarding the state of Steem Monsters
The project is ambitious enough to deserve attention not just from the Steemit community. I hope it can grow beyond it's current state to reach especially more casual players who don't have the time to fiddle with too much complexity. Different game modes for quick play with easy card delegation, the new planned token on the primary market would support this idea as well. I recommend also a redesign of the current landing page because the game deserves much more energy and cool visualization here. Put a cool teaser from the game and video in the background, some scroll parallax animation, less text, smoother and subtle color palette and let the very good monsters design shine on the page!
Maybe it can reach also more the collectors with some 3D visualization (think of VR real estate in dlux where you have room of honor and all your gold foil cards within a display case of glass litted by some light bulbs with visible golden glitter on them đ) in a more distant future.
The heart of every collector would jump to have more physical appearance together with advanced gameplay. Long term i see turn based gameplay mechanics which would bring in the tension and realtime tactics from MTG or nowadays MTGO but with full ownership for you! Developers should also watch out what Gods Unchained is doing because Ethereum is also tirelessly working on a scaling solution which could propel this card game to new heights with much faster transactions and far less fees. But for now, a hot Steem Monsters March awaits us!