Steem Monsters: The Mechanics of Cooldown

Many a new player has asked “I just bought this card but why doesn’t it show up when I play a game?” A lot of the time, the reason for this is cooldown.

What is cooldown you might ask? When a card is played in a Ranked game, this triggers a 7 day cooldown period so that if you transfer, sell, or delegate the card, it cannot be used in another Ranked game until the cooldown period has lapsed.

Cooldown was introduced to limit the abuse of multiple accounts all using the same set of cards. For example, you could play one account to get into the Top of the leaderboards with a single collection of cards, transfer all the cards to another account, and then get into the Top leaderboards with another account using those same cards.

Tournament, Practice, and Challenge games do not trigger cooldown with any cards that you use. And you can use cards with cooldown in these formats as well. Currently, cooldown only applies to Ranked games.

The cooldown icon is a little clock. Here is what it looks like:

The game screen only shows cooldown as it applies to that account. Take a look at this example:

The Level 3 Malric Inferno is on cooldown for this account. It was played in a Ranked game in the past week by another account so if I want to play it in Ranked, I need to wait for the cooldown to end.

The Level 2 Malric Inferno has not been played recently in Ranked by any account. If I transfer it to another account, it will not have cooldown and can be used immediately.

The Level 4 Malric Inferno has been played recently in Ranked by this account. Since the cooldown icon uses the current account as the frame of reference, the cooldown icon isn’t highlighted. But if I transferred this card to another account, there will be a cooldown based on the last time I used the card in Ranked (not by when the card was transferred).

The main website doesn’t differentiate the status between the Level 2 and Level 4 Malrics. However, the Peak Monsters website does show this distinction:

Here you can see that the Level 4 Malric does have cooldown triggered.

Sometimes there will be situations where you have several cards of the same level. One of them has been played recently by your account and the others haven’t. But now you want to transfer one of them and want to make sure you transfer one without cooldown:

Checking the Peak Monsters website reveals which of the Card ID’s has cooldown:

Sometimes cards for sale or which are available for rent have cooldown. There may still be good reasons to choose them. Cards for sale with cooldown are sometimes available at a cheaper price. So if you are willing to wait a few days, you can save some money. Plus you can still use the card in tournaments, practice, or challenges. If you’re renting cards for a tournament (and not Ranked play) then you can ignore cooldown. This is especially applicable to Alpha or Gold Foil cards when you already have a Regular Beta version you can use in Ranked and just need the card for the tournament.

You can also sometimes get around cooldown when combining (leveling up) cards. When you combine cards, one of the cards will be subsumed into the other. The final card will retain the Card ID and the cooldown status (or lack of cooldown) of that final card. In a future article I will discuss the mechanics of combining cards and how to improve your chances so that the final card does not have cooldown.

So playing a card in Ranked triggers the cooldown status but that status might not be clearly visible until you transfer, sell, delegate, or undelegate the card.

Also note that if you play a card in Ranked, transfer the card to another account, and then immediately transfer it back to the original account, the card will now have cooldown and cannot be used. The card does not “remember” exactly which account was originally used to trigger the cooldown.