Steem Monsters Alpha Cards will not be combinable with Beta cards

Over the weekend, the Steem Monsters team has come up with some new information regarding the Beta cards, which will start to be available as if this week.
In my view, the most important piece of news that Alpha and Beta cards will not be combinable. This is different from the previously announced plan to make them combinable.

I must say that I think that this is a really wise decision, as I did not like the earlier approach too much. The original approach would have made trading quite complex as it would have been difficult to keep track of what content is included in which cards and how to value this. This new way is now much more straight forward and follows the same approach as we have already seen it with the gold foil cards.
To be honest though, it is still not my preferred solution, which would have been to allow combining Alpha / Beta and whatever cards there may be in the future, while automatically converting the combined to card to a Beta (or whatever is the currently latest edition) card. This approach would have reduced the number of Alpha cards over time and would thus have been value accretive for Alpha card HODLers. But ok, I will not complain and find the current approach ok.

But what does this mean for card values and trading?

Well, first of all it means that if you want to level up your existing Alpha cards you either need to go the cumbersome way of levelling through fighting - or you need to buy additional Alpha cards on the secondary market. Alternatively you can of course sell your Alpha cards in order to use the funds to level up Beta cards by buying packs and / or buying them on the secondary market. Given that most early adopters will have more Alpha cards then Beta cards for a relatively long period of time, I think that will not be an option for most users. Consequently I think that this will result in additional buying pressure for the Alpha cards - especially for the Gold Foil cards, which will be hard to level up with beta cards as the number of beta cards will only increase slowly over time.

What other details were released about the Beta edition?

1. The amount of Beta packs will be limited to 900,000 packs, so 3 times the number of the Alpha packs. Given that the XP per Beta card will be lower ( i think the number of 25% was not confirmed in the update), this means that the amount of potentially maxed Beta cards will however not be 3x that of the Alpha cards but rather something in the magnitude of 2.25x.
2. As part of the Beta release there will be new cards 10 new cards, of which 5 are summoners and 5 are monsters. These cards will be neutral, meaning that they do not belong to one specific splinter. This makes them especially valuable as they will allow players to create much more versatile decks. I am sure that these cards will be the most wanted once in the Beta deck and I would expect these cards to fetch at least similar or even higher prices than their Alpha peers.

Start of gameplay might me slightly delayed

Slightly sad news for all people (like myself) looking forward so much for the start of the gameplay is the news that the release of the initial gameplay might me delayed by about two weeks. This is due to the fact that the development team ran into some issue that need to be resolved. While this is clearly slightly sad I think it is ore important to come up with a fully functional first version rather than one with significant bugs. And two weeks see to be acceptable even for the greatest addicts like myself.

As always, I wish you all the best with game,
Tim