Origins TCG at Steam Next Fest 2026: the numbers, ranked and the Crimson Cup

The festival and the tournament

• Steam Next Fest, October 2026 edition: 19–26 October. Valve's festival of playable demos ran from Monday 19 October at 10:00 Pacific time (13:00 Eastern, 18:00 UK, 19:00 central Europe) to Monday 26 October. Origins TCG was in it with its free demo, which had got its first big update on 21 September and ranked mode on 15 October.
• Origins TCG tournament: 19–25 October. Koin Games called it "our biggest tournament ever": a multi-day event that went Qualification → Playoffs → Finals, entirely online and in-game. CoachCrono won it on Sunday 25 October.

How the festival went

On 27 October 2026 Koin Games published the numbers of the week (Steam post): more than 20,000 wishlists, 30,000 downloads of the demo, over 300 people streaming the game and a peak of more than 5,000 concurrent viewers during the Crimson Cup, the number 2 TCG on Twitch at that moment. 256 players fought in the playoffs, and on Sunday CoachCrono won the grand final, which makes him the future owner of the 1/1 Dracula tournament promo card.

A few hours later the same day the demo ended: Origins TCG moved to Early Access on Steam with update 0.8, still free to play, with the Grandmaster Division open and collectible cards tradeable on the Steam Market (Koin's post). Account, collection and progression from the demo carried over. How to play it now is in our guide to playing Origins TCG on Steam.

What the demo brought to the festival

The big demo update tested in three closed playtests in August (patches 0.6.1, 0.6.2 and 0.6.3, all tracked in our MetaShifting) landed early, on 21 September 2026: a new interface and board, a collectors tutorial, test packs to open, new voice lines, balance changes and the tentative card list of the Crimson Cup, so players could build decks for the tournament. Progress carried over from the demo or the playtest, whichever was further ahead.

The decks, cards and bosses of the playtests were in the free demo, and so was deckbuilding: everyone built their own 25-card deck (one Legendary plus twelve cards, each played as two copies). Our card database has the 122 cards checked in the game on 22 September.

Koin had promised ranked mode "with the start of Steam Next Fest", "which will come with exclusive ranked rewards" (Steam post of 21 September). It arrived four days early, on 15 October 2026, with the ladder stopping at Grandmaster for the time being. How it works today, with the Grandmaster Division open since 27 October, is in our Origins TCG ranked guide.

The tournament, step by step

1. Qualifiers, 19–22 October. Five of them, 512 spots each and 32 advancing from each: AMER on the 19th at 7pm EST, EMEA on the 20th at 7pm CEST, AMER on the 21st at 9pm EST, APAC on the 22nd at 7pm SGT and EMEA on the 22nd at 7pm CEST, plus 96 wild cards. The AMER qualifier of the 19th and the EMEA one of the 22nd were added on 5 October, when the official calendar graphic also moved the AMER qualifier of the 21st to 9pm EST with 32 advancing instead of 64, and the wild cards from 128 to 96 (our article). In Koin's words, "you can join ANY of the qualifiers, no matter where you live": players could enter more than one.
2. Playoffs and finals, 24–25 October. The playoff stage had 256 spots on the 24th (10am EST / 4pm CEST / 10pm SGT) and four players came out of it for the finals on the 25th at 10am EST (3pm CET / 10pm SGT), won by CoachCrono. Content creators got wildcard invites straight into the playoffs.
3. Format. Official, from the announcements of 9 and 24 September: Conquest with three decks, with at least 8 unique cards between each pair of decks; decklists stayed hidden until the top 4, so when you banned one of your opponent's decks you only saw its Legendary. Best-of-3 matches, best-of-5 grand final: in best-of-five there was no ban and you had to win with all three decks. Details in our article on the rules.
4. Check-in. It opened two hours before each qualifier and closed five minutes before the start, together with deck submission; then a short first-come window gave waitlisted players the free spots. Players who missed the check-in could not play.
5. Which build. The tournament was played on the demo, with only the cards available there; the closed playtest, which got different updates, closed on 15 October. The final balance patch before the tournament, patch 0.7, arrived on 29 September 2026, three weeks before the first qualifier.
6. Prizes. Prizes worth $10,000, in Koin's own words, split between cash, collectibles and exclusive promo cards. The breakdown came on 5 October: the winner took a 1/1 Dracula promo card, two booster box cases and $1,500 in cash; 2nd a 1/8 Dracula promo card, one case and $750; 3rd and 4th a 1/8 promo card, two booster boxes and $350; the top 8 a booster box, a 1/8 promo card and $125; the top 16 a booster box and a Finalist Plus card; the top 32 ten packs and a Finalist card; then 8, 4 and 2 packs down to the top 256 (the full table). The tournament was called the Crimson Cup — the name is on Koin's own artwork, not a community nickname.
7. Location pool. Seven locations were out of the tournament, "very RNG heavy" in Koin's words: Junkyard, Cloning Lab, Reflecting Pool, Amplifying Amphitheatre, Giant's Beacon, The Colosseum and Nostradamus' Call. Room battles in the demo used the same pool, for practice. What each location does is on our Locations page.
8. Practice tournaments. Before the Cup Koin hosted weekly practice tournaments with no stakes, announced on Discord, to play against real people instead of bots.

Sign-ups were on the official Discord.

How to get started now, in five moves

1. Get Origins TCG on Steam: it is Free To Play, in Early Access since 27 October 2026. If you played the demo, your account and collection are already there.
2. Read Origins TCG explained in five minutes and the card database: the stats are those of patch 0.7 of 29 September, checked card by card in the game on 22 September; the 0.8 patch notes of 27 October mention no card changes.
3. Build three Conquest decks in our deck builder: it flags two decks with the same Legendary and counts the cards that differ between decks. Step by step, with real community decks: how to build a Conquest line-up.
4. Study the decks published by the community: every list comes with its composition charts, the author's notes, a button that opens it in the builder and the game code to paste into Origins. Publish yours with a guide so other players can rate it.
5. Follow the news: every announcement is summarized within a day, with a link to the source.

How OriginsMeta covered the week

During the festival we published the official numbers of every qualifier on our Crimson Cup page, and the final in our article on CoachCrono's win. Sources of this guide: the official Steam posts of 4 August, 25 August, 9 September, 21 September, 29 September, 5 October, 15 October and 27 October 2026, and the Steam Next Fest schedule.