Building Origins AMA: ranked until 4 December, 22 new cards in November and why Bagheera costs more

Ranked: 19 October to 4 December, Grandmaster from the 27th

The team gave the dates with a warning: "they're written in pencil and I carry a lot of white out". The ranked season starts on 19 October, the first day of Steam Next Fest, and runs until 4 December. The Grandmaster leaderboard stays closed during the festival and should open on Tuesday 27 October, so that "everyone will start at the same time".

The best prizes go to the top of that leaderboard, including "one of one or one of 25 exclusive rewards" that Mike, from the Koin team, called "probably the best prizes in the entire game". This season has ranked rewards before the full monetization arrives, "maybe the only time ever", and the items you earn in the demo now will be out of print at launch. More in our ranked guide.

November: a monetization playtest and new cards every two weeks

The November builds are monetization playtests. If plans hold, November also brings "at least 22 new cards", with new cards and locations every two weeks during the ladder season. Further out, Mike said the team is "headed towards launching the game next year" and that the interface, which still looks mobile, will look "far more PC" by the end of the year; Kevin said mobile is coming "soon", without a date. The confirmed dates are in our roadmap.

Future cards: 20 Legendaries, over 90 locations and food

The demo holds "the first half" of the first set; the second half adds keywords and new concepts. Ben, the lead card designer, said 20 Legendaries are planned and "over 90" locations are designed, against the roughly 40 players have seen. Many current locations favour aggressive decks like Three Not So Little Pigs; that should even out as more arrive.

The new mechanic he is "pretty excited about" is food, pushed back because it's "a little bit advanced": an item on the board that isn't a character. A character played on top of it gets a bonus, "right now it's plus two plus two", so positioning matters more. Another sub-theme is coming, "created cards cost less". No new card was named.

Later sets will visit other mythologies: a Greek mythology set is planned, with some cards already designed. Koin also promised collaborations and said that studios "number one in the world in their respective categories" have approached it, without naming them.

Collector pass, capsules and commanders

Origins stays free-to-compete: every player gets every gameplay card, nobody should feel "forced to spend anything", and money goes into limited variants, as in Counter-Strike. The pieces:

• the collector pass (a working name): a one-time purchase of "around 20 bucks", not a monthly battle pass, giving about two collectibles a week through play, never of a kind found in packs;
• shop credits earned by playing, for other exclusive collectibles;
• capsules, a second kind of item: packs only hold cards, while commanders come from capsules;
• commanders, tradable and limited in supply; in early access everyone gets four non-tradable ones, with emotes and avatars, as a "starting endowment".

Koin is also exploring collectible, customisable cases and binders to browse other players' collections. Sets and grading are in our article on sets and the collector economy guide; for the Kickstarter, "the pricing is going to be revealed soon".

Spectating, replays and boards

• Spectate mode exists but "is not finished": at the Crimson Cup only some accounts approved for streaming will use it.
• Replays work internally but aren't ready for players; a turn-by-turn history is planned.
• Seeing how many cards your opponent replaced at the mulligan, a community idea, was already in the internal build: it shipped with the 0.7.1 playtest.
• The current game board is a placeholder, "too sci-fi and bland": boards inspired by each boss are in the works, and cosmetic boards are coming.
• Bots: "at peak, we have about 200 concurrent players", Mike said, so some ranked matches are against bots for now; missions are explicitly PvE.

Why Bagheera, Mind Palace and Spellbook cost more

Patch 0.7 raised all three by 1 mana. Ben said the team wasn't planning changes, then the cards players kept flagging "started getting better play rates" until the numbers were no longer healthy. He didn't give win rates, only that they had been "in healthy ranges".

• Bagheera is a card "very important for us to get right": it sets the early pace and teaches new players where a threat will show up, "in the same three spots", the middle spaces where its On Reveal ability grows it. As a 1-mana 3/3 it was in too many decks, Three Not So Little Pigs above all. Koin wants it to be a card for Mulan, who repeats On Reveal abilities, so it kept the big bonus and raised the cost. A stronger Mulan deck, Ben noted, could in turn make Ellen Trechend stronger.
• Spellbook will change the most when the card pool doubles, because its spells come from that pool. Kevin counted about 22 spells today, so a Legion of the Dead comes up roughly "one in 22", odds that "will not last very long".
• Ellen Trechend: "no action", and nothing to expect "in the immediate future".

Before the Crimson Cup, Koin is "committed" to leaving cards as they are; in a "catastrophic" case, "we would just ban the card rather than change it".

Christopher Robin and Axe Throw

Christopher Robin went from 5/4 to 4/5 because it was in many decks with a good win rate, and in onboarding games new players kept meeting Golden Egg across from it with no way out but trading; as a 4/5, a Galahad played afterwards changed the fights. The team reverted it (demo patch of 21 September) because it was considering moving Axe Throw "back up to five" damage, wasn't ready to, and wanted Axe Throw, 4 damage today, to stay good against the most played cards. "It wasn't necessarily just purely a power level concern", Ben said. The Twister Toss rework also removes a clunky moment: the move no longer fails if another card enters the space first.

How Koin designs the game

• Bands, not equal power: "we're not really focused on making sure every card is the equal power level", Ben said; the team steps in when a card leaves the healthy bands.
• Data and feelings: numbers plus feedback, because "the player sentiment is actually data too" (Kevin), and a goal they call "net positive joy": the winner of an interaction feels good without the loser feeling terrible.
• Few, heavy decisions: 12 base cards plus a Legendary make "13 decisions", so a change of mana cost weighs more than in bigger decks.
• Simultaneous turns, three locations and a Legendary you "don't have to draw", in a game meant to be fun to watch "since the very beginning".
• Friendlier rules on purpose: removing an ongoing buff never kills a character, and Shield stops Trample completely.

What we don't know yet

• Every date is "written in pencil" and can move.
• What the ladder rewards and the 1-of-1 prizes are: Koin is "still in the kitchen".
• When food, the other Legendaries and the Greek set arrive, and with which cards.
• The Kickstarter prices, and how many commanders and capsules there will be.

Where this comes from

The recording of the Building Origins AMA on the official Origins TCG YouTube channel, live on 2 October 2026 and published on 5 October (2 hours and 22 minutes), with Kevin Lambert, chief product officer and head of design at Koin Games, Ben "Benny Beatdowns", lead card designer and formerly at Wizards of the Coast on Magic, and others from the team. We used YouTube's automatic English subtitles, which mangle some names (card names checked against our database): the quotes are our own transcription.