Crimson Cup rules: three-deck Conquest, decklists hidden until the top 4 and a check-in you can't miss

Three-deck Conquest

A few days ago Koin Games ran a survey among players, and this announcement settles the format: the Crimson Cup uses Conquest with three decks. Between each pair of decks there must be at least 8 unique cards.

Every deck has 13 different cards: the Legendary and twelve base cards, whose second copy the game adds on its own. Our reading is that two decks can share at most 5 cards, but the announcement does not spell out how unique cards are counted. At Big Bob's Playtest Battle in August the rule was at least nine cards of difference.

Decklists hidden until the top 4

Decks stay private until the top 4. When you ban one of your opponent's decks, you only see its Legendary.

Best-of-five: no ban, win with all three

Best-of-five matches have no ban: to take the match you have to win with all three decks. In the first announcement, on 9 September, best-of-five was the grand final, with best-of-three matches before it.

Check-in: be on time

The planned schedule for each qualifier:

1. Check-in opens two hours before the tournament starts.
2. Check-in and deck submission close five minutes before the official start.
3. A short window lets players on the waitlist claim the free spots, first come, first served.
4. The tournament introduction.
5. Matches start as soon as the introduction is over.

If you don't check in, you can't play. For the EMEA qualifier on 20 October, which starts at 7pm CEST, that means checking in between 5pm and 6:55pm CEST. The AMER qualifier is on the 21st and the APAC one on the 22nd: times and spots are in our Steam Next Fest guide.

Update, 7 October: there are now five qualifiers. On 5 October Koin added AMER on 19 October at 7pm EST and EMEA on 22 October at 7pm CEST, and its new calendar graphic puts the AMER qualifier of the 21st at 9pm EST, with 32 advancing instead of 64 and 96 wild cards instead of 128. Seven locations are also out of the tournament pool. Everything is in our article on the prize pool and the new qualifiers.

Demo or playtest: where to practise

• The demo has the tournament card list. Ranked switches on there for Steam Next Fest, with new ranked rewards. This is the build to practise on.
• The playtest is the same as the demo today, with ranked already on and a few minor changes. It will get more updates and will be different from the tournament build.

You can play both, but the tournament is held on the main demo and only with the cards available there.

The last balance patch

The last balance patch will arrive two weeks before Steam Next Fest, which starts on 19 October. We will track it card by card in MetaShifting.

Update, 30 September: the last balance patch came out earlier than announced, on 29 September. It is patch 0.7, which the team calls the final balance patch before the tournament: Twister Toss is reworked, and Bagheera, Mind Palace and Spellbook cost 1 more.

Prizes

The official post on X talks about a 10,000-dollar prize pool, and the Discord announcement says the exact prize pool will be shared next week. In September Koin described prizes worth 10,000 dollars in total, between an exclusive 1/1 promo card, other promo cards, digital packs, Alpha boxes and cases, and cash (our article).

Update, 7 October: the breakdown arrived on 5 October. The winner takes a 1/1 Dracula promo card, two booster box cases and $1,500 in cash; promo cards go down to the top 32 and packs to the top 256. The full table is in our article on the prize pool.

What we don't know yet

• The exact prize pool, due next week: it came on 5 October, see the update above.
• How the unique cards between two decks are counted.

Where this comes from

• The "Big Crimson Cup announcement" posted on the official Origins TCG Discord on 24 September, which also points to a new video going over the tournament details.
• The Origins TCG post on X of the same day, with the 10,000-dollar prize pool.