"Having grown up in the competitive Magic scene, I jumped at the chance to host a tournament for Coom Battles. While on the one hand, I was sad that I wouldn't be able to play, there is a joy in being able to sit back and watch the heartache, the struggle, the sweat, the burn and finally the triumph of your best friends while they compete in a engaging new game called CoomBattles." Brett Banfe

After 5 rounds of competitive play with $500 staked as prizes and 5 hours of play, only 8 remain. A few are no novices to tournament competitive CoomBattles play even though this was the first official tournament in the card game's young history. That's because a group of Japanese and Chinese players have began organizing their own tournmanets with their own prizes.

Sporting two modes of play, a free-mode allowing all users to wield the powerful magic of Otherworldly Worlds along with a Ranked Play mode coming soon allowing the ability to play with digital cards that are owned, CoomBattles has a vision for disrupting the competitive trading card space.

"A lot of TCGs have lagged behind other eSports when it comes to prize winnings for competitive play," said one of the developers of the project, <@1097617825666977964>. "We think we can step into that space and be the premier venue to allow gamers to compete for prizes and tournamnet winnings. By using blockchain we allow our gamers to actually own the cards they play with instead of being platform dependent."

The game has exploded onto the competitive TCG scene and has big sights set on eventually growing larger than Hearthstone.

"Pokemon and Hearthstone have billions of cards and hundreds of millions of monthly revenue across millions of active gamers. We see a big opportunity to leverage the powers of blockchain to provide brand new web3 gaming experiences for TCG and digital trading card gamers."

Whether they meet their lofty goals remains to be seen, but in the meantime, their growing community is loving the direction the game is going:

"I like turtles." - <@951514214365806592>

Yes, indeed, sir. Turtles.

Reporting live from San Diego, back to you, news team!"

- Brett Banfe