Many people have fond memories of collecting sports cards, whether as a child or an adult, and Epics Digital Collectibles aims to provide the modernized esports version of that experience.

Epics.gg is a digital trading card platform built around Counter-Strike: Global Offensive , with collectible cards based on players from teams like G2 Esports, Immortals, Virtus.pro, SK Gaming, and more. From the iOS or Android app (with a web version to follow), users can earn and open free packs of cards, as well as purchase premium packs to find rarer cards.

The digital cards, which feature live-updated stats, can then be traded or sold via the platform, as users try to fill out their collections and top leaderboards. Pro players can also bind in-game CS:GO item skins to cards and trade them to Epics.gg, who will make them available for fans to acquire. These Relics items are tracked and secured via the Ethereum blockchain to ensure ownership and authenticity, and they can be traded back to a Steam account at any point for in-game usage.

It’s a new frontier for both collectible cards and esports, but Epics co-founder Mark Donovan sees a bright future ahead. Following a $2M seed round in January, Epics just launched its mobile apps in an early access beta—and the company intends to expand to other games in the future. We spoke with Donovan about why digital cards are a perfect fit for esports, and why CS:GO was the ideal starting point for Epics.gg.

Why do digital cards make sense for the esports ecosystem?

That’s a great question. The reason we came up with this concept was because my partner Gavin [Weeks] and I both grew up in different parts of the world—he grew up in the UK, and I grew up in the middle of nowhere in Canada. When he was growing up, he was collecting Panini stickers for World Cup sticker books, and I was collecting Upper Deck hockey cards, Topps cards for the NFL, and Star Wars cards.

Basically, we both grew up collecting as kids. Back then, when it was all analog, you’d have to take your cards in a shoebox to school so that you could trade back and forth with friends, get rid of your dupes, and fill out the rest of your season collection, right? That was fine for us growing up, but there’s a whole generation of people growing up today, especially people who are fans of esports—there’s a big overlap—who don’t want to have 10,000 cards, which I have sitting in my parents’ basement collecting dust.

They want to be able to do it with anyone in the world on their phone. So you can have 10,000 cards on your phone, no problem. You can buy, sell, and trade, you can have much better access to them, and it’s much easier to transact with other people when it’s just digital. And I think there’s even a generation of people who are not going to have an interest in collecting physical cards. And if they do, it’s going to be a small, novelty set of the users, and the most hardcore people that want to do it, rather than the entire audience.

Why start with Counter-Strike: Global Offensive?

Well, one—because we’ve been fans of Counter-Strike. It actually just had its 19th birthday the other day, so there’s a huge history of people who have played the game. Let’s compare it to a Fortnite or League of Legends : there’s only 11M people a month who play CS:GO, which seems a lot smaller than those games. But there’s this huge audience of people who might not play the game actively anymore but are still interested in the scene and still follow it, and still have a huge affinity towards the game itself.

That’s one thing: the history and the audience that’s there for it. The other thing is just the history and the audience of the teams and the players. There are people in CS:GO that are legends, like a GeT_RiGhT or F0rest—people that have been playing the game for a significant amount of time that have this huge history and huge fan base. That’s another aspect.

And then on top of that, there’s already a thriving digital goods ecosystem around Counter-Strike as well—multi-millions of dollars of items being traded digitally for CS:GO. Some of them are worth hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of dollars. So there’s already an understanding within the community that a digital item can have value, and can be precious and unique, and interesting to go out and acquire and trade and show off to your friends. That’s really why it lends itself perfectly to our product for launch.

What kind of response have you seen from teams and pro players?

It’s been a really good response. We’ve got a fantastic list of teams that we’re launching with. They’ve been very supportive, and there’s a couple of reasons why. Number one, obviously, is there’s a monetary reason for them—they see the potential of a trading card product for them. But beyond that, and more importantly, there’s a huge element of storytelling and fan engagement that collectible cards bring to bear.

Growing up, when you weren’t playing hockey or you weren’t watching hockey, you were collecting cards around it. You were talking to your friends and comparing stats between different players, and making up your own games of war between your hockey cards and their hockey cards, or your Panini cards and their Panini cards. That was fun, and that’s a big engagement point around a sport or esport that builds a lifelong fan of the game.

On top of that, when you start to open up packs and you get a player that you didn’t think you were going to be that happy with, you flip it over and you read their bio and you’re like, “Wow, that person actually has an interesting history. They’re from a town not far from where I’m from.” Or, “Wow, I didn’t realize that they were this good. Look at their stats, they’re really awesome.” And then you start to really become fans of people or teams that you didn’t think you were going to become a fan of. That’s a unique thing that trading cards can do that not a lot of other fan engagement tactics can do for teams.

What kind of feedback have you gotten from testers so far?

It’s been really good. We’re just about to launch early access for the app. Obviously, we did a closed testing group before this, but the feedback has been really good. Surprisingly… I don’t want to name names, because I don’t have permission to, but the number one person on our leaderboards during our closed testing period was one of the managers of a major esports team.

It lends itself to competitive people, right? So the app actually has leaderboards that are based on how complete your collection is, and the quality of your cards. Like, how low the mint numbers are and a few other factors. It’s a lot of fun to get in and compete. One of the key things that people want us to do from here, I think, is to build some ways to show off your card collection—your really rare cards. And also ways to use them, like meta-games within the ecosystem.

Do you see Epics expanding out to other games in the future?

Absolutely. We’ll not only have more games—our plan is very much to add more content that our fellow gamers would be interested in collecting as well, whether that’s content from games themselves, or comics, or a bunch of other content categories as well.

Disclaimer: BITKRAFT Esports Ventures, an investor in The Esports Observer, is also an investor in Epics.gg.

