Origins TCG opens 1,024 spots for Harvest Bowl, its first tournament with a sideboard

In Brief:

• Origins Trading Card Game announced the Harvest Bowl, a tournament with 1,024 spots split across two qualifiers on Nov. 28 and a 128-player final on Nov. 29.
• It’s the first Origins tournament with a sideboard, and the official account said 32 tournament promos are on offer.
• The event is part of a monthly Early Access tournament series that the team said will run until the full set launches in February.

Origins Trading Card Game has opened sign-ups for the Harvest Bowl, a 1,024-player tournament that brings sideboards to Origins competitive play for the first time.

The official @origins_tcg account announced the event on X with two qualifiers and 32 tournament promos. “Halloween is over but we’re not done with pumpkins yet,” the account said.

Two qualifiers, one final

Both qualifiers run Saturday, Nov. 28, and each one is capped at 512 players. Qualifier 1 starts at 10 a.m. EST (4 p.m. CET). Qualifier 2 follows at 4 p.m. EST (10 p.m. CET), and each has its own sign-up and check-in.

Each qualifier is a double-elimination bracket with best-of-three matches. Players who lose once drop to the losers’ bracket, and a second loss knocks them out. The top 32 from the winners’ bracket and the top 32 from the losers’ bracket advance, so each qualifier sends 64 players on.

That gives the final 128 players. It’s a separate tournament on Sunday, Nov. 29, at 10 a.m. EST (4 p.m. CET), described on the sign-up pages as “A 128 player seeded Swiss bracket with a 8 player Top Cut.”

Demand is high on the first slot. When the sign-up pages were fetched, Qualifier 1 had 476 of 512 places filled and Qualifier 2 had 337 of 512.

Sideboard rules

Players can bring a sideboard of up to three cards, handed in with their decks. Between games they swap cards one for one and don’t have to declare the swaps.

The tournament pages say the sideboard is “Not a rule of the game: an option of this tournament.”

Decks are free, according to the listing. Check-in opens two hours before the start and closes five minutes before, together with deck submission. Players who miss it don’t play.

Timing is strict once the bracket starts. From round two, a player has 15 minutes to open their match room after the match is ready. If they don’t, their opponent can claim the win by forfeit.

Who runs it

Both qualifiers are listed as community tournaments on OriginsMeta, organized by apixtwts, with aldrymus and luigidavdasragoni as judges. The whole event runs on the OriginsMeta site, and the listing says an introduction will be held in the Origins Discord. The @origins_tcg post also pointed players to Discord and Steam for details.

The rulebook and FAQ for the event are linked from the sign-up pages.

A monthly series to February

In a follow-up reply, @origins_tcg placed the event inside a longer schedule. “The Harvest Bowl is part of our Early Access tournament series. We’ll run one of these per month until our full set launch in February,” the account said.

Origins is developed by Koin Games and is in Early Access on Steam. Players build 25-card decks around a legendary character drawn from myths, folklore and classic stories, then play short PvP matches with simultaneous turns.

The previous event was the Crimson Cup in October, which the developers called their biggest tournament ever. It carried a $10,000 prize pool plus tournament promo cards that the team said will never be re-released. After almost 11 hours of play, @origins_tcg said, the Crimson Cup’s top four played for first place and the first ever 1/1 tournament promo card.

The OriginsMeta tournament pages also carry a banner noting that the Origins TCG Alpha Edition has been on Kickstarter since Oct. 27.