Artifact is a digital collectible card game developed and published by Valve Corporation. The game's concept is heavily based upon Dota 2, a multiplayer online battle arena game also by Valve.
Released on Steam on November 28, 2018, Artifact is designed to give Trading Card Game (TCG) enthusiasts the deepest gameplay and highest fidelity experience ever in a fantasy card game. Offering more than 280 cards in the shipping set, players will be able to buy and sell cards on the Steam Community Marketplace.
On March 4, 2021, development on Artifact was cancelled by Valve, with the both version of the game becoming free-to-play and immediately released to the public.
General information[ | ]
Artifact will have cards that feature Dota 2 heroes, items, abilities, and characters from its lore. Matches will take place simultaneously on three lanes. Minor lore characters like Rix, Kanna and Sorla Khan will be shown in more detail, and possibly ported to Dota 2 as heroes.[1]
280 cards and 44 heroes will be available on launch.
Quotes[ | ]
| “ | If you’ve played previous trading card games, it has a lot of similarities in terms of having creatures and spells that you cast onto the board but in this game, anything you see in Dota, it’s here.
There’s not just one board but three boards. You control five heroes, deploy them among the different lanes, creeps spawn every turn, the heroes that you play in Dota, they’re in the game. You can play as Bounty Hunter and cast Track on an enemy hero, killing it gives you extra gold, use the gold to buy item cards, equip them to your heroes. And I gotta say, it’s a really cool experience because you really feel like the commander who’s allocating the various resources amongst this entire huge battlefield, moving from lane to lane. I will say it’s a very different experience from playing Dota, of course. […] In this game, there’s a lot of really interesting cards and behaviours. Like there’s these improvement cards where you can actually cast spells on the varying lanes and they continue to upkeep every single turn, so you can wind up like- I played a game where I was honestly getting my ass kicked in two of the lanes but I just kept building more barracks in the third, flooding my opponent with creeps. And it’s really nice because often card games can be very complex, and if you’ve played Dota, virtually any question you would have about how the game works, there’s a very clean and clear reference to Dota 2. |
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| ~ Sean ‘Day[9]’ Plott |