Artifact The Dota Card Game – More Details Revealed.
Most of you might already have come across the name of Artifact called the dota card game. If you aren’t familiar with it let me give you a little overview. Artifact is an upcoming digital card game by Valve. It was revealed during last year’s Dota 2 International. Here’s the teaser trailer for Artifact from last year.
Today Valve’s president Gabe Newell while conferencing with Game press revealed a bunch of details about their upcoming digital card game[IGN]. Let’s start with one of the main things that are whether the game will be free or not? And the answer is NO. Yes, that’s right the game won’t be free to play like Valve’s biggest hit Dota. Although the price tag hasn’t been revealed yet. You will also be able to buy card packs and open them for a rare card (which usually doesn’t happen and you end up getting absolute trash until you are very lucky) or just simply buy cards from other players through the market place.
Newell stated that the game isn’t a dota 2 card game but a game that uses Dota as a base for convenience. Also that this game will create more content for Dota such as new heroes that’ll appear in Dota after Artifact. Artifact will also be having a slot in marketplace and steam workshop support that’ll allow people to create and publish their creative content. Here are screenshots of game revealed by Valve.
You must be wondering how would artifact work. So here is the way to play it as explained by PC Gamer’s Tim Clark who got his hands on the game.
Each deck contains 40 cards and includes 5 heroes (which is the same as a Dota 2 team). There will be 280+ cards in the base game. There are 44 heroes. You can include three copies of each card in your deck.
Your cards and heroes are selected from four possible colours: Red, Green, Black, and Blue. As per Magic, each colour has its own personality which themes what its cards do accordingly.
At the beginning of the game, your first three heroes will be deployed evenly into the three lanes (which are essentially game boards), along with some randomly spawned melee creeps. After each round, two more creeps will spawn in random lanes on each players’ side.
Each lane contains a tower which has 40 health which you must protect. Lose two towers and the game is over. Once a tower is destroyed, it’s replaced by the Ancient, which has 80 health. Destroy an Ancient and you also win the game.
Heroes that are killed aren’t gone for good, they just have to sit out an entire round, after which you can choose which lane to redeploy them in. (An exception here is a green hero who has a ‘rapid deployment’ ability and can be sent back into the fray in the next round.)
Each lane also has its own Mana pool, which begins at 3 and increases by 1 with each turn—though you can also use Ramp cards to accelerate your Mana pool. Hey, it’s a Richard Garfield game.
In order to play a card, you must have a hero of the corresponding colour placed in the lane where you’re spending the mana. However, Mana spent in one lane can be used to cast certain cards in other lanes.
Each time you play a card of any sort the initiative passes to your opponent. Once you’ve both finished taking it in turns to play a cards in a particular lane, combat occurs with heroes and creeps attacking whatever is opposite them. If they aren’t facing another unit, they will attack the opposing tower.
After combat, the action then switches to the next lane. The idea of player initiative is carried over to the next round, which ends when you’re both done in the third and final lane.
As enemy cards are destroyed you will accrue gold. Certain cards can also affect gold generation, such as black’s ‘Day at the Track’ which doubles your gold total. Gold is spent on equipment between rounds during the Shopping Phase.
Only heroes can use equipment, and each hero has three slots: weapon, armor, and accessory. If you want to use a different weapon it will overwrite the current one.
Equipment varies from cheap simple buffs like a cloak which gives your hero +1 health through to powerful, expensive stuff like the Apotheosis Dagger which adds +8 attack, +4 siege (tower damage that can’t be blocked), and condemns (ie kills) any enemy it hits.
Importantly, equipment on characters is persistent. So buffed heroes will keep coming back with their upgraded stats and abilities.
Valve also announced that the game will be arriving for iOS devices. PC version of the game will be released this year. For the iOS version, it will be coming later next year becoming the first ever Source Engine 2 game for mobile devices. After Artifact we might be seeing more games by Valve making their way onto mobile devices. For now, we know that the game will be a tough competitor for the current crown holder of digital card games called Hearthstone.
Valve Reveals More About Its Upcoming Card Game Called Artifact. Artifact The Dota Card Game - More Details Revealed. Most of you might already have come across the name of Artifact called the dota card game.