Author: Mike Minotti / Source: VentureBeat
I’m a big Hearthstone fan, and no other digital card game has competed against Blizzard’s market king for my affections. The Elder Scrolls: Legends? No thanks. Gwent? Get bent. But Artifact, Valve’s upcoming digital card game based on Dota 2, is interesting.
Artifact takes the collectible card game DNA established by Magic: The Gathering and forms it around MOBA traditions like lanes and shops.
It has a lot going on. In terms of systems, Artifact makes Hearthstone look like a “my first card game” experience.I tried to divulge everything I learned about Artifact during my recent visit at Valve. But I also want you to know that it’s fun. Yes, it’s deep and a little overwhelming, but Valve is smart to take a different approach — making a more complex game.
Expand your mind
In my two demo games, I noticed some things that Artifact does better than Hearthstone. The first few turns are more interesting. You start with heroes and creeps already in play, so you’re making important decisions from the start. In Dota 2, heroes are the player characters, while creeps are the weaker, computer-controlled creatures. They have a similar power distribution in Artifiact, with heroes being much stronger but less plentiful than creeps. All of the heroes are based off characters from Dota 2.
You also have three game boards to worry about. Each one is a battle against your opponent to destroy their tower while defending your own. This is another idea taken from MOBAs, where destroying enemy towers is a big key to success. In Artifact, destroying two of your enemy’s three towers nets you a victory.
So you have this element of strategy that goes beyond hoping for lucky card draws. Which lanes do you want to focus on? Is it worth conceding one board so you can focus on another?Even if one tower falls, you can’t just abandon that board. A destroyed tower turns into an ancient, which has 80 health instead of the tower’s 40. Killing a single ancient wins the match. So you can concede a lane to your opponent, but you can’t leave it so defenseless that the opponent can kill your ancient.
Even outside of having three boards, Artifact has a lot of differences compared to Hearthstone. It has no limit to the amount of cards you can have in your hand (sorry, mill fans)…
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