First Screenschots and News about Artifact - The Dota Card Game by Valve revealed
Valve finally showed the first screenshots of their upcoming card game Artifact! See some of those below, and also scroll down for additional information about the game!
Additional info:
There was a presentation on Artifact at Valve, on March the 8th (today).
Source 2 coming to mobile (iOS & Android). (Delayed release Mid-2019)
Game scheduled for 2018, still no release date.
$1 million dollar tournament first quarter of 2019 (called it).
Not free-to-play. Will have draft modes and such, so multiple ways to get packs. Focus on trading via Steam Market.
Profits will go into tournaments, like compendiums.
Automated tournaments for all skill levels.
Creator of MtG working on Artifact (Richard Garfield).
No single-player campaign.
Tutorial through AI apparently.
Will contain future Dota 2 heroes.
Shopping phase.
Confirmed replay/stats available.
Gameplay assumptions based on the screenshots: 5 heroes, 3 item by heroes (one for attack, one for armor, one for health), item cards can be purchased with gold, towers have 40 HP, creeps might spawn through a stack on the side of the lane rather than being played from your hand.
More assumptions: Each lane has its own mana pool. Some cards affect all three lanes.
More assumptions: Passives are square on the hero cards, abilities might be played from your hand, or maybe you attach your abilities to your hero cards (because Luna is seen with a Lucent Beam square instead of Lunar Blessing).
More: When dead, heroes respawn after a timer, shown in the top-left corner of the screen.
From a short clip: Hero cards appear face down as they are played, they are revealed at the start of the turn.
You can play summons from your hand (wolves for Lycan, rebel decoys for the unknown cat-guy).
Items can affect towers. There is siege damage. Items can have active abilities.
280 cards, 44 heroes.
You need to take down 2 out of 3 towers to win the game, so it's literally not DotA. You can also win the game by destroying the enemy Ancient (towers have 40 HP, the Ancient has 80 HP). (So either deal 40 structural damage in two lanes or 120 in a single lane.)
Your deck can only have cards of two colors (out of four).
Spells of a color can only be played on a board with a hero of that color. (Meaning you can probably play God's Strength on Legion Commander but can't play it on Zeus, for example.) Some spells can be played on any board, and apparently Black cards are particularly adept at this.
You buy items at the end of every third turn. You get 5 gold from killing heroes, 1 from killing creeps.
Heroes respawn after one turn into your deck.
Creeps are played at random.
Cards will be bought and sold on the market. There probably won't be any rarity to them.
Combat is automatic. Heroes and creeps attack one of the three units in front of them randomly. If there's no unit, they'll attack the tower.
You play each board consecutively.
I am very excited about this game and hope to get access to the Closed Beta soon! What about you?