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What will Artifact: The Dota Card Game look like?
Valve have kept quiet about the game so far but what might we expect to see from Artifact: The Dota Card Game?
When Day9 paused his hosting duties during TI7 to introduce a new game from Valve, there was a brief moment where everyone watching leant forward in anticipation. Could this be it? Would all these years of waiting finally be ended? Then, the doubt crept in. Would they really announce it so unceremoniously? Why would they choose to do so at The International and not one of the more mainstream gaming events? No – it wasn’t Half-Life 3. Of course it wasn’t. Instead, the next new game from Valve is going to be Artifact: The Dota Card Game.
It seems even the PC titan can’t resist the allure of the card game buzz that’s gripped every major game developer or publisher since Hearthstone became the new sliced bread. Big name franchises from The Elder Scrolls to Fable have all transitioned to the digital tabletop in the hopes of capturing that lightning in a bottle once again. However, based on the little that we’ve heard about Artifact, it sounds like it could be very different from your standard CCG minion battler and actually be more closely related to the mechanics of Dota itself.
“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,” said Day9, during the TI7 broadcast. “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.”
At its most basic level, that game has you spawn units and cast spells from a cycling deck of cards to assault enemy structures on a two lane map. The units you deploy steadily plod or fly towards the enemy team’s base, battling each other along the lane and whittling down the towers that stand in their way. The player who destroys their opponent’s base first, or deals the most structural damage within the time limit, is declared the winner.
Artifact clearly has grander plans than to just be a clone of Clash Royale, but there’s a core in that game that you could see Valve building upon to recreate the complex and strategic battles of Dota 2. “And I gotta say, it’s a really cool experience because you really feel like the commander who’s allocating all their various resources among this entire huge battlefield, moving from lane to lane,” Day9 continued. Now, it seems, there’ll be no possibility of accusing someone of feeding in mid when you have to watch every single lane.
Similarly, Elder Scrolls Legends divides the game board into two lanes that set up different card interactions or provide temporary bonuses, but Artifact’s approach sounds far more advanced. It seems as if each lane is its own mini board, where its own unique skirmishes will take place as part of the wider battle. As a player you’ll have to jump between each lane to monitor how your chosen heroes are performing, how successfully they’re pushing and gathering gold in order to purchase item cards.
It’ll be interesting to see how the item shop works in Artifact as, of course, in the transition to a card game Valve is going to have to cut or refine a number of the game’s more complex mechanics to smoothen the experience. Alongside your chosen heroes, there may be a set number of items you bring into each game based on the deck you’ve built. Knowing which ones to include in order to counter your opponent and exploit your team’s strengths could separate the game’s best players.
Equally, how will concepts such as last hitting and denying work within a card game, or will it make more sense for something so specific as that to be removed for a sake of clarity? What about jungling and neutral creeps too? These could spawn at regular intervals on specific sections of the board for players to commit resources to contest. Generic camps might see a cut, but there’s no way Valve can nix something so iconic and fundamental to the game of Dota as Roshan. A possible idea could see temporary cards being added to your deck if you claim objectives to represent one-shot use items such as the Aegis of the Immortal.
If it’s all sounding mightily elaborate, then it’s meant to. In the What the DUCK?! Podcast, Jake ‘SirActionSlacks’ Kanner revealed some general thoughts after his time with Artifact: “There’s a reason why it’s catered to Dota players. It is very intense, it’s hard. It’s like if you compare League and Dota it’s like Dota’s equivalent to Hearthstone. Hearthstone is easy to pick up and it’s not that complicated. [Artifact] is like...you have to get through the learning curve and it’s super f*****g difficult and complicated but at the same time when you’re in, you’re f*****g in – it’s hype!”
So, what we can absolutely surmise is it’s not just going to be a case of you and your opponent bashing together cards that represent Earthshaker and Axe until someone runs out of life points. There has been (perhaps expectedly) a level of skepticism since the announcement considering how inundated the gaming space is with card games recently. Still, even with the little concrete information we know so far, there’s reason to be cautiously optimistic for what Valve are doing with the game. Artifact could be an entirely new and unique way to play Dota.
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