With Valve officially abandoning Artifact Foundry, I wanted to write a post to commemorate one of my favorite games of all time, Artifact Classic, and tell you a little about what I wanted this game to be. Note: I’m not saying my vision of the game would be succesful, or what Valve should have done, this is just my dream scenario of what a digital TCG could be. So without further ado, lets begin!

A truly ambitious game

Artifact dared to do things differently, for better and worse. A tradable collection, which you could share with friends, or buy and sell on the secondary market, was a great idea. Three different lanes with indepent action and combat phases but with potential to influence each other was also a fantastic idea and it was this dynamic which created so much decision space for the game.

Even the—gasp—RNG was, in my opinion, a very ambitious idea. Yes, most digital card games have some amount of RNG besides from the shuffled deck, but not built into the core mechanics of the game like in Artifact. Which is probably why it was so unpopular. Hearthstone, for example, has RNG in great abundance but it’s explicitly tied to card effects, so at least in theory you can choose not to include those cards in your deck.

Yes, I’ve suffered from excessive salt due to the RNG a few times and it could very well be argued that the RNG in Artifact was just a tad bit too much, but it was also a really elegant way to introduce variance, a need to plan a head for various different outcomes, and not overload the player with too many decisions.

Another thing Artifact did really well was the sense of scale. No restrictions on mana or board size and with plenty of strong scaling cards in the base set. In draft, when games go to turn 11 and up and most of your resources has been exhausted already, the game kinda plays itself out, the little cards you have remaining only making small changes to the already established board state. While this may not sound very fun from a player agency perspective, I found it really fascinating and brought to light how decisions I made several turns back had affected the board state as it was now.

In game design lingo I belive this is known as a loose feedback loop, where the decisions you make doesn’t have an immediate effect on the game state but changes it slowly over time. I loooooove loose feedback loops and that is probably why I got so hooked on Artifact the moment I started playing it. However, this puts a lot of effort onto the player to recognize mistakes and—combined with the RNG—it was kind of a hard sell to convince someone that the reason they lost wasn’t because arrows fucked them up in the last round but because they made a misdeploy several turns earlier.

Economy, or why we play

I mentioned earlier that I thought the way Artifacts collection works was a fundamentally good idea. What I don’t think was a great idea was the fact that you needed a collection to just play the base game. Yes, you could play draft (which is, still, one of the best draft experiences you can get) but not everyone is into draft. I think the two main modes of Artifact, draft and regular constructed, should have been completely free from the start. Together with a ranking system. That would be truly revolutionary, a card game you could play completely for free with no strings attached.

So, why have a collection in the first place?

Customization. A lot of it. And I’m not talking just alternate art or cosmetic effects, I mean a complete system that would track every individual card and allow ways to alter them and use them in new ways. Among other things:

Complete information about a cards history and origin (which pack it came from, how it got traded and at what prices, what tourneys it entered)
Allow signing of cards, gifting and trading cards
Tools for doing minor visual adjustments to cards
If a card becomes patched, all previous cards are not changed. Instead every owner of a previous card receives a brand new version of the patched card, with a special tag indicating that it is a patch-compensated card. The previous card would of course not be legal to use in the standard formats, but more on that later.

How would cards be aquired?

Through packs and special events. Packs that can be bought would be unrestricted, but would be from a different “print run” depending on how early the pack was bought. Every print run would double in size, so if the first “print run” is 1000 packs, the cards from the first 1000 packs would say that they come from the first print run, and the cards in the next 2000 packs would say that they came from the second print run. This would create some artificial scarcity for the people who care about how “old” a card is.

Additionally, events would be a good way to get packs and cards. Every player would get 2 free tickets each week (expiring if not used) which could be used to enter into events. More tickets could be bought for the players who wanted it. Events would vary from week to week, with both elaborate game modes, single player mini games, standard constructed and draft. Packs gained through events would have a special tag saying exactly which event it was from and certain events would have rare exclusive versions of cards as the top rewards.

How would cards be used?

Flexing on other players by having a signed or visually differentiated card is of course a lot of fun, but there is also much more potential. The players with a large collection would be the ones dedicated to the game, and offering game modes specifically for them would be great. For example: cube formats. Anyone would be able to create a cube, a subset of their own collection to be used for drafting with other players. How the drafting is done would be up to the cube creator, and of course while playing with a deck you drafted from the cube, the cards would look visually the same as the cards put into the cube.

The cube could also work for constructed play. Everyone participating in the lobby/tourney would have access to the cards in the cube without owning them themselves. Cube lists would be easy to share, and the developers would encourage cube creation by making one event each week be “cube of the week”. Additionally, pre-patched cards could be included into cubes, as well as any other special cards which normally are not legal.

There could also be other uses for owned cards, but specifically the ability to create cubes is what I would want.

End of the long haul

Well, for me the haul ended with the first development post about Artifact 2.0. It was clear to me at that point they were on their way to create something very different from Artifact Classic. Something which might had the potential to be a good game in its own right, but it wasn’t for me. I’ll still be playing draft in Artifact Classic occasionally, as long as there are others willing to play with me.

Thanks for everything, even if you didn’t become what I wanted you to be.