I entered PAX West 2018 incredibly excited to demo an upcoming Magic: The Gathering creator Richard Garfield-designed card game.
Keyforge: Call of the Archons is an upcoming physical card game from Fantasy Flight Games that does away with booster packs and deckbuilding, instead relying on the principle that every single pre-built deck for the game is unique (they actually note more than 104,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible decks). This mechanic still feels impossible to me, but as the last time I played Magic: The Gathering a few years back it largely felt like a game of “I spent more money than you, so I win,” I’m incredibly excited to experience the no secondary market necessary, unwrap and figure things out world of Keyforge.
The other Richard Garfield designed game at PAX (how can this guy have two totally different unreleased card games on display at the same show?), Valve’s Artifact was not even on my radar.
After spending nearly 90 minutes with the game this past Monday, you can bet that it’s on my radar now.
Artifact had possibly the largest booth of the entire convention. Huge, high resolution displays floated above the crowd (and the never-ending line for the booth), showcasing some of the exciting action happening across the dozens and dozens (and dozens) of desktops set up in the Artifact area. As I walked the show floor looking for new games to play, the flashing giganticism of Valve’s booth continued to catch my eye – sometimes I’d find myself stopping for minutes at a time, staring at cards and at plays and at mechanics that I simply did not understand.
By day two of PAX I’d decided that I needed to experience Artifact for myself. This proved tougher than anticipated, as based on the threads in the r/PAX subreddit, people had been lining up for the game as early as 6AM, and would spend hours and hours in line without making much progress at all. The line was apparently being capped for the entire day early in the afternoon. These lines were understandable based on the massive following for Valve’s own DOTA, which the cards and characters of Artifact are based on, and because PAX West was set to be the very first place where Artifact would be playable to the public. I wouldn’t find out until much later, but I imagine part of that line was also because of the insane swag that Valve was giving away to those that waited in line for play the title.
Eventually, after watching and watching and not quite understanding, I approached an Artifact staff member and asked for them to explain some of the basic mechanics. I’ve played a lot of trading or collectible card games in my years – I was in elementary school and obsessed with the Pokémon Trading card games for several years after it came out (though I had a NeoGeo Pocket Color instead of Game Boy, so I wouldn’t play a Pokémon video game until much later); I also retired in my (albeit small) town undefeated in Yu-Gi-Oh, my final exhibition coming down to an eleventh hour win that had my opponent throwing his discard pile across the room in frustration; I played Magic: The Gathering casually for years; and have also dabbled in the likes of Hearthstone and The Elder Scrolls: Legends among others. The super-friendly Artifact employee explained just some of the ways that Artifact is different, in some ways simpler than typical card games, and in some ways much, much more complicated.
Artifact is in many ways simpler in that you’re not typically managing as many things as a typical card game. There’s no land or energy cards here – your mana simply refreshes in full and grows by one each round. You can have as many cards in your hand as you want, and never need to worry about discarding down to a certain hand size. There’s also no limit to how many cards you can have in play at one time (the board often gets pretty full) or how many cards you can play in a single turn – play will pass between you and your opponent until you both pass without playing a card, and you can continue to play cards as long as you have the mana to do so. This stuff is pretty easy to follow, and not needing to manage or worry about things like a hand getting too large means that you can take your time and slowly build up to some pretty insane combos – during my time with the game I found that I would often hold cards for some time as Artifact lets you play cards when the timing is right, rather than forcing you to play things just because.
Artifact is also very different in that at all times it’s kind of like you’re in three games at once. Each game of Artifact is played across three ‘lanes’, each of which basically being its own match (though certain cards and effects can trigger actions or damage in other lanes or across the entire board, for instance). Your goal in each lane is to destroy your opponent’s ‘Tower’, which can take 40 points of damage. Destroy two towers across any lane (or the same tower twice, though after a tower is destroyed it regenerates with twice as much health) and you win the game.
Each Artifact deck has 40 cards, and will contain five heroes of four different card colors (red, green, black, or blue) – most of the cards that you’ll play are associated with a color too, but you can only play a card in a lane if you have a hero of a corresponding color in that lane as well. This means that destroying your opponent’s heroes becomes a major factor of the game as well, as destroying the last hero in a lane will (at least temporarily) significantly limit what your opponent can do there. Heroes also have equipment slots, allowing you to equip a weapon, some armor, and an accessory, all of which can add effects to the hero, or increase its health or attack power. Heroes die, of course, but after a time will respawn randomly in another lane, complete with any equipment that they had when they were previously destroyed.
As I mentioned above, you and your opponent will take turns playing cards in a lane until you both choose not to (or can’t because mana). Your heroes and creatures will then attack each other (typically straight ahead, but there’s also a 25% chance that an opponent’s card will ‘pull aggro’ and draw attacks towards it as well, which can really screw things up. If a card isn’t blocked by an opposing creature, that card’s attack power will be deducted from the opposing tower’s hit points. Some cards also have abilities that can pass remaining damage to a tower after being blocked by a creature (think Trample in Magic: The Gathering), or a myriad of other effects that can cause damage, help you ramp your mana faster, and the like.
Destroying enemy creatures earns you gold which you’ll spend between rounds on equipment like weapons, consumables like potions, or even a ‘secret shop’ which often has very expensive, but very powerful, random equipment up for grabs. The ‘Shopping Phase’ is actually a huge factor in the game that I didn’t see as overly important at first, but became a game-changer once I’d actually begun to embrace it.
I think that describing Artifact makes the game sound markedly more complicated and harder to understand than it actually is – it truly feels like one of those “minutes to learn, forever to master” type of titles, and this was made clear when I finally sat down to play the game (the Artifact employee that I’d initially spoken to noticed my badge, and passed me to another employee who set me up with a specific time to demo the game, and I’m so freaking thankful for this). The setup here was pretty cool – the decks you’d play with were pre-built, and you’d have an employee with you to guide you through your first match against an AI opponent. Once you beat the AI, the game went into a matchmaking mode that would pair you with another player at PAX. If you lost, you were done, but if you won, you’d move on to the next round. Once you beat five opponents you’d go to another on-stage area where you’d compete more competitively to win some cool prizes.
My employee, who reminded me of a younger Clark Duke spent my first match over my shoulder telling me which moves to make and sharing some of the game’s basic controls. Certain things were explained more thoroughly than others, and while we made fairly short order of the AI opponent, going into my human vs. human match I felt as though I had absolutely 0 clue what I was doing. My employee left me (though he’d check on my periodically for the remainder of my Artifact playtime) and I legitimately wondered just how quickly I’d fail my first real match.
My opponent absolutely murdered me… for awhile. At this point, mechanics didn’t feel super clear to me, I didn’t take advantage of the shop phase, and I simply made many poor decisions in terms of card usage and placement. Each time my tower was hit or my creature was lost, however, I learned something. Eventually things began to click, I began to defend more efficiently, and then I began a goosebump-inducing comeback that elicited feelings that I haven’t felt towards a card game since my very first Friday Night Magic. I won my first match by one turn, and following the appalling way that I began the game, I wish that I could have seen my opponents face the moment that the ‘Loss’ screen popped up on their display.
I moved on to another match, surprisingly with a new deck built of colors that I’d not played yet. Rather than the mana-ramping that I’d experienced with my predominantly green deck previously, this deck felt predominantly red, and was filled with cards that would buff up my heroes (sometimes just temporarily), and cards that would do instant damage to my opponents creatures. This second match was neck and neck for its entirety, with my opponent taking out my second tower just a single turn before I’d be able to do the same to them. I lost, but I had a smile on my face the entire freaking time that I was doing it.
I stood up just as the employee that’d set me up came back over (I’d seen him just a few minutes before when the match was moving in my favour, and he’d seemed pretty excited that I was doing so well). He asked me what I thought of my time with the game and gave me a handshake before pointing me towards the swag / exit area. To this point I’d seen plenty of people walking around PAX with cool looking Artifact-branded reusable bags, but holy crap were there some amazing goodies inside. Anyone who’d waited in line for the game, after first getting a chance to play the game at its first public appearance, would receive two autographed, high quality art prints of the game’s characters (I’m still not even sure who these characters are but I can’t wait to frame them), and a branded bag that included a wonderfully soft t-shirt, an exclusive set of pins, a lanyard, and two copies of the game itself (the game won’t fully launch until November, but the provided codes also include beta access). This seems like an incredibly valuable package to give away to fans, and for those that waited hours upon hours in line, it must feel like a neat “thank you,” from the Artifact team.
I still have a number of questions about the game – like just how the game’s store, trading, and deck sharing systems will work – the $20 base game includes 10 booster packs and two pre-made decks with additional booster packs being a fair $2 a pop; players will also have the ability to sell or trade unneeded or unwanted cards; and Valve has also mentioned that they’re exploring the ability to ‘share’ decks with friends, just like players often do when casually playing physical card games. The game’s mechanics feel super solid, but I think that it’s systems like these that will make or break a digital card game without any free-to-play component for many players. Valve has also noted that they’re developing systems to see the game from becoming pay-to-win, and from Gabe Newell’s Artifact press conference from a few months back (see the full shaky video below) there are already big plans for Artifact from an eSports perspective.
Artifact simply made me feel like a kid again. It’s been a long, long time since a card game (physically or digitally) has had my heart racing, but drawing and playing just the right card at just the right time in Artifact did just that multiple times. I played a lot of phenomenal games at PAX this year, but in my many, many gaming conversations since the expo ended, Artifact is the game that keeps coming up again and again. Artifact was my #1 game of PAX West.
I freaking loved my time with Artifact, and I simply cannot wait to jump back into this world. Artifact launches on Windows, MacOS, and Linux on November 28th (with iOS and Android versions coming next year) for $20.