- [Sam] Hey everybody, this is Sam Machkovech from Ars Technica here with an exclusive look at Artifact, the next major video game from legendary developer, Valve Software. You're about to see the game's first ever demo version which is being revealed at this weekend's PAX West Conference. Lucky for us, we were invited to a sneak preview ahead of the game's formal November 28th launch on Windows, Mac, and Linux with a smartphone version coming sometime in 2019. Artifact is a digital trading card game or TCG modeled after popular games like Magic: The Gathering. Now, before you start convulsing in anger that this isn't Half-Life 3 or some other first-person game, we insist that there's something interesting here. Particularly because Magic's creator, Richard Garfield, joined Valve to work on this game. If you're going to take on a game as big as Magic we reckon, you might as well get Mr. Magic to help himself and unsurprisingly, Garfield's reputation for making complex, math-filled games is strong with this one so buckle up. There's a lot to cover here. Artifact takes place in the Dota 2 universe, full of Valve's familiar fantasy creatures and a few key similarities to Dota's gameplay. Like in Magic, every match of Artifact is one-on-one but unlike Magic, this game hinges on each player assembling a team of five heroes. These are the first cards you play in a match and you'll build a whole deck of cards based on your hero's strength, weaknesses, and colors. All four of the game's colors appear in this video. Blue, black, green, and red and their card types each emphasize different types of strategy. Woo, that is a big table. Richard Garfield says he wanted to enable crazier card gameplay with his first-ever digital card game so he went for three lanes of cards which is a lot like Dota 2 whose combat is also split into three lanes. In Artifact's case, three of your five hero cards are randomly dropped on the table at a match's start as are three creep cards which are just like the weaker grunt characters from Dota 2. The object of the game is to use your hero cards and a variety of spell and equipment cards to cause damage and tear down two of your opponent's towers before they do the same to you. Whatever other chaos happens does not matter in the end, the towers are the key. Notice here that each lane starts with a number 40. That's each tower's starting health, its hit points. When either players first tower goes down to zero points, it is replaced with an additional stronger tower and that one gets 80 hit points. This is one of Artifact's most interesting wrinkles. What should an attacker do at this point? Switch gears and attack a weaker tower to win the game or focus on this new stronger tower? There's a strategic angle either way but we're getting ahead of ourselves which is easy to do in a game with this many moving parts. So, let's go back to the beginning. After these hero and creep cards randomly land on the table, each player gets five spell cards in their hand. You need two things to play a spell card in Artifact. First, you have to spend a currency known as mana points much like in Magic: The Gathering. Each spell's cost appears in the card's top left corner and see that three-three down at the bottom? That fraction tells you how much mana you currently have along with your maximum mana. Just to be clear, each lane gets its own mana pool which refills every round and this number ticks up one point every round in every lane. Now, in addition, you also need a hero card in that lane. It must be alive and its color must match the spell. Blue spells need a blue hero to be cast. Green spells need a green hero and so on. Some spells have an immediate effect in your current lane either to yourself or to your foe. Others include in any lane designation which does something interesting. It lets you spend one lane's mana on another lane. During my tests, Garfield often recommended that I take advantage of this any lane quirk to bail on one lane in favor of playing cards on another. This is very similar to how an average game of Dota 2 plays out but I've never really seen a card game use this mechanic in this way. Remember each player started this match with three hero cards on the table but we had five cards per team in that opening splash screen, where are the others? Well, look at that box in the top left and you'll see small icons for remaining heroes. A checkmark means that hero will return in the very next round and you get to pick exactly where it goes at that time. A minus one means you have an extra round to wait to put that card on the table. Minus two means an extra two rounds of waiting and so on. Whenever a hero card is destroyed, it gets sent to the same waiting pool with a minus one timer. Remember if you ever have a lane completely cleared of heroes, you can't cast any spells in that lane and this can hurt. Whenever any hero or creep card is destroyed, that gives the attacker some gold which you can spend between rounds in an item shop interface for more cards. Unlike spells, these item cards do not require mana and their effects range from instant actions like drawing a card to permanent boosts like adding stats to a hero card. If you don't buy these cards when they appear, they get shuffled back into your deck which can make them hard to get back. The only exception is if you pay one gold to hold whatever is in the secret shop slot. You'll wanna do this to short some more gold so you can eventually afford that awesome, expensive card you really want. Each hero has three stats, attack, health, and bounty. The first two are basic enough. Subtract the attack number from the health number to determine a card's damage. That bounty number is the amount of gold your hero coughs up should it die. Those stats all fluctuate as you add boosts and equipment from the item shop which fill the rest of the card's open slots and yes, that bounty gets bigger as your card becomes more valuable. Each hero also gets its own signature spell card which is randomly dealt into your deck. These have serious impact and even better, they typically require low mana to use. Many heroes come with special spells they can activate with a cooldown. Kind of like the superpowers in Dota 2 matches. For example, here's one that can be activated once every four turns to let players draw an extra spell card. You can use spell cards to spawn more and stronger creeps on a lane and these sometimes come with their own perks. This one for example will clone itself on the battlefield whenever it hits a tower. It's like something out of a Tolkien orc raid nightmare. From here, as mana counts get higher and heroes equip more armor and perks, each lane grows more intense and complex. In some cases, heroes have special effects that trigger on a regular basis. In others, the mana and items you spend in previous rounds result in increasingly powerful cannons and attacks that pester a given lane's heroes and creeps over and over. Unlike Magic, Artifact has no card limits. Keep as many cards in your hand as you want. Lay as many cards in a single lane as you want and make a personal deck with however many cards you desire. It's not really a good idea to have a bloated deck but if you want to, go right ahead. In my demos, I wound up with so many cards in my hand that I had to use a mouse's scroll wheel just to peruse them all. From there really, it's all about the cards. Like Magic before it, Artifact is basically a rules framework that is meant to be stretched to its limits by each player's individual card deck. The cards we have seen thus far are pretty Magic-like with the usual suspects. Damage dealers, conditional buffs, reactions, bonuses based on where our card is placed and so on. We have to wait until late November to see this game's first wave of cards which will almost certainly be followed in the months and years to come with more options. Garfield in particular promises that quite a few upcoming cards will break the game's rules. For example, we got a preview of a red hero card that can shut down all spell casting in a given round and that's pretty huge for a game whose cards are all called spells. That's the point of Artifact, Garfield says, that cards can change the rules of engagement at a moment's notice which is supposed to keep this kind of game interesting for a long time. But, we're still waiting to see how some major parts of Artifact work like how you make decks, how you buy and trade new cards on the Steam marketplace, and how you match up against friends and online rivals. Those questions will have to wait until November 28th to get answers but for now, I'll say this. I've had some time to simmer on Artifact's unique card battling ideas for awhile now. Especially its way it splits everything into multiple lanes and all of these weird ways that numbers never quite add up. There's always an imbalance wherever you go, even this whole system of having to attack an even stronger tower at the end. It's creative stuff and I'm itching to try it out again so that's a really good sign. [festive guitar music]