I'm gonna be honest, I hated this game the moment it released, but not because of the fact it was a Dota card game. In fact, I love card games, and I have my fair share of experience with Magic: The Gathering and Yugioh. However, unlike those games, Artifact isn't exactly intuitive. You see, Artifact thought it was clever by having this three-lane system where creeps spawn to attack in random directions. These creep spawns can outright determine whether you're going to lose a lane or not, and it makes planning for moments like this hard. I understand that randomness is a key factor to card games but the issue is creep spawning and direction of attack cards is not interesting. It's not the fact it's random, but it's the fact it's random with no player input from either side, and it makes it boring. Which is a key thing about Artifact as a whole: it's boring and uninteresting.

However, the main reason I'm writing this review is like Anthem, Artifact also died a horrible death and Valve thought it could get a skeleton crew to mangle its dead corpse in an attempt to give it some life again from the ground up, but like Anthem, Valve realized it's rather messed up to be playing with corpses and decided now is the time to put it back to the ground and let nature take its course. There's no reason to exactly play Artifact anymore, and because of that, I have to give it this website's lowest score offering as it's a game that failed its promise to deliver a game that will be constantly upkeeped with updates.

I hate that everyone thinks they can just jump onto the money boat that is making a ""live service"" rather than an original game with a start and an end instead. Eventually, they will die, it's just this one and Anthem died sooner than the other ones. They can be fun, no doubt, but not when they're half-assed. We see more and more of these situations occur as the days go by because the market is finally rejecting these. There are enough live-services people can sink their time and money into, and the market has had enough. This, along with Evolve, Anthem, and the sea of failed Fortnite clones is just a waste of everyone's time. As for this one, this was a waste of Valve's employees' time, my time, and everyone else who bought this game's time. Embarassing.

This game is admirable in the way that it managed to piss everyone off. For the casual player, the game's card trading and ticket system probably seemed insane in a world of free to play card games like Hearthstone. I personally didn't really mind it too much, having already gotten used to the concept playing Magic the Gathering Online (which is undoubtedly where Artifact's devs got the idea from). This was mostly a gaming equivalent of Stockholm syndrome, I think that monetizing a digital game this way is deranged and exploitative. Regardless, at the time I was willing to accept it. Valve was probably trying to target a more "core" digital TCG crowd with this anyways, the sorts of people who wouldn't mind it.

For this "core" audience, the game had to justify its existence to really gain anyone's lasting attention. At first glance, it seemed like this was the case. The game was filled with unique mechanics, most notably the fact that you manage three boards at once. I know that starting out playing it I was excited to learn how to grapple with the game's systems and learn what strategies were viable. It wasn't immediately obvious to me how fundamentally flawed it was.

I had some friends that also adopted the game early, and as we all played it we gradually all came to the same conclusion: it got worse the more we played. At a surface level it was fun to try and manage resources between three lanes, and it felt fresh to play because of how different it was from other TCGs. As you get better at the game though, you start to realize something awful.

Almost none of your choices seem to matter because so much of the game is random. Basic unit placements, attack patterns, what shows up in the shop, etc. It felt incredibly frustrating to try and strategize effectively when an unlucky roll of the dice could turn a great turn into a game losing mistake. All games like this have an inherent level of randomness, and that's what makes them so engaging and replayable. There's a fine balance between variance keeping things fresh and feeling unfair, and this game falls heavily into the second category.

I think that with a free to play model the game could've found a niche even with it's problems. I've (personally) never liked Hearthstone on a mechanical level but it found an audience since it's accessible. Artifact was based on an existing IP in the same way, but any kind of casual crossover from DOTA fans was destroyed the moment they decided on the monetization system.

This system has worked for Magic, MTGO is still online and has a seemingly pretty dedicated player base despite the existence of MTG Arena as a F2P alternative. However Magic was already proven as a game. Artifact fell apart even after just a few hours of examination.

So who was this game for? Was it for the established audience of the Dota franchise that didn't want to pay to try out something outside their typical interests? Was it for the TCG fans that would quickly discover the game's lack of depth? It's hard to tell who this was even targeting exactly, because it didn't really do a good job catering to anyone. With enough momentum it could've stuck around for long enough to refine mechanics and come out with more cards, maybe. I know they tried to overhaul the game for a while after its failure but at that point the damage was done. I think it was doomed from the start.

The ChaDOTA:
makes DOTA card game I keep forgetting the name of
doesn’t support it at all
treats it like it never existed



vs the League of Virgins

even if LoR failed, Riot still continues to support the game
has a memorable name
treats the game like it exists





wow never in my life would I think league of losers would beat Dota in a category.