Enlarge / Two posters, two free end-of-life games. (credit: Valve)
The weird, woeful, and nearly redemptive development of Valve’s digital card game Artifact has ended. Effective today, Valve has launched the 2018 game’s total-overhaul “2.0” version as a completely free—and “unfinished”—card-battling game dubbed Artifact Foundry, and while it’s playable, it’s effectively dead on arrival.
That means the game (formerly known as Artifact 2.0) no longer requires signing up for a closed beta—and is immediately available for anyone to download and play with zero microtransactions or restrictions on ownership. The apparent catch is that this near-total overhaul of the original game’s ruleset and card abilities will not receive a single substantial update going forward. While Valve admits that Artifact Foundry could still use more “polish and art,” its devs insist that “the core gameplay is all there.”
Additionally, the game’s original version has been left as a playable option, in case you preferred its specific spin on Magic: The Gathering-like card combat. The biggest change is that it’s been updated to remove all microtransactions, while anyone who paid for the original game or its cards has been given a curious perk: a series of “Collector’s Edition” cards, which can now only be traded and sold for real-world money within the Steam Marketplace ecosystem. Within the game itself, “marketplace integration” has been removed, since the original concept of buying blind card decks has been nuked from orbit. Every card in Artifact 1.0 is now free and instantly doled out to players.
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