I'm guessing, with time, it will be developed and expanded to compete with Arena's new season ladder.
Unfortunately, Steam is basically a competitors platform now as a result of Artifact, so I don't see that ever happening. Still, given the streaming numbers and also Wizards' shift in focus (plus statements from Mark Rosewater and others), the numbers for Arena must be huge.
I mean that Artifact looked dead from the get-go. Hearthstone was already dominating the genre and still is. The games are so similar that I see no point getting worked up about playing one when the other is so much well estabilished. This isn't like the case with TF2 vs OW or Fortnite vs PUBG, because they both have very different mechanics and communities. But from what I know, Artifact is trying to steal Blizzard's lightning so hard it just became a shell of what a TCG could be in contrast to the competition.
Artifact is trying to steal Arena's momentum, if anything. Arena is currently the rising star in that realm.
I'm confused because you cite Fortnite vs PUBG, TF2 vs OW for similar games that play differently, but then you say that Artifact is basically Hearthstone? Have you actually watched both of the games be played because they play fairly differently.
They can get the deck they want faster, without relying on the luck of card packs. The resulting deck is also much cheaper.
That's not exactly true. It's mirroring the Magic Online model, which is FAR more expensive than Magic Arena, at least for the foreseeable future.
But you currently can get full collection in Artifact for 100$
That's just because Artifact has a really small number of cards, smaller than any of the other big CCG/TCGs.
Artifact has far fewer cards, so this just makes sense. Arena has five sets, with a sixth releasing in roughly a week and a half. It's impossible that Artifact will be that cheap if it ever reaches six sets, barring a complete tanking of the economy.
Artifact is more or less copying the Magic Online model 1:1, though obviously with a far smaller card pool.
Again, that cheapness is directly linked to the limited card pool. If and when it reaches a comparable carpool to Arena, barring a total market / player base collapse, it will likely be much more expensive than Arena.
The MTG:O bots ARE the card market. You can still buy and sell directly to other players, but bots are run by online card vendors as a means to control prices and keep things in check. They are not run by Wizards of the Coast.
It's simple economics. Magic Online has similar keeper drafts and phantom drafts. The math works like this: As newer sets release, those sets are cracked for draft and fewer old packs are cracked. This results in an overall gradual supply shortage on older cards, causing prices to rise gradually on staples from those sets. Again, it is almost literally copying the Magic Online model, and we have data to see what the end result of that is.
It's got different sources of RNG. I wouldn't say there are more.
Yeah maybe I just haven't figured out how to deal with it if I have something like my blue/green deck, but I've found the absolute hardest thing to deal with in this game is that first turn, when your squishy ass heroes end up in front of a strong red hero like Bristleback and are dead unless you are lucky enough to have drawn a card to stop it. Red has it's weaknesses, but that first turn ain't one of them, and to actually do anything you need to have heroes alive.
That's not a reasonable comparison, is it? It's direct competition are Hearthstone and Magic Arena (and, I guess, Magic Online, though Wizards is seemingly abandoning that platform gradually).
I'll have to keep that in mind. My Blue/Green deck I'm using in Constructed right now is basically Ogre Magi/Meepo deck for multicasting mainly Divided We Stand, to have a huge Meepo army. I have Enchantress and Omniknight to try to keep all the Meepos alive, and Drow Ranger to give some more damage as well as the slience.
One idea I had was to get the Revtel Signet Ring (the one that reduces hero bounty) and that card that makes copies of an item (I forget what it's called) to try to get some of those on your Meepos to at least mitigate the gold you give up there. I might try changing the green to red and see where that gets me though.
