Both of those games gradually died as TCGs and were later relaunched as LCGs.
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Kotaku: "Valve's Card Game Artifact Is Running Out Of Players"
- Thread starter NeoRaider
- Start date
Didn't CS:GO have a rocky start, too? Since Valve isn't beholden to a publisher, they can keep this game running as long as they want until it eventually finds an audience.
Even for Valve, turning around bad momentum for an online game is tough. Even if you make good decisions it's tough as hell to win back players. Games like CS:GO and Rainbow Six Siege are the exceptions, not the rule.
Neither does Heartstone. It's not really needed in a 1v1 game.
The tcg's where quite different from the LCG, especially in star wars case.
Case in point is that those are very complex games with a very loyal and in netrunners case a quite big following.
I have said before that I believe a LCG model would of been better for Artifact. But still the marketing and who they chose to market to was a poor choice and led to this situation.
I don't play that many TCG-style games but I can name you just a couple:
Android Netrunner: featured asymmetric play (each player is playing a different way, the decks between each side are incompatible), and each side had like 5-6 different types of cards in the deck, and had to build an economy system through card powers (not just playing lands or gaining mana). It's way more complex and has a pretty diehard fanbase at this point.
Star Wars Destiny: You have character cards that work in tandem with customized dice, as well as a deck of other cards that supplement those characters through assist characters, weapons, powerups, one-shot abilities, etc. The footprint of this game looks light but it has a fairly meaty decision-space that can be as complex as Artifact's.
Then there are card games that people play a lot, with a lot more complexity than Artifact:
Race for the Galaxy: The game's iconography alone puts a lot of people off from touching this game. Getting past that, you still find a pretty steep learning curve as you learn how to maximize the game's turns. But people who dive into it play it many, many times (like hundreds, or thousands of times). This card game has been around for over a decade now, with several expansions. It even has an app version that is like $6.99, and people buy it!
Arkham Horror LCG: This is based on the Lord of the Rings LCG, both of which are very TCG-like in that you construct a deck ahead of time, but they are coop (or solo) against the game. It is very popular, despite taking a fair amount of time to play and features a fair more complexity and difficulty. It also costs a lot of money. People love it!
I mean this list is by no means exhaustive, it's but a small sample, but the point is there really is a market with a strong appetite for card games with more to them than Magic/Pokemon/Yugioh, and with a different business model. That's not just conjecture, there's proof that these games constantly come out and get reprinted.
You both are proving my point. LCG is a very different model from TCG. Comparing apples to oranges.
Then I am very confused what the hell your point was? The gameplaystyle of an LCG and a TCG are in the same genre its just two different monetizatin systems.
I'm saying that TCGs need to be of lower base complexity to make that model work. LCGs, traditionally, can afford to be of higher complexity because everything already comes in the box at launch. It's closer to a board game than a traditional card game.
Artifact has much higher base complexity than all of its direct competitors.
If you're talking about the complexity of the game and what it looks like on a stream, the business model has little to do with it.
I disagree. I think the business model of a TCG makes higher complexity much more daunting and, as a result, off-putting. It's why Wizards of the Coast, several years ago, moved to "New world order" design to lower the base complexity of new Magic the Gathering expansions.
In any case Artifact mitigates some of the luck of pack-opening by allowing you to trade and purchase (rather cheap) cards to complete your deck.
Nevertheless, one of the games I mentioned (SW Destiny) is a true blind booster TCG and it manages a more complex game just fine. It just tends to be more expensive. Netrunner also started as a blind booster TCG with largely the same game design. I'm not really buying this argument.
I don't know much about Star Wars Destiny to be honest, but Netrunner largely failed as a TCG and needed a reboot as a LCG to survive.
That's not a moving goalpost...why would you interpret someone saying 'enthusiast word of mouth is bad' as meaning only people that are enthusiastic about the game still? That literally wouldn't even make sense. You're basically reading it as "Even people that like it don't like it" and then claiming it's a moving goalpost when it is clarified that you're misreading that if that's your takeaway.
And Artifact is dying as a TCG too. Not sure why you think this is an important distinction.
Then again, I'd argue Artifact is no more complex than MTG either. Having more things on the board doesn't make it more complex. Like, terrible logic. The Stack alone as a concept makes Magic significantly more complicated as a game, and that's something that even before it was defined (early years) still EXISTED on some level within the base gameplay. The timing of magic alone is the primary factor that held it back from having decent digital versions for years, it's simply vastly more freeform of a game than every strictly digital CCG is.
EDIT: Gah, my fault for assuming 12 minutes meant someone else would've posted.
Artifact is failing as a TCG because of the base complexity. That's my point. That's literally what I'm saying.
It's complexity matches up better to games in a similar but different category.
I already gave my thoughts in that other "Artifact is dying thread" last week or two but I'll give my thoughts here as well.
I bypassed Artifact because I have always enjoyed constructed and getting everything I need to make a deck included in the base price (all cards included). I like creating my own decks. So I only play Digital LCGs/Expandables/Deckbuilders (I bought many on Steam).
One of my favorite streamers does play this game, Lifecoach. I tried to watch him play but I just dont understand the game. So as you guys already established many times over, this game is not easy to follow even for experienced Card game fans. I just have no clue what's going on. I am only watching Artifact only because I love spectating Lifecoach.
If Artifact included all the cards to make decks in the initial base price though I would've been all over it. The free draft is tempting but I've never even played Drafts in the past (all that much) so it's not much of an incentive for me. So yeah I never did buy the game. The Dota reborn client has plenty of free mods (like Dota Auto Chess) as well, so if I wanted something using the lore I am much more likely to just play mods myself.
I bypassed Artifact because I have always enjoyed constructed and getting everything I need to make a deck included in the base price (all cards included). I like creating my own decks. So I only play Digital LCGs/Expandables/Deckbuilders (I bought many on Steam).
One of my favorite streamers does play this game, Lifecoach. I tried to watch him play but I just dont understand the game. So as you guys already established many times over, this game is not easy to follow even for experienced Card game fans. I just have no clue what's going on. I am only watching Artifact only because I love spectating Lifecoach.
If Artifact included all the cards to make decks in the initial base price though I would've been all over it. The free draft is tempting but I've never even played Drafts in the past (all that much) so it's not much of an incentive for me. So yeah I never did buy the game. The Dota reborn client has plenty of free mods (like Dota Auto Chess) as well, so if I wanted something using the lore I am much more likely to just play mods myself.
Magic is more complex but not deeper. Its the chess and go comparrison all over again.
The stack adds to compexity and depth surely, even though its somewhat of a often inconsistent system.
Artifact has three boards you play on, which adds siginificantly too the depth of your decisions compared to magics only one. Also your ressource system in Artifact is directly affected by hero placement etc, which agains adds depth and player agency, whereas magics ressource system is almost entirely driven on random draw. Even the amount of lands you put into your deck is a very simple choice and has no effect on the actual playing of the game.
I think that's a rather weird way to be so sure of something. Artifact has a more complex board state, due to the 3 lanes aspect, but magic literally has 10s of thousands of different cards to interact with each other. I'm not sure how you can categorically say 'Artifact is deeper' - especially given the complaints about the lack of card interactions.
CS:G0 was rocky because they had a bunch of old hardcore players sticking to the previous CS engines. Valve had the player base, just not all in the same game. Eventually, those players transitioned to CS:GO.
I don't think Artifact is going to share that effect.
I agree. I think Artifact has much more base complexity, but isn't nearly as deep as Magic because of the backlog of cards and mechanics and combos.
Yes, Magic (in eternal formats) is more complex than Artifact, but depth and complexity aren't the same. I'd be pretty quick to argue that Artifact is deeper, because it constantly presents situations where you have a greater variety of meaningful choices. You tend to have more cards at your disposal in Artifact, since you have no max hand size, draw 2 cards per turn, get even more cards from the item shop, then the initiative system often means that not playing cards that you want to play is a valid choice. Between all of those factors, plus the fact that there are 3 lanes at any given time, you have a lot of options and have to weigh them based on where you might want to play them (or hold them for initiative). Then, between heroes defining where you can play cards, redeploys, and initiative, you wind up not just having lots of choices with 3 possible lanes to play them in, but you're also strongly incentivized to think about upcoming turns when making your decisions. From turn 2 onwards, just about any turn in Artifact feels really difficult to play optimally.
In contrast, in Magic, you get a lot more turns where your lines of play are clear. You get those do-nothing turns where you're out of gas or locked on mana, or your opponent is tapped out and you just curve out whatever obvious thing is in your hand. Turns like that just aren't very common in Artifact. Magic definitely starts to get a lot more interesting turns if you're playing something like Legacy, where you have access to more flexible and high-powered cards, but Artifact is like that basically all the time, even with its fairly simple first set.
What I'm trying to get at here is that the most complex decks I've used in magic, in the toughest matchups, gave me about as much to think about as the average game in Artifact. That's what I think people are talking about when they say Artifact is deep.
You are confusing depth of decision with rules complexity and overhead. Chess is more complex due to having different pieces and movement patterns, but Go is a far deeper game due to the vastly greater potential board states etc.
Artifact making you juggle three different boards with tons of units and those different boards all affecting your overall gameplay and decision space.
On top of that comes the Ressource system which adds decisions in artifact, aswell as the lack of a hand limit.
That's not really what happened, though. Netrunner, Jyhad, and Magic were part of the "Deckmaster" series of card games published by Wizards of the Coast, all designed by Richard Garfield. Maybe someone can fill in the rest of the history here, but it seems that Wizards decided to consolidate their efforts and cancel the other two games as Magic got more and more popular. It did not fail "because it was a TCG". A ton of TCGs at the time did not win the race against the juggernaut that is Magic.
Fantasy Flight Games rebooted Netrunner as an LCG, not because that was "the only way Netrunner would survive", but because the LCG format is their overall business model to differentiate from Magic, which they have used across several card games.
3 'boards' is a meaningless distinction. If you only had 1 'board' in Artifact it would be shallow as shit, so multiplying it by 3 increases the complexity, but the base is pretty low.
You're acting like somehow Magic complexities don't make it deep - they do. The possible interactions in magic are miles more interesting because of it, the interactions in a game like this or Hearthstone are simple in comparison, because it makes it playable on a computer in a timely manner.
The simple act of being able to cast something in response to your opponent adds MILES more depth to Magic than Artifact or HS can have.
EDIT: As far as land goes, you can like it or dislike it, but it makes resource management an actual deckbuilding strength in Magic that doesn't exist in other games. Artifact isn't compelling in that regard, yeah you have to have that color hero to play in that lane, but it actually just means that you're restricted more often than it makes it an interesting decision, it also means you make the right or wrong decision ages before it really bites you in the ass usually.
Meanwhile Land as a resource instead of the now-standard 'increasing mana per turn' leads to significantly more deckbuilding skill in terms of making sure that you have a deck that can win the majority of the time. If you find that 'mana screw' is something you experience a lot, that's not RNG, that's you making a bad deck. It also means that you don't encounter the power creep of cards and mana costs in Magic that you do in other games - you can have cards that are exponentially more powerful based on cost instead of mostly linearly more powerful. In Hearthstone if I get to turn 5 and I'm not curved out to appropriate 5 mana spells, I'm probably behind. In Magic a low cost spell retains its value throughout most of the game, it just means the curve is significantly different. It makes mana an ACTUAL resource instead of just 'this is how strong the turn is going to be, increasing by 1 per turn until the game is over'
I know plenty of people that don't like it - you clearly seem not to, but it's usually proof that someone doesn't understand it very well when they resort to 'oh it's rng' as an argument against it: It's a card game, it's ALWAYS RNG what you draw, but the fact that your mana base in Magic is something you have to build your deck to work around is an important part of the game that lets it remain freeform.
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I think the worst condemnation of Artifact I can find is that indie game designer Keith Burgun considers it his favorite collectible card game.
Which sounds like a glowing endorsement until you remember that Burgun hates card games (and really any kind of game that doesn't conform to his style of game-making), to the point that he thinks Artifact's biggest flaw is that it's a card game.
Valve really didn't know who they were targeting with Artifact.
Which sounds like a glowing endorsement until you remember that Burgun hates card games (and really any kind of game that doesn't conform to his style of game-making), to the point that he thinks Artifact's biggest flaw is that it's a card game.
Valve really didn't know who they were targeting with Artifact.
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So you don't know how initiative works in Artifact? The whole game is built around the idea of making almost every action allow for a reaction. Have you even played Artifact? Like, I don't see how you could miss this if you had.
Artifact is literally a game of action and response. Players take turns taking individual actions, and there's an initiative system that determines who gets to take the first action in the chain.
Your statement makes me wonder if you've actually played Artifact.
When talking about "in response," the poster is talking about the stack. The stack allows players to react to a card before it actually resolves. The reaction takes priority over the action. Initiative gives them a chance to react after a card resolves. This means that players have no way to react to resource denial like killing the enemy hero or locking cards in hand.
Yes there is. Other ccgs have tried to get around the lack of interrupts in that exact way, and as soon as any level of complexity enters the game it completely breaks. You can only do that sort of effect if your design pool is very shallow.
Can you give examples? Not saying your wrong, just genuinely curious.
That doesn't result in more depth though. You can prevent your opponent from doing something in Magic by playing a reactive card. In Artifact, you can prevent your opponent from playing a card by stealing initiative and then killing a hero. Or by strategically passing and killing a hero. Or by stealing initiative/strategically passing and preemptively defending against their play. And this doesn't even get into the mindgames produced when you have initiative and don't want it. Baiting people with passes comes up a lot. Artifact's initiative system leads to more interactivity than Magic's LIFO approach to effect resolution.
Besides, interesting decisions regarding the stack are rarely a result of the stack itself. 99% of the time you play a card, you just immediately let the opponent respond because there are so few situations where holding priority to play multiple effects onto the stack is relevant (and even with those, it's usually a situation you know is likely to be produced by your deck, so it's not much of a decision, just the obvious line). For the 99% of times you don't hold priority after playing a card, the interesting decision is the opponent deciding whether or not they should respond and if so, how. That's the same decision being made in Artifact, but without any of the other interesting decisions initiative introduces!
Anything with triggers, as an example. For example, if a black card is played, target creature takes 5 damage. I play a black card, the trigger also happens. You play your 'last card doesn't count' card - does the triggered effect also get reversed? What about if your ability manipulated your deck or drew you cards? What about anything that activates off that? It can very rapidly become extremely complicated the more diverse and interacting your card base is. Ultimately your counterspell ends up as 'the last players turn ceases to exist and the game state returns exactly to how it was before'. Which is an insanely powerful card (it's effectively Time Walk), and far less subtle or interesting that the whole range of timing interactions that happen in magic.
I've been in every Artifact thread, I own the game. It's actually far more telling that neither of you understand what I'm talking about - meaning you PROBABLY have never played Magic. "in response" in magic doesn't mean "You're doing it because someone did something" like you're saying, it means literally "I cast this spell that kills all creatures" and you IN RESPONSE, sacrifice your creature to your Ashnod's Altar to get 2 mana instead of just losing it for nothing. Or "I cast this creature that is going to win the game" but you have the mana untapped on your side to then cast a Counterspell.
These are not interactions that you can make in Artifact or Hearthstone, because they make it hard as balls to make a computer version of the game work. Yet, Magic has done it for 25 years. Interactions regarding timing are completely intuitive and a non-issue in a paper game, but when you ask the computer to work them in it becomes a huge problem. Magic has largely solved them but I understand why new games try to avoid the problem altogether - still, that doesn't mean that it's not a huge avenue for player interaction that Artifact and HS lack completely. It is.
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None of those are deep decisions??? That you don't want to loose your creature for nothing is obvious. And this is the issue with the stack. It adds complexity but rarely depth because 9/10 times the right play is obvious.
And you hand waving away the meaning of having multiple lanes to consider really is telling me that you don't understand complexity vs depth.
The question where to place heroes or which lane to set different spells and what items to give which hero in what land is crucial to, not only doing damage or defending not one but three different live totals, but also directly affect where you can play what card in the future and how the creep waves will change etc etc.
The Ressource system in magic only has some depth during deck building and even then it is a very basic idea of how to not flood or starve your deck. In Artifact the ressource system is a moving object that you can directly influence and that will change during the game depending on your actions on several boards.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
(Also, it's kind of telling that the example you came up with for why the stack provides depth is Ashnod's Altar. Like, that's an interaction that beginners may miss, but is pretty much autopilot once you know how to play the game. With manaburn gone, there's no reason not to. That's not a decision. It's a perfect example of Magic having complexity, but not depth [Edit: not to say Magic lacks depth, but this sure ain't where you're gonna find it!]. Same with your countering a big spell play. The decision there has nothing to do with effect resolution order, and everything to do with the decision to have floated mana in the first place.)
I used that example because you indicated that you have no understanding of the mechanic. Do you really want to see how deep the stack can go?
A system where you can't even meaningfully cast a counterspell is crippled when it comes to interacting with your opponent.
"The right play is obvious" is a cop out - you can say that of literally any game. I can say 'the right play is obvious' in Artifact when you try and break down any individual moment. The point is that it's an entire huge avenue of interaction that you simply do not have in Artifact. You cannot meaningfully interact with moves your opponent makes, you can only 'react' after the fact.
"3 different lanes" is not added depth, it's NECESSARY depth because a single lane in Artifact is completely shallow. Magic doesn't make you play 3 simultaneous games of magic with 1 hand because it's pointless, that is unnecessary complexity. Artifact's 'complexity' is necessary because the single lane depth is nonexistent.
Saying that resource management in Magic is only a concern during deckbuilding shows a very basic lack of understanding the system. Your resources are parts of your hand, parts of your deck, it influences everything you do in magic.
You can just as easily say "Hey it's RNG in Artifact or HS because if you don't draw your correctly curved spell on the appropriate turn you're failing to use your resources" Magic uses both card draw rng with your spells AND with your resources, but it doesn't make it more RNG, it makes it more skill based, and it discourages you from playing a simple curve and praying that you draw the cards to hit it, it adds value to low cost cards that doesn't exist in fixed mana curve games. It changes the value of things like card draw, or deck fixing. It is DIFFERENT, it is definitely not worse.
It is not a cop out it is simply stating facts.
Whether to loose you creature for nothing or gain some mana back is the definition of a non decision. The correct play is obvious.
But whether to use your anihilation now and take zero damage in lane a or wait and take zero in lane b requires you to consider a ton of factors and to read a lot more information.
The three lanes are a choice that adds depth, it is a part of the theme. It adds overall balance since stronger heroes would be a much bigger problem with only one health pool to worry about.
If Magic's ressource system is any good why do you think the first thing EVERY competitor and even the designer himself have looked to fix is the Ressource system?
Having to rely on luck to gain ressources adds no depth. Rng adds variety and in some cases complexity but never depth since you cannot predict it fully. Depth is about meaningful and calculated decisions. Having card draw is a good thing in any game where cards are your actions. Having to draw for ressources aswell simply makes you more reliant on draw and vulnerable to discard mechanics. This again means that the whole decision space is during deck building and not deck play.
Speaking of discard. The lock mechanic is a great example of adding depth but not complexity. When you discard your opponents card it is gone. Now your decisions about that card are done. The lock mechanic forces you to consider timing, hand size and when certain cards will come back into play and how you setup to deal with them later.
I've been wanting to try a new digital CCG. Artifact caught my attention for a couple of reasons:
But I am really concerned with the player base exodus. And I'm kind of baffled at how silent Valve has been... you look at their Twitter account and the last tweet was December 21.
The silence could mean:
- Recently released so I can get involved without having a bunch of expansions already in place
- I have played some DOTA 2 so I kind of can understand some terms and card labels
- I'm not really a fan of the Blizzard WoW lore or Witcher lore so I'm kind of put off there
- Kind of dumb, but I have a Mac so Magic Arena is not very attractive (I know there are ways to play on a Mac, including using Wine or Parallels, but eh). I also like Magic but having not have followed the scene very closely it's very daunting to jump in because there's a LOT there.
But I am really concerned with the player base exodus. And I'm kind of baffled at how silent Valve has been... you look at their Twitter account and the last tweet was December 21.
The silence could mean:
- They moved resources away from the game and have indeed abandoned it
- They're preparing some major changes
Man, if only they could discover a game idea that people want to pay money for...
Another entirely unwanted entry in a very saturated market by a cumbersome large company, yeah, I see that.
Heh.
I've played MTG since unlimited edition, back before they revised the rules to have a stack and instead had interrupts and instants. Yep, I have Ashnod's Altar, along with a pretty nice collection of other Antiquities cards.
Every Garfield CCG since MTG got rid of the mechanic where each play of a card or effect could trigger an optional reaction by the other player, because, yes, that makes the computer versions of those games very difficult to implement from a UI standpoint.
I personally prefer how games like Netrunner, Keyforge, and now Artifact work. With Artifact, the stack is gone and instead you have a play / pass mechanic. It's more elegant, less ambiguous, and easier to write a game client for.
Also, I apologize for saying that I doubted you played Artifact. Clearly, you do, and you understand the differences in the mechanics involved.
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I wanted to like it, but the games were too long and when the player count started dropping like crazy, it stopped being even slightly fun because the only people left were already way better at the game than me (I only managed to play a couple games in the first month of its release). If it goes F2P maybe I'll try and get into it again. Wouldn't fix the slow games issue though.
You are aware that every CCG has tried a different system - and literally none of them have found a better way? I've been playing ccgs for twenty years. I helped develop three of Magic's competitors. Every one of those games is now long dead.
The randomisation of Magic's resource curve is a key reason why it's still so insanely successful - more popular than it ever has been. It adds enough randomisation to ensure that pure curve decks aren't dominant, without creating the awful situation Artifact has where you have made the correct play and have the right tools on the board but you lose because the randomisation factor kicks in.
Garfield himself has tried randomisation in a number of different games over the years - and again, none of them have worked as well as magics lands. See his disasterous Star Wars game in particular.
Also, the notion that Magics depth is in deck design and not deck play is just...woefully uninformed. Sorry, but have you ever played competitive Magic, or watched it? The analysis and design magic making at the top level is astonishingly deep. There's a reason some of Magics greatest ever players went on to win fortunes in professional poker. It's also the reason why even in the era of netdecks and solved formats, professional players are the ones who win tournaments - skill in playing the game, and knowing what to play and when, is just as important. You aren't playing a counter control deck on auto pilot!
but they addressed this issue to my knowledge didn't they? I dont play the game but I been keeping up