Valve Software's first brand-new video game since 2013, the digital card-dueling game Artifact, finally has a release date: November 28.

This is the first Valve game since Counter-Strike: Global Offensive to launch with a fixed release price as opposed to the free-to-play model enjoyed by Valve games like Dota 2 and Team Fortress 2. Anyone who wants to play Artifact will need to buy the game's base model at $19.99, which will be available on all Steam platforms—meaning Windows, MacOS, and Linux.

What exactly does $19.99 get you? The game maker didn't answer this in its press release, so we reached out to Valve's Doug Lombardi, who broke down the exact package included in that cost: two pre-made "base" decks of 54 cards each ("5 heroes, 9 items, and 40 other cards") and 10 sealed packs of cards, which each include 12 random cards, one of which is guaranteed to be "rare." Additional 12-card packs will be sold directly by Valve at $2 a pop at launch.

One exception to that upfront cost will come at this month's PAX West. Anyone who waits in line and plays Valve's first public hands-on demo of the game will receive two free keys to unlock the game's base model when it launches on Steam later this year.

The game will also launch on iOS and Android in "2019," but details about that version's cost, or whether players will be able to take their paid Steam version to their favorite smartphone device, were not disclosed today.

Modes, economies, and questions

Artifact, as we discovered in our lengthy, world-premiere hands-on earlier this year, cranks up the mechanics of the popular card game Magic: The Gathering by having players manage three "lanes" of cards in one-on-one battles. While this three-lane system, and the game's collection of heroes, are wholesale borrowed from Valve's Dota 2, the game's design was spearheaded by the guy who created Magic in the '90s, Richard Garfield—and he insisted to Ars that the design was not bent or molded just to fit into the Dota 2 universe.











The game's first 280 playing cards include "heroes," attacks, spells, items, and other Magic-like options that can be shuffled into a given deck. (You can have as many cards in a deck as you'd like.) Unlike other digital card games, future changes to Artifact will be a lot more Magic-like. New cards will be introduced to the game as digital purchases, likely in "sealed packs" directly from Valve. Additionally, certain modes may revolve around card packs, according to Valve co-founder Gabe Newell; he suggested in March that "draft pack" and "sealed pack" modes may eventually ship with the game.

Those future cards, and cards in the starter set, will be sellable to other players as purchases over the Steam Marketplace (from which Valve will likely take a cut, as it already does with other paid-item transactions between users). Because the base $20 package includes a number of "sealed" card packs, these may very well introduce duplicates into a new player's starting card set, which players can then take to the Steam Marketplace to sell or trade.

Garfield and friends seem intent on leveraging the concepts behind the real-world Magic marketplace—meaning a game that is regularly updated by introducing new, paid cards as opposed to requiring expansions that may render older cards moot. Whether digital-card fans will prefer this over the expansion-driven economy behind Blizzard's Hearthstone remains to be seen.