If you’ve ever been involved in competitive Magic: The Gathering, there’s a decent chance you’ve encountered what’s known as proxy cards. Playing Magic seriously is an expensive endeavor, and a competition-ready deck can set you back $1,000 or more. So, if you want to play—but not pay—like a pro, you use a proxy card: A homemade simulacrum of a costly, unowned card that, with two players willing to shake on it, stands in for the real thing. They aren’t strictly legal, but they are pervasive enough to be accepted (one online tool will even print an entire deck of them for you). And, in any case, Magic publisher Wizards of the Coast’s provision against proxies is about as impotent as the “don’t remove this tag” message on your pillow. As a result, proxy cards have become part of the experience of competitive Magic. Whether you’re just getting into the scene, or a serious player testing out new permutations of cards, proxies offer something akin to the “real” experience without the financial burden.

Proxy cards and online trading have lowered the practical barrier of entry to competitive Magic, even if the financial one remains daunting. But for Wizards of the Coast, which has published Magic since 1993, they amount to bootlegging and aftermarkets, respectively. The company can, of course, adjust its terms of service and add holographic watermarks, but when your product is, physically speaking, an arrangement of pigment on cardstock, there’s only so much control it affords. As a result, Wizards of the Coast has mostly resigned itself to the status quo. Magic, of course, is an extraordinary game, which accounts for its enduring appeal. Even so, if the real game you’re playing is maximizing returns on investments, it’s hard not to look past millions of happy Magic fans and see a tremendous amount of value being created, and then lost, slipping away like sand through fingers.

But when it comes time to compete in official tournaments, you’ll need genuine cards. Judges disqualify players caught using proxies, an embarrassing and potentially costly penalty for any serious competitor. To avoid that, aspiring players have two options: one is to buy booster packs and hope the cards they seek are contained within. The other, less chancy approach is to seek cards out on third-party exchanges, like TCGplayer and Card Kingdom . If you need a staple of competitive play like, say, Scalding Tarn , you can shell out $71.22 and have a well-worn copy in your mailbox by the end of the week. In essence, would-be competitors face a choice: submit either to the whims of cellophane fate or the predictable (if unforgiving) logic of supply and demand.

Here’s another truth: Artifact is extraordinary. Dr. Garfield may be a mathematician by training, but a he’s a designer by calling, and Valve is still home to some of the most talented artists and developers in games. To play Artifact is to witness masters at the peak of their craft. Everything about Artifact—from the pleasing rustle of cards as they unfurl across the board and to the ways your held cards respond, ever so gently, to the touch of your cursor—displays unmistakable signs of talented people giving a shit.

“A game without a metagame is like an idealized object in physics. It may be a useful construct, but it doesn’t really exist,” wrote Magic’s legendary designer, Dr. Richard Garfield, in a 2000 essay on his design philosophy. Garfield’s point is that games, no matter their format, bleed. Tempting though it is to mark out where a game “ends” and the rest of the world begins, such boundaries always break down under close scrutiny. This is true of all games, in one way or another, but it’s especially clear with Magic, whose aftermarkets and proxies are inescapably “part” of what the game is in the world. It’s also true, then, of Dr. Garfield’s latest card game, Artifact, which was released on Steam last week and will arrive on mobile sometime next year.

As a longtime Dota 2 fanatic, I’ve especially enjoyed the artful translation of Dota 2 mechanics into the conventions of card games, of which its three simultaneous lanes is only the most obvious example. It’s hard not to marvel at the depths of Artifact, which, to me, feels like Hearthstone in three dimensions. To be sure, I am not an especially gifted or consistent player of card games, and yet I find myself compelled to go deeper, pulled in as if by magnetism. Artifact is the rare game whose complexity does not make you feel stupid, so much as it inspires you to be smarter.

This makes it a bit surprising—and a bit of a tragedy—that the game is being pilloried by its target audience, and, based on its already declining player base, is on a direct path to an embarrassing free-to-play resuscitation. With 10,975 reviews in on Steam, Artifact’s score is“Mixed”, which, on Steam, is a sure sign that something has gone seriously wrong. It doesn’t take a lot of searching to uncover the culprit: How Artifact is monetized.

“This is not a card game, it’s a credit card game,” writes one user in a typical negative review, upset that there’s (a) no in-game currency, the way that most multiplayer games (especially free-to-play) have a currency that you can earn through playing (b) it costs money to compete in a lot of game modes that are designed for advanced and competitive players and (c) that the game more-or-less forces players to buy and sell cards on the Steam Marketplace. Early estimates suggest that getting a full set of 310 cards will set you back around $300 – less than an elite Magic deck, but 15 times as much as Artifact costs. Most of these reviews concede as a matter of course that Artifact is, unquestionably, a great game. (It is.) It’s the metagame that’s the problem.

This poses a dilemma for reviewers. Artifact, clearly, is a flashpoint for ongoing debates about the relationship of mechanics to monetization. Artifact’s woes are not just because of how it separates players from their money, but because of how flagrantly it ties these two arenas together, the ritual of play bound and gagged to the vulgarity of buying and selling. This challenges one of the underlying assumptions of what, exactly, we’re reviewing when we review games. Every game may indeed have a metagame, and yet, by common consensus, we reviewers tend to focus on what’s “in” the game, not around or on top of it. Artifact exposes this as the performance it always has been, a distinction as imaginary as any border is. What if, instead, we didn’t review Artifact as the excellent game so many wish it only were? (Plenty of these exist already). What if we reviewed it for what it really is: a market—one Magic could never forge, and only Valve would dare to.

If you’re interested in understanding Valve, and, how, in turn, this led them to make Artifact the way they did, you need to look at the history and, in particular, its knack for finding novel ways to make money. Valve—which is not publicly traded, maintains one of the smallest workforces of any firm of its prestige, and is thought to have the highest profit per employee of any American company—is not like other game companies, and operates according to a different, but specific, set of principles. That fact makes Valve both fascinating and predictable.