Artifact, the next game from Half-Life developer Valve, is decidedly bucking digital card game trends. Not only is it not free-to-play, it’s not going to have any kind of free in-game currency to spend on cards -- a decision Valve tells me is to avoid the grind that can make other CCGs feel like a job instead of a game.

“At its core, we want you to play the game because you enjoy playing the game,” programmer Brandon Reinhart told me when I visited Valve last week. They don’t want you to feel obligated to do daily quests just so you have enough gold to get a pack that might have the card you want. They want you to just play the game.

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So instead of the usual digital model, Artifact is following a physical one like that of Magic: The Gathering -- whose creator, Richard Garfield, is also the lead designer of Artifact. It will have a $20 price tag that gets you two full decks and 10 card packs, and all card packs after that cost $2 each.

Playing the Market

“ Designer Richard Garfield said Valve “absolutely won’t” let Marketplace prices get crazy.

On top of that, Artifact will take full advantage of the Steam Marketplace, allowing players to buy, sell, and trade cards. “We came to Valve in part because they had this record of being able to do marketplaces,” Garfield himself told me. “We see that as such an important part of how trading card games work in real life.”

The Marketplace is undoubtedly one of the most exciting aspects of Artifact, but it’s also a bit scary. While Magic may be the model, that game is notoriously expensive to play, and it’s not uncommon to see CS:GO gun skins selling for hundreds of dollars on the Steam Marketplace. What’s to keep cards in Artifact’s Marketplace from getting prohibitively pricey? Well, as it turns out, Valve is what.

“We're very conscious of that,” designer and former Magic developer Skaff Elias explained, and Garfield reiterated that they “absolutely won’t” let Marketplace prices get crazy. Garfield said that when prices exploded in the early days of Magic some people in the company were happy about it, but that “the game designers were terrified, because you can't expect people to play games in that environment.”

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Thankfully, digital card games don’t have printing restrictions -- card packs and the cards in them aren’t finite in the same way they are in Magic. Additionally, Artifact is flattening card rarities a bit, with only common, uncommon, and rare levels, and one rare card guaranteed in every pack you open.

“ Reinhart tells me “it's pretty reasonable someone could buy every common card in the game for a couple bucks.”

That means the price of a rare card won’t ever really go through the roof just because of how much easier it will be to naturally find. Why spend $100+ on a single card on the Marketplace when you could buy 50 packs, sell what you don’t want, and have 50+ chances to find what you do anyway?

I asked what Valve would do if a “doomsday” scenario did occur, where a deck’s key card reached $1,000 on the marketplace, and Garfield was quick to say that “cannot happen, and in no way would we want it to happen. It can't happen because the arbitrage. As long as we're publishing cards, there's a maximum value any particular card can have.”

So then what is the upper limit a card could cost before Valve considers it unhealthily expensive? While he didn’t think there was a specific value, Elias said they tend to think in terms of deck costs rather than individual cards. “I don't know exactly what number to put on it,” Elias explained, “I would expect the vast majority of people to say ‘hey, that's not very expensive.’”

Artifact First Screenshots and Art 21 IMAGES

Reinhart tells me “it's pretty reasonable someone could buy every common card in the game for a couple bucks.” The minimum buy price something can have on the Marketplace, for technical reasons, is three cents, and Valve expects every common card in the game to sit firmly at that price just because of how many of them will be in circulation.

Additionally, Reinhart says they are looking at “switching cost,” which is how much it costs to decide you want to play a build up a totally new deck. Being able to sell and buy cards easily makes that cheaper, as you could always use old cards to fund new ones. Valve is even working on a deck sharing system that will let you lend a deck to a friend for a match just like you would in a physical card game.

Why Artifact Isn’t Just a 'Cash Grab'

One of the biggest differences between Magic cards being bought and sold and the Steam Marketplace, however, is that Valve gets a cut of every transaction. Already Artifact is being called a cash grab to make money off of by some cynical forum goers, and that would mean higher prices mean more money for them. I asked Valve how they respond to those claims.

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“I'm not sure that reasoning actually holds up too well when you look at it closely,” Reinhart said. He explained that lower prices means more people will actually play, and having people play and enjoy Artifact is their goal. “We actually do want people to play, and we want you to be able to play with your friends. So making sure there's a reasonable price ceiling is really valuable for that.”

“ Elias says he’s “never heard any revenue estimates, targets, goals. It's never come up.”

In fact, when we first saw Artifact in March, studio head Gabe Newell offhandedly told us that Valve literally never makes profit projections or goals for any game they make. That sounded like a crazy claim, but it’s one every there I spoke with confirmed. Even Elias and Garfield, who are working with Valve on Artifact but aren’t technically part of the studio, said “there are none.”

“As outsiders, Richard and I, when we come in, we can tell you that this is not an illusion. This is true,” Elias said “Everything here is really just focused on people liking the game… I've never heard any revenue estimates, targets, goals. It's never come up. So yes, that's strange.”

“It's not clear how much the revenue projection changes our decisions in any positive way,” Reinhart explained. “I think there's potentially a bunch of ways it makes our decision making worse... We could project any number we wanted to, but if we don't make a really great game, it's not clear how much that matters.”

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So while the perception might be that Valve is only interested in games that make them money, they’re really just interested in making the games they want to make. That’s not a new revelation about the studio, and it’s not somehow proven false by the fact that, yes, Artifact will likely make Valve a ton of money.

My biggest takeaway from my conversation with the Artifact team is that even if they aren’t focusing on how much money they will make, they are very conscious of how much their players are going to need to spend. They know marketplaces can get out of hand, are working to prevent that, are willing to go out of their way to make this an accessible and affordable game.

Whether their best intentions pan out or not is a question still waiting to be answered, but I was extraordinarily happy to see how passionate they were about the issue. Artifact’s model will be an adjustment from the one Hearthstone trained people to expect as the norm, but I am seriously looking forward to seeing how it pans out.

Artifact is coming to PC on November 28 and will eventually make its way to iOS and Android devices in 2019. Before that, Artifact is getting its closed beta in October where you may get to try out the newly revealed Dota 2 hero in Artifact, Meepo. For even more on Artifact's finer points, be sure to check out our hands-on impressions of Artifact from two different perspectives.

Tom Marks is IGN's PC Editor and pie maker. You can follow him on Twitter