Today's Build Your Legend Update focuses on skill rating, account leveling, and card balance. Skill Rating and Account Leveling
This update introduces independent skill ratings for constructed and draft games. It also includes an account leveling system that tracks your overall experience with the game and allows you to unlock level icons and a set number of tickets and packs. More information on both systems is available on the update page and the patch notes below. Card Balance
A common pattern in physical card games is to design around the goal of never changing cards, and to only make card changes or bans in extremely rare cases. Our initial approach to the game was to follow this type of methodology and keep balancing changes as a last resort, in large part because we thought players valued immutability very highly.Since the release of Artifact, there have been a lot of discussions surrounding this topic. Input came in many forms, some from online discussions, some from direct fee... Read more

Today's Artifact 1.1 Update focuses on social features: a chat wheel, in / post-game chat, and brand new automated tournaments. Additionally, we've added leaderboard support to the Call to Arms gauntlet along two new decks: a damage-focused mono blue deck and an all-aggro all-the-time mono black deck.There are many other features in the update, as well as a ton of bug-fixes. Check out the patch notes and the update page for more details.This is the first major update of many for Artifact. While finishing this update we've also been working hard on the next update, that we expect to ship next week and which is focused on a skill-based progression system. Read more

We've had an exciting few days watching everyone finally get their hands on Artifact. Alongside the strategic depth it's also been great seeing people explore the many modes of play. One of our goals in building Artifact was to capture some of the social energy and fun of playing games around the kitchen table with friends, and to bring those experiences online. Today we want to do a guided tour of some features that bring us closer to that goal: matchmaking through Steam Group Chats and user-hosted tournaments. Open Play
Players and groups have a huge variety of differing goals and play styles. Some like low-stress games with all-commons decks, others want to competitively experiment with new archetypes. Some social circles are small and play games at specific times, while others are large and constantly have a few games going, and everything in between.Steam Group Chats are an existing tool to help provide an online presence for these groups. Anyone on Steam can create a new Group C... Read more

Fixes

• Fixed a crash that would happen when exiting while in game.
  
• Fixed a crash that would happen at very high (>4k) screen resolutions.
  
• Fixed a crash that would happen when resolving some spells.
  
• UI movies now play from memory instead of disk improving menu performance on low end systems.
  
• Fixed Sucker Punch's effects timing.
  
• Updated the localization files.

Fixes

• Fixed a crash that would happen sometimes when the game lost focus.
  
• Fixed a crash that would happen when hovering over cards or towers when a game ended.
  
• Fixed a Mac OS crash that would happen when running in high resolutions.
  
• Fixed some Market prices listed in the client being incorrect.
  
• Fixed some issues in the deck editor when playing through multiple draft gauntlets in one session.
  
• Fixed some display issues with the effects for Remote Detonation and the imps.
  
• Updated the localization files.

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We’re 19 short days from Artifact’s release, but already the community has been busy creating a variety of tools to support the game. Every time we see one of these community creations pop up, whether it’s a draft simulator[howlingmind.com] or a deck builder[www.artifactfire.com] or even a personality quiz[artifaction.gg], the Artifact team is blown away by your ingenuity, and the excitement is contagious.We want to help.In order to support the community’s efforts, today we’re opening some public APIs for those building tools. There are two components to this:

• The CardSet WebAPI[github.com] supports direct retrieval of all images and text for all cards as they are released.
• The deck code API and source, viewable on GitHub[github.com], will make it easier for players and community sites to share deck codes. Any valid deck code can be pasted directly into the client or viewed online in our online deck viewer.

We hope the release of these APIs will not only empower tools creators, but wil... Read more

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvCr3w6CJGc Losing a hero might not be as bad as you think.Many players immediately gravitate to red because the heroes are often huge and robust, and the feeling of losing a hero on the flop is so bad. Red is solid – but it doesn’t dominate – and that in itself indicates the penalty of hero death is probably overrated. The loss of a hero can hurt a lot; the temporary loss of the attack and block the hero provides, and the reduced flexibility in card play make it generally something to avoid. And then on top of that your opponent scores some gold for the kill.To really understand the cost of a hero dying you have to understand how good it is to be able to redeploy your heroes. When your hero is destroyed they sit out a turn, and then they can be put into any lane. It is hard to overstate how important and powerful this ability is. In general you only have to win 2 lanes, and so focusing your power correctly is vital to success in Artifact – it could invo... Read more

Q. What do I get when I buy Artifact? Your purchase includes 10 card packs, 5 event tickets, and two complete starter decks. The two starter decks are Red/Green Brawler and and Blue/Black Control. Q. What game modes are available at launch? We've organized game modes into three categories: Social, Casual, and Expert.Social Play includes user-organized tournaments, private lobbies, and the ability for open play. Open play enables you to create a freestanding invitation for players within a Steam community or your friends list to challenge you. Players will be notified that you're available for a game. Open play enables players to easily find matches within their own communities.Casual Play includes bot-matches, global matchmaking, and the casual constructed Gauntlet. Bots own all cards, so you can make a deck for the bot using any card released for Artifact, not just the cards you own, making them great for practice and learning. Global matchmaking lets you quickly find a constructed m... Read more

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-ep1QnXLQ8
I enjoyed helping design the shop in Artifact and I think it provides a lot to the game. We knew we wanted the heroes to get more powerful over the course of play – and in fact we experimented with some experience and leveling systems to accomplish that. We quickly came to the conclusion we could get a lot of the feeling of improvement from a shop which sold items that upgraded the heroes. Rather than collect experience, players would collect gold. The gold could be spent to flexibly upgrade your heroes in different ways during the course of the game.The shop is composed of three panels, the rightmost selling a random consumable item. These items are effects that we wanted players to always have access to, we didn’t want them to be forced to put, for example, healing potions in their deck. The middle panel is dedicated to equipment the player chooses to bring into the game. It is a minimum of 9 cards, and unlike the other two panels, when you ... Read more

The Artifact public beta is starting later today. All attendees from this year's International and everyone who redeemed a beta key will find the game activated in their Steam account.Since lifting the NDA on the private beta yesterday, there's been an overwhelming amount of feedback on all parts of the game. Much of that feedback has been a clear signal that we underestimated how much interest and excitement the community has around certain features that weren't available in the initial beta build.We want to take a few minutes to talk about some of those missing features now:

• There was no way to do a draft event with friends. We didn't prioritize this play mode, and had planned to enable it sometime after release. We've heard your feedback: drafting with friends is a core part of what you want to spend your time doing in Artifact. In the next Artifact beta build, you can select Call To Arms Phantom Draft in any user-created tournament.
• There was no way to practice the draft modes withou...

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Features

• You can now recycle cards into event tickets at a rate of 20 cards to 1 ticket. There is a "Recycle Cards" tab accessible from the collection. Note that each card will currently show "N/A" where the market price would be until the market is open. Sort by market price will sort by mana cost until the market is open.
  
• You can now play bot matches and Call to Arms without claiming your starting package. This lets you try more of the game before you reach the point-of-no-return on refunds.
  
• Added an AI difficulty selector.
  
• Added some premade decks to the bot's deck selection options to make it easy to quickly practice against various opponent color combinations.
  
• Added a new cursor and cursor size settings control.

Deck Editor Fixes

• Leaving the deck editor by pressing the Artifact logo will now prompt to save changes.
  
• Fixed an issue where dragging an unowned hero into a deck that already contains that hero would remove the hero that was in the destination slot and then fail to add or arr...

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Artifact is coming to Steam in just two days! In the meantime, we're happy to launch the first in a new series of Artifact comics, called Prelude. Artifact is more than just a Dota card game — it is a shared universe with a storyline that will deepen the history, expand the world, and change the fates of the heroes of both games. We'll also be releasing a second comic called Call to Arms on launch day, which sets the stage for a series of events that will transform the world of Dota forever. Don't forget to come back and check it out.We're also updating the beta, once this afternoon's stress tests have completed. Pre-loading will be available tonight! 11/26 Beta Update
Features

• Added the ability to inspect the current deck lists during play using F2 and F3.

Bug Fixes

• Fixes for several crashes.
  
• Pressing ESC to cancel an unrecommended action no longer causes the card to become unresponsive.
  
• When you try to recycle >1000 cards, the dialog box will be clearer about why you can’t.
  
• Fixed the t...

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Small Update:

• Fixed a bug where the opponent's Deck Tracker was completely filled at game start in Gauntlet and casual matchmaking games. It is intended that you can see the opponent's full deck list during tournament games to reduce the value of scouting. You will also be able to see the full opponent's deck list in private lobbies. In other modes, the opponent's Deck Tracker will update based on what cards you've seen, and cards you know to be present (e.g., hero signature cards).
  
• Added the Deck Tracker keys to the key binding menu.
  
• Added an in-game comic viewer to the client.
  
• Updated the localization files.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnVuzZYdwIQ
We're proud to launch Artifact and its first set Call to Arms. We also have a new comic and a trailer to get you started. This is the first of many adventures and stories in the world of Dota and we are excited to start this journey with you. This is only the beginning... Read more