Valve announces Artifact, a Dota-themed digital card game

Enlarge / Want more info on Valve's upcoming card-battling game Artifact? Too bad! All you get for now is this logo. (credit: Valve)

Rather than wait until the end of The International, the major Dota 2 tournament taking place in Seattle all week, to announce major Dota news, Valve surprise-announced an entirely new video game on the event's second, early-rounds evening.

"It's not Half-Life 3," broadcaster Sean "Day9" Plott said, and he insisted that the game was not a re-release or a fine-tuning of an existing game i la Counter Strike: GO or Dota 2. Then, he introduced a vague, 35-second teaser video that prominently featured a triangular logo. It ended with the phrase: Artifact: The Dota Card Game, which Valve says will publicly launch sometime in 2018. (Technically, Plott wasn't lying, but gosh, did he come close.)

Sadly, Artifact's reveal was not followed with anything in the way of screenshots or gameplay. Instead, Plott described having played test versions of the game already, and his brief description hinted at a one-on-one digital card-battling game, like Hearthstone, only with a Dota-themed three-lane system and other Dota-like tweaks.

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