Everything you need to know about Valve's Artifact: "The whole point is to steer away from pay-to-win"

Everything you need to know about Valve's Artifact: "The whole point is to steer away from pay-to-win"

We go hands on with Artifact and hear from Gabe and Garfield about trading on Steam, randomness, and why it's not F2P.

• Each deck contains 40 cards and includes 5 heroes (which is the same as a Dota 2 team). There will be 280+ cards in the base game. There are 44 heroes. You can include three copies of each card in your deck.
• Your cards and heroes are selected from four possible colours: Red, Green, Black, and Blue. As per Magic, each colour has its own personality which themes what its cards do accordingly. 
• At the beginning of the game your first three heroes will be deployed evenly into the three lanes (which are essentially game boards), along with some randomly spawned melee creeps. After each round, two more creeps will spawn in random lanes on each players' side.
• Each lane contains a tower which has 40 health which you must protect. Lose two towers and the game is over. Once a tower is destroyed, it's replaced by the Ancient, which has 80 health. Destroy an Ancient and you also win the game.
• Heroes that are killed aren't gone for good, they just have to sit out an entire round, after which you can choose which lane to redeploy them in. (An exception here is a green hero who has a 'rapid deployment' ability and can be sent back into the fray in the next round.)
• Each lane also has its own Mana pool, which begins at 3 and increases by 1 with each turn—though you can also use Ramp cards to accelerate your Mana pool. Hey, it's a Richard Garfield game.
• In order to play a card, you must have a hero of the corresponding colour placed in the lane where you're spending the mana. However, Mana spent in one lane can be used to cast certain cards in other lanes.

Source: https://www.pcgamer.com/artifact-guide/