After securing themselves a place among the extremely popular FPS and MOBA genres, it was only a matter of time before Valve set their sights onto the next big thing - card games! As such, it really shouldn't come as much of a surprise to hear that during this year's The International Valve announced their brand new Dota 2 themed card game hybrid Artifact.

In standard Valve tradition the details are in incredibly short supply, but what I can tell you is that Artifact will attempt to emulate a standard Dota 2 match. In other words, there will be three game boards representing the different lanes, you will be able to control 5 unique heroes, purchase and equip item cards onto said Heroes, and perhaps most importantly, each hero will have all of the same abilities as their Dota counterpart. In order to earn gold you will need to beat up enemy heroes and creeps that spawn each turn, though how exactly all of that will work I'm afraid I don't know.

The only other piece of information I can tell you is that you will be able to play various creature cards to attack your opponent with, as well as cast spells that leave persistent effects on the lane. All of this is complete guesswork, but I'd imagine these spells will represent standard Dota 2 mechanics such as creep denying, harassment, and perhaps even ganks. Whatever the case may be, Artifact does at least appear to be significantly different from all of the other card games, so while I'm exactly excited for it I must admit I am looking forward to find out what its all about.

You can expect to see Artifact at some point in 2018, though no exact date has been given just yet. And finally, here's the extremely brief and extremely useless teaser trailer: