Valve is sure you won’t need to build $500 decks for Artifact

Andy Chalk from PCGamer recently released an article that dispels a major worry the Artifact community has about the game economy.

As everybody knows by now, Artifact is a Pay to Play game and you’ll need to spend $20 just to get into it. At the end of this article we’ve injected a video with Gabe Newell discussing many aspects of the game, including Artifact. At approximately minute 9 when he starts to talk about economy, eventually explaining why Valve decided to make Artifact a P2P instead of F2P.

Artifact is going to have an open market for cards and it spawns a legitimate concern that some cards will get overpriced and rich players IRL will have an upper hand over those who don’t want or can’t pay for expensive items. Here is what Valve designer Skaff Elias told about overpriced decks to PCGamer:

The original philosophy of 'rarity does not equal power level' is more pronounced here. I think there will be decks that have a decent number of commons and uncommons inside of them. In the case of common cards, they’ll be so abundant that the price [of those cards] will have a hard time getting off the floor.

If there is a cheaper card that counter a more expensive one, price on any item naturally is capped.

This will create special effects on metagame, because competition is going to get saturated with decks that have high cost-to-viability ratio. It will eventually get balanced out by the supply-demand rules of open market. Trading card games like Magic: The Gathering have been operating under such rules for many years.