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For me it was the economic model.

I play Magic the Gathering (Arena) regularly and own and enjoy Slay the Spire as well. I was really interested in Artifact, but it seemed cost-prohibitive to play it casually so I never tried it.

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I played roughly 150 hours of Artifact, almost entirely the free draft mode. Gameplay is more interactive and interesting than MTG or Netrunner, which are in turn better than Hearthstone. Artifact automates the small stuff for you leaving you to play this lovely resource-balancing bluffing game. For a metaphor, playing MTG feels like writing code to spec, while playing Artifact feels like architecturing a complex system. Same decisions but more abstracted, with greater chances for failure or brilliance.

I'm sad the game died. I agree with this article's post-mortem, it's largely Valve's failure to test the "outer loop". I hope we get a worthy successor eventually. (STS is great but single-player only)

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