Artifact will let you build decks online and then import them into the game

A pre-release preview tournament for Valve's CCG Artifact is running on SteamTV this weekend, and no doubt anyone watching will be itching to get their hands on their own deck. Online deck builders, such as this one, have already started popping up, letting players tweak their card combinations—and now Valve has released tools that will make it easy for players to import any decks they've built online straight into the game.

The developer has released a CardSet WebAPI that will allow third-party Artifact sites to pull card images and text straight onto a web page, as well as deck code API, which will make it easier to share codes generated for customised decks. You'll be able to copy and paste those codes directly into Artifact to pull the cards into the game, or view your deck in Valve's online deck viewer, it said.

Valve said the tools will help players "theorycraft new ideas"—and I don't doubt some people will spend hours upon end agonising over card choices before they even launch the game.

Artifact is due on November 28. You can read Tim's impressions here, and Jody's deep dive into how it'll change the card game scene here.

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.