Heroes

There are a wide variety of **Heroes** featured in **Artifact**. These Heroes each boast their own **ability**, and have their own specific play styles.

## Summary

Heroes are a player's strongest card in the game, because of this players are limited to 5 per deck. Currently 48 heroes (12 for each color) make up the 280+ cards that have been released with the base game. In Artifact, every hero is categorized into one of four following colors: **Black**, **Blue**, **Green**, and **Red**.

### Anatomy of a Hero Card

The hero card's color dictates what spells you can play with that hero.

A hero card has three separate slots for Items at the top of the card: Weapon, Armor and Accessory. A hero can have one item in each of these slots, each conferring unique benefits, up to a total of three items overall. Most heroes have innate abilities, as indicated by an icon on the bottom left corner of the card art. Finally, the primary stats of the hero are located on the bottom row, corresponding to their Attack, Armor and Health.

### Ability

Most heroes, with the exception of Axe, Mazzie, Keefe the Bold, and Magnus, have an ability indicated by the icon on the bottom left corner of the card art.
These come in four different types.

* **Active Ability**
	+ An effect that must be manually activated on the card. Starts on a cooldown that begins to countdown from the start of the game. Ability cooldowns decrease at the end of every round, regardless if the hero is dead, alive, or waiting to be deployed.
* **Passive Ability**
	+ Usually applies to effects that trigger when a specific condition or phase listed is met. Passive Abilities often use words like "when" or "after".
* **Continuous Effect**
	+ Usually applies to effects that are constant and continuous, such as providing neighboring allies with bonus attack. The effect ends or changes appropriately if the hero dies or changes lanes or position. Continuous Effects often use words like "have" or "has".

## Signature Cards

Every hero has an associated Signature Card. Including a hero in your deck will automatically add 3 copies of their Signature Card to your deck. Signature Cards cannot be collected, traded on the marketplace, found in card packs, or manually removed from a deck. Because players must play exactly 5 heroes and each hero will add in 3 copies of their respective Signature Card, each Artifact deck contains exactly 15 Signature Cards.

## Mechanics

*Main article:* Mechanics
You must have exactly five Heroes in an Artifact deck. You can only play non-item cards in a lane if you control a hero in that lane with the corresponding color. Heroes deploy into the game in the order that they were placed into your deck. The first three randomly appear split between the three lanes. The fourth is deployed during your first Deployment Phase (mana turn 4), and the fifth during the second Deployment Phase (mana turn 5).

If a hero dies, it is sent to the Fountain for the rest of that round and then the following round, before it returns during the next deployment phase.

## Unreleased Heroes

Information about Artifact 2.0 heroes is pending.

## References

1. ↑ [1], Gameinformer's Suriel Vazquez explains a bit about how Artifact works.