Sounds like they are actually still going through with a complete Artifact rebuild

I have never installed Artifact since the original word of mouth was so bad. But it sounds like they're trying to completely redo it, which is nice?

“Artifact was an interesting failure in its first go-round." Newell tells Edge, “We were surprised. We thought that it was a really strong product.”

“We ran an experiment, we got a negative result, and now we need to see if we’ve learned anything from that, so let’s try again,” he says. “And that’s what [the Artifact team] have been doing and that’s what they’re getting ready to release. Based on the reaction to it, what was wrong with the product? How did we get there? Let’s fix those things and take another run at it.”

Edge reports that, internally, the follow-up to Artifact is being referred to as Artifact 2, though it's unclear if this will be a full blown sequel, a No Man's Sky-style comeback, or something else entirely, but Newell stresses that Valve has "to do a larger reboot in order to justify its existence to customers and to markets."

Will be interested to see how this turns out. Guessing they will attempt a model more like Hearthstone this time.

If y'all are curious on why the 2.0 has taken a while to come, and what potential changes are coming, VNN did a report recently based on verified internal leaks. TLDR: Simplifying the gameplay to work better with mobile/not be as frustrating to learn, reducing RNG, and going with the Underlords business model of all gameplay being free, and monetising with cosmetics through a battle pass.

I'm a huge fan of Artifact 1.0 (despite it's flaws), and I'm really excited to see what's coming with this relaunch.

Also it sounds like there's gonna probably be an interview with one of the Artifact devs in that Edge issue on Monday as part of the feature in there interviewing 20+ Valve devs about what they're doing at Valve, along with the Gabe Newell big interview that spawned the quote that Rorie found.

Also the Artifact team posted a blog post today talking about them prepping stuff and news coming soon:

First off, we wanted to say thanks for all of your tweets, emails and posts. The continued interest in Artifact has been encouraging, and we sincerely appreciate all of the feedback!

You might notice some changes soon – we are starting tests on our systems and infrastructure. This shouldn’t impact live Artifact but we wanted to give you a heads up.

Expect more news after the launch of Half-Life: Alyx!

Moving towards mobile seems like the right "wrong" move. It's been shown several times over that card games tends to benefit highly from being on mobile, but building the game for that market from the ground up pretty much puts a "B" quality stamp on the game from the get-go. It would basically be Valve going "hey, at least this way it'll make money".

I think the resurgence MTG had with Arena showed us that while HS took the market with storm with technological innovations the card game playerbase still craves complexity over simplicity. Artifact was a game that portrayed itself as complex, but under its nearly impenetrable shell it was ultimately fairly simple. Which is much of the reason why people got so hyped and turned so hard on the game.

With MTG back in full swing on the digital market the idea of making a big budget card game almost seems like a fools errand, so going for a more low profile cash-in seems to be the more sensible choice.

Honestly, unless it is free to play, they have already failed again.

Their are dozens of people who are excited about this.