note that this isn’t the same as Duelyst 2, a game which some team has been working on for a while and has been out for a couple months.

AFAIK the original Duelyst team gave the Duelyst 2 team some code (long before open-sourcing), but they added some new features and a lot of polish, most notably reintroducing 2-card draw. But Duelyst 2 is monetized with lootboxes (free to download), and right now pay-to-win as it otherwise takes a ton of grinding to unbox or craft the right epic and legendary cards.

It’s really interesting. They’re monetizing a game which is mostly open-source: if you don’t agree with it you can play an almost-the same game, and it seems like a separate small could make it even closer to the same with a few months of work. But (reading on the r/Duelyst forms), it seems to be working: some people have already spent thousands on the new game. It just shows why so many companies end up with IAP that lets people spend absurd amounts of money, because some people do. Nonetheless, Duelyst 2 has indicated they are planning to put most of the monetization on cosmetics, so I suspect they will shift the reward system and make it easier to get cards as time goes on.

And note that open Duelyst has been around for a couple months now (around when Duelyst 2 was released), and Duelyst’s community is niche and the openness has been discussed frequently, so I doubt most people didn’t realize. There’s also https://duelyst.gg which existed much longer than Duelyst 2 and has everything unlocked by default: it’s more similar to open Duelyst, an online version re-engineered from the assets and some of the code before the rest was made available.