Wikipedia
BattleForge is a discontinued video game that was developed by EA Phenomic and published by Electronic Arts. It was released on Windows in March 2009. A demo was released in the same month. BattleForge is an online card-based real-time strategy (RTS) game. The game's servers were shut down on October 31, 2013 at midnight UTC.
On its initial release, the game revolved around trading, buying and winning through means of micro-transactions, though micro-transactions were not required for playing the game, only for buying new cards. On May 26, 2009, BattleForge became a Play 4 Free branded game with fewer cards initially available (32 cards and no points). The retail version came with all of the starter decks (One for each element, 64 cards) and 3,000 BattleForge points. On September 4, 2013, EA announced the closing of the game in an email to registered players, effective October 31, 2013.
The game's virtual currency was distributed to each player on a 2-point per day basis, but only if the player has played at least 15 minutes that day. Through this, all micro-transactions were available to all players, but doing them without purchasing the retail version of the game or any virtual currency was possible, only slow.
Since June 2015 a group has started working on reverse engineering the game code to create a server for the game to run again. This uses 100% of the game features without cash needed to buy BFP which was needed when EA ran the servers.