I’m starting to feel like the card game genre is the new MOBA of video games. A Warcraft-based game pushed the genre into the public eye (Dota for MOBAs, Hearthstone for card games), everyone started piling on and now you’ve got card games by the dozens with only a few standouts. Just like how DC jumped into the MOBA space we now have Marvel entering the card game realm with Marvel Snap, a relatively casual and incredibly mobile-focused card game that has spent the last week unironically ruining my life because I’ve been playing it when I should be doing far more important things. Let me tell you why.
There’s a lot of very strange mechanics in Marvel Snap, at times I’d swear almost intentionally so (this is a mobile game after all) so let’s start with the basics and expand outward. Marvel Snap is a mana-based card game like Hearthstone or Legends of Runeterra where you gain additional energy at the start of each turn, but unlike those other games Snap has been designed to be as streamlined and fast as possible. As such they have made three key changes to how card games traditionally work that immediately set the tone of how the game plays out: you can only have one copy of each card in a 12-card deck, there are only six turns, and you and your opponent play cards at the same time. The first change makes the most sense from a design standpoint, as their logic was that you generally have a 40ish card deck in most card games (not counting lands in the case of Magic the Gathering) and most people want to run as many copies as possible of their best cards. So rather than running a 40-card deck full of just 3 copies of 13 cards you could instead run just 12 unique cards with the same level of consistency. Obviously this doesn’t leave much brain space for techs cards but I don’t hate the idea of “streamlining” deck building in this way.
The other two choices are a little more crazy to think about. Six turns isn’t a lot of time and from a core gameplay loop it’s probably one of the features I dislike the most. It means that whatever your bomb card is it’s probably going to be six mana and it will be the ONLY thing you’re playing on your last turn outside of certain decks. It does lead to quick games, which was the idea, and I have more often than not discovered that my bomb card is actually NOT the best choice to play on the last turn, leading to some surprisingly tough decisions with the clock ticking down that makes the game exciting… but I still find deck building decisions a little restricting when every card with a six mana cost says on it “you are playing me on your last turn or not at all.” On the other side the idea of playing cards at the same time as your opponent can be hard to wrap your head around but essentially both players choose which cards to play and once they’ve both hit “end turn” the cards that were played are revealed. Again the logic behind this was a quicker player experience, with the hypothesis being that “the most boring time of the game is when you wait for your opponent to play,” and as a fan of counterplaying your opponent in games like Yu-Gi-Oh! I find this concept to be the height of heresy but in practice the idea seems to work… fine. It limits the design space of how cards can work of course, with few ways to “counterspell” or otherwise stop your opponent’s tricks in the moment, however there’s still plenty of ways to out think and out maneuver the other player thanks to how the game is actually played.
Marvel Snap is surprisingly similar to Witcher‘s Gwent in that it is focused on a board with three rows. Called “locations” in Snap, each is a different Marvel comics-themed area with a passive ability that can hold four cards each and twelve total (your deck has 12 cards, remember), and the person who has higher power at two locations at the end of the game wins. The strategy here speaks for itself, as if an opponent overcommits to one location they might leave themselves vulnerable in the other two, but also if you choose to abandon a location entirely to focus on the other two then your opponent can easily win one of them and only needs to fight for the board in one other one. It’s a game of positioning and playing cards that synergize without being super reliant on each other, because without easy tutoring of cards, mulligans, or other such strategies you sometimes won’t see your combo finisher and have you make due with the other cards in your deck instead. The rub here is that there’s a pool of ninety plus locations to choose from and they are randomly generated every game, so while this leads to a “completely different experience every time” the amount of randomization present here really pisses me off.
Don’t get me wrong, Marvel Snap‘s simplistic design and short game time would be dead on arrival if not for some mechanic that makes the game “fresh and unexpected,” but the many different kinds of locations can lead to ridiculous board states that can give one player an absurd advantage or just completely shut down the game before it begins. You won’t necessarily know the game is screwed for you until you get a few turns in though, as the three locations are hidden at the beginning of each game and only reveal themselves one a turn, leading to obnoxious games where the first location is garbage so you commit something to the second location only for it to be “destroy everything here at the end of turn three.” You could be playing a later game deck but the location that ends the game on turn four flips up, or worse you’re against a swarm deck and the “turn every card here into the Hulk” or “first to fill this location gets a zero-cost high power card” locations rear their ugly heads. The “featured location” that happens every few days makes this even worse, as suddenly a particular location has a significantly higher chance of appearing shows up, so you either need to be playing decks that thrive in that location, counter it, or lose. Lots of people dropped Hearthstone for the randomization and I’ll be curious to see if the player base sticks around after the novelty wears off and they get sick of getting undermined by bad location rolls.
There’s definitely a lot worth sticking around for, at least from what I’ve seen from the cards we don’t have yet. Here’s where I try to explain Marvel Snap‘s way of unlocking cards and you’d better strap in because it’s probably the most fair unlock system in any free to play game while still being a slightly confusing grind. Snap has two primary forms of free currency: credits and boosters (why they decided to use the term “boosters” in a genre of game where one would generally think of these as “booster packs” I don’t know), and while credits are gained from daily challenges and free drops your boosters are acquired by playing games and are card specific. Every game you can earn up to six boosters for one card in your deck, depending on the length of the match, and when you get enough boosters for a particular card you can “level up” that card with artwork enhancements by spending boosters and credits.
For example, you play a game with Iron Man in your deck and even though you don’t play him the game ends and you get six boosters for him. Since you have enough credits you can use those six boosters to level him up, which gives that version of his card a “frame break” look with at least some aspect of the art bursting out of card’s frame. Collect ten more boosters and with enough credits you can level him up again, this time completing the frame bursting visual with a 3-D effect. Next level some part of the card is animated, etc. The lower upgrade of a given card the higher chance that you’ll get boosters for it during your games too (as long as it’s in your deck) so you can grind out for a particular character if you really want them to be upgraded fast, assuming you’re fine with its basic look for a time. Not that there’s anything wrong with the basic look, as upgraded cards only look different visually and aren’t improved in any way gameplay wise from the basic to fully upgraded versions.
But we’re talking about progression here. Every time you upgrade a card you improve your profile’s “collection level” by a certain number of points, based on the tier you upgraded your card to. An initial upgrade gives you one collection level, a later one might give you ten, etc., and every two to four levels you unlock something on the collection track, and generally every other unlock is a new card. This is how you get cards in Marvel Snap: by upgrading cards you currently own through points you earn by playing the game with them in your deck. The cards you unlock are random after the initial starter cards but they will come from a predetermined “pool” of cards based on when they came out. Currently there are three pools and you can’t get cards from the next pool until you own every card from the one you’re currently on outside of special events, but with the randomization of card drops not everyone will have every card in that pool until the very end of that part of the collection level, which inherently leads to deck variety due to circumstance but also frustration if every time you flip over your one new card for the day it turns out to be garbage like Strong Guy rather than a staple like Elektra or a tech card like Scarlet Witch.
This is why I’m writing this as an impressions piece rather than a full review, as it’s going to probably take 2-3 months to get every card in the game (or more, if another pool comes out before I finish pool 3) and pool 1 is essentially just a point slam fest. Counterplay is limited to Elektra and two or three counter tech cards that almost no one runs, so basically the name of the game is either playing a bunch of little dudes to get buffed by your big dudes, or a combo deck that plays one or two SUPER big dudes. There’s still positional decisions to be made and the one or two counter play cards timings to consider, but really you can just slam mana value on curve and do alright in pool 1. The decks I’ve seen in pool 2 and 3 are a little more interesting, but since I’m not there yet I can’t comment on them and I also don’t want to wait three months to make this review.
However, this is where Marvel Snap‘s greatest design choice comes in: you only play people around your collection level. Gone are the days of posting on websites complaining about how you are getting destroyed by people with the best decks when all you have is Dark Magician, a 5 mana 3/3 vanilla, and a prayer. While you may not have the “right cards” at the same time as your opponents you should, in theory, at least have a similarly sized collection, which is a hell of a lot more fair than a new player jumping into something like Hearthstone or Legends of Runeterra right now. And best of all this means that even if you fall off the wagon and come back later you should still be facing people in the same spot you’re in, rather than being left behind as the game evolves (assuming they keep this collection level model).
While everything in the last two paragraphs is extremely free to play friendly (if grindy) there is still the sinister air of free to play lurking around the game. The most annoying is how daily and weekly missions are handed out, as they do not unlock all at once but instead you get two every eight hours which forces you to either keep coming back or quickly play through all of them in that eight hour window before you miss out on more challenges in the next cycle. Admittedly these challenges aren’t necessarily difficult, ranging from “win a location with X number of cards” to “play cards of X mana” but it’s the fact that they aren’t willing to give you the chance to get all of these at once that adds to a bit of a grindy atmosphere and a fear of missing out that keeps dragging you back, as any good mobile free game is supposed to do. It’s not a HUGE problem given how nice the progression model is and how little there is to actually spend money on, but there is clearly a negative intent here that suggests the usual level of free-to-play shenanigans could be lurking just below the surface, especially considering some questionable choices they made during beta that were quickly walked back.
Visually the game is fantastic if you’re into super hero stuff. All of the card art is either unique pieces done by established artists or iconic comic book covers, and as you level up your cards the art gets more and more dynamic (though your mileage may vary). If you’re hovering a card over the field it’ll do a minor cool animation based on the character, like optic blasts, firing arrows, rocket boots, webs, etc, and while I have the game muted all the time I’ve heard other people say nice things about some of the voice lines. I can’t say the same for the music though, as it’s just the same generic track over and over again, but hopefully music will be more engaging as time goes on. Different looking environments to play on wouldn’t go amiss either, as while the locations are always different the play area itself just looks like the broken surface of an asteroid, which I could do without. Maybe other game boards will be premium cosmetics in the future.
In the end I do have to admit that if Marvel Snap didn’t have the Marvel skin on it I wouldn’t give it nearly as much attention as I currently do. That’s not to say that it’s bad, the fact that I’ve been playing it every chance that I think I have three minutes to spare even when I don’t (in fact I wish I was playing it right now) should be proof enough that it’s a good, if compressed, card game experience. It’s just that there’s the additional Marvel flavor here that makes it really appealing to a comics nerd like me, and after all would anyone have cared about Hearthstone initially without the Warcraft skin? Hearing people talk about a “Deadpool Taskmaster” deck or the fact that two of my favorite heroes (Ghost Rider and Moon Knight) are in the same archetype just itches the perfect part of my brain while also fueling the other part that got me into Yu-Gi-Oh! all those years ago. I’d recommend it to anyone who plays card games, likes super heroes, or plays games on their phone, as at least at the moment the design choices make it a very fair, if occasionally random, experience that doesn’t try to steal your money for cards. Hopefully it stays on that path.
