Marvel Snap - Catch-all

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Marvel Snap is a F2P game on ios, Android and Steam, the leader developer was game director for Hearthstone.

You play Marvel-themed cards to three sections on the board. The sections change each game and affect gameplay. If you control at least two sections, you win.

There are six turns in a game and players' moves are resolved simultaneously. The last games are very short - the last one I played was three minutes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNuq...

It's got small, interesting decisions, with a chance for the game to swing back and forth. My concern is that unlocking cards will be a grind - there's always an option to pay to skip said grind - and that it much better decks will be overwhelming. It seems quite casual, but I think it'll suit people that like tinkering with builds.

Anyone else playing?

1Dgaf wrote:

Marvel Snap is a F2P game on ios, Android and Steam, the leader developer was game director for Hearthstone.

You play Marvel-themed cards to three sections on the board. The sections change each game and affect gameplay. If you control at least two sections, you win.

There are six turns in a game and players' moves are resolved simultaneously. The last games are very short - the last one I played was three minutes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNuq...

It's got small, interesting decisions, with a chance for the game to swing back and forth. My concern is that unlocking cards will be a grind - there's always an option to pay to skip said grind - and that it much better decks will be overwhelming. It seems quite casual, but I think it'll suit people that like tinkering with builds.

Anyone else playing?

I've been playing a fair bit and enjoying it so far. I appreciate how it starts you off with a fairly simple card set and slowly builds upon that as you unlock more cards. Gives you a chance to learn the mechanics and see a bit of the game without feeling too overwhelmed, and slowly seeing you cards gives you a glimpse into more complex possibilities.

I don't love the heavy mobileness of it. Dailies, clicking on everything to earn everything for the sake of clicking on things, daily free things in the store you need to go click on... it's pretty obnoxious. I also don't love that you unlock more cards by upgrading things, even if those upgrades are visual. Makes for a somewhat strange feedback loop and does feel like it incentivizes monetization even though I haven't felt the need to pay for anything yet.

I think it's unfortunate because I don't feel like it's overly pay-to-win; there's a very healthy dose of randomness in the game with how the three locations reveal and have special abilities, and I'm hopeful that does enough to throw a wrench in the meta.

It's fast and random, and I like both of those things. I'm not quite sure how much staying power it'll have for me but I've been enjoying my time with it so far.

I’ve bounced hard off pretty much every other card battler like this but I find myself coming back to Marvel Snap whenever I have a couple extra minutes. Really digging this, I’m just wondering how the simplicity of the game is going to affect future cards and locations, there are already too many with essentially duplicate modifiers.

I tried it despite being burnt out on the Marvel IP. I used to like card battlers but a lot of stuff about them turn me off nowadays. Snap does away with a lot of those things that turn me off. The speed of games, the different collection system, etc. I also have questions about how they will manage the game in the long term, but I’m pretty hooked right now.

I'm playing it a few times per day. In terms of ease of play, they've come up with something special. I heard once that McDonald's chicken nuggets were designed to be eaten in a car, for people that wanted snacks on the road. I don't know if that's true, but it points to design to fix a problem people didn't know they had.

I wonder how much of the design here is from the same standpoint - make the game extremely short and seemingly simple because people didn't know they wanted it.

EDIT : The people here being people that play card games like magic, hearthstone etc.

Don't play Odin at Bar Sinister!

I’m enjoying it so far, but I feel like I’m being conned a bit into that enjoyment, I’ve played over 40 games and have yet to lose. These must be all or mostly all bots, right? That’s what I’m reading. Makes me a little sad.

I won basically every match until I hit about level 25-30 then it felt like I was playing more against people with actual deck strategies. More players started using the communication system as well. Maybe they’re just smarter bots tho who knows.

jonnypolite wrote:

I’m enjoying it so far, but I feel like I’m being conned a bit into that enjoyment, I’ve played over 40 games and have yet to lose. These must be all or mostly all bots, right? That’s what I’m reading. Makes me a little sad.

Came here to say the same. Either I'm really effing good at this, or something is up.

Same here. Haven’t lost.

It definitely seems like you are eased into playing real people. Also pretty sure you are matched to people in the same collection pool rather than your rank.

I’ve lost maybe once. Pretty sure it’s bots. Also, finished both recruit missions and saw that to unlock anything outside of upgrade and occasional random cars I have to pay 9.99 for the season pass and I’m out.

Toddland wrote:

I’ve lost maybe once. Pretty sure it’s bots. Also, finished both recruit missions and saw that to unlock anything outside of upgrade and occasional random cars I have to pay 9.99 for the season pass and I’m out.

Personally, I find the monetization pretty fair compared to other collectible card games.

So, the 9.99 season pass doesn't give you much of an advantage. There's only one card unique to it, Miles Morales. You get Carnage from it, but you also unlock that for free sooner or later. Otherwise, it gives you cosmetic stuff, gold and credits.

Credits are used to upgrade you existing cards.
Gold can buy credits (bad idea) or cosmetics.

Almost all of the game's cards are unlocked through the raising your collection rank. You do this by upgrading your existing cards with credits. Unlike Hearthstone, etc. where you have to buy booster packs and hope for cards. The randomization is somewhat controlled for card unlocks by three "Pools."

Pool 1 is collection level 18-214, Pool 2 is 222-474 and Pool 3 is 474 and onward.
So, everyone will have all Pool 1 cards when they reach level 214, etc. It's just random in which order you unlock them.

So, the season pass can help you unlock the collection faster but that's not necessarily a good thing. You are matched with other players in the same collection pool as you. So, you could, potentially upgrade your collection too fast and be matched against players with a lot more experience than you.

The season pass thing could be abused in the future, but I think there would be a lot of negative feedback from the community. The developers were pretty responsive to feedback during the beta about the monetization model.

Toddland wrote:

I’ve lost maybe once. Pretty sure it’s bots. Also, finished both recruit missions and saw that to unlock anything outside of upgrade and occasional random cars I have to pay 9.99 for the season pass and I’m out.

I'm constantly getting cards and upgrade materials. The monetization seems super fair.

Also, you play against bots until you get into ranked. You know you are in ranked when you can lose rank. Ha

Found the worst location tonight: District X- Replace both player’s decks with 10 random cards. It was location 1 during a match and I only won because my opponent retreated on round 4 after only being able to play 1 card over the first 3 turns.

Haven’t seen that one yet! That’s pretty crazy. I kind of like the craziness of some of the locations even if they can be frustrating sometimes.

Had a weird incident tonight- I was playing on break at work and the notoriously unreliable wi-fi caused a disconnect in round 2 of a match, when I was back online the “play” button had turned into a “reconnect to game” button, which dropped me into round 4 of the same match, with cards on my side of the board that I definitely hadn’t played. Within a second or so of reconnecting I got the “successfully escaped” alert you get for retreating and the match ended.

Was… was I the bot all along?

ruhk wrote:

Found the worst location tonight: District X- Replace both player’s decks with 10 random cards. It was location 1 during a match and I only won because my opponent retreated on round 4 after only being able to play 1 card over the first 3 turns.

Having this location come up a few times makes me wonder how the cards you unlock are weighted. I've seen about 6 cards in these random grab bags that I have never seen get played before. Makes me wonder if the random cards you unlock are not random, or if they are divided into pools.

Edit: As soon as I posted this, this weeks Bombcast started talking about it. According to Jan pool 2 unlocks at deck level 222.

Yeah there’s three deck pools right now with a couple more on the way, Pool 3 starts at 475 I think.

I had another interesting location last night- Ego: Ego takes control and plays your cards for you. It appeared from a Scarlet Witch transformation on round 4 and the last 2 rounds was just this location reaching into both of our decks with energy tendrils and playing the game for us.

I'm enjoying it so far. I'm level 50 and win about 50% of the time. Finally starting to create themed decks.

Well it stopped being too easy and now I'm hovering at rank 24, getting beat fairly regularly.

The critic talk and lack of a mobile thingie compelled me to give this a try, despite my last Marvel game experience being very, very, very irritating, but I'm finding this is both a fun card game, and also sort of solved a lot of my issues with that last experience by divorcing everything from the movies. I've finally made a deck that's all mutants, probably not the most effective (I can't, for example, make use of Apocalypse's trait), but I'm just glad I could do it.

But I do not like the season pass. I know the free path is supposed to be sh*t, but this one seems extra sh*t.

I just bought the season pass today and I was disappointed. I don't know what I was expecting. I guess I wanted to be able to upgrade more cards, but most of the upgrade credits must be on the free path.

My question about the season pass is this: can I buy the next season pass with gold if I complete this one? The allure of a season pass or battle pass or whatever for me is that I can buy it once and if I keep playing I don't have to spend much or anything next time around. This is how Splitgate handled it and I appreciated that. Gave me incentive to actually try and finish it.

I have to say I'm addicted. I installed it last week just to give it a try. Today I made it to season pass level 50... I ended up springing for the premium pass this time just to get the cards but, yeah it's more than fair to play without paying.

For a 6 turn game it's surprisingly deep in terms of combos and synergies, and it only gets more with every new card and random locations.

I daresay it will supplant Animation Throwdown, finally, after many years.

New Season for Nov is Warriors of Wakanda, with the Premium Pass featuring Black Panther, Okoye, and Nakia

I just won a match because Forge gave +2 to a rock.

SpacePProtean wrote:

I just won a match because Forge gave +2 to a rock.

I have a deck based around buffing cheap low-power cards so an opponent playing Korg or the locations that give you rocks are just free points for me.

Getting rocks can also be fun if you’ve got a Destroy deck.

...what do I do with gold? I see I can buy variants, but I was hanging onto it hoping I could maybe put some toward a season pass. Is that really all it's for?

You can buy credits to upgrade your cards with, upping your collection level.

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