Marvel Snap's December Patch dropped on Tuesday and it gave us unofficial full reveals of February's cards, some small cosmetic changes, more information on the upcoming Season Pass Premium, and a lot more information about how Character Mastery works was added to the data files. Let's go through what we learned from the patch!
January
January will be the Dark Avengers season with Iron Patriot as the season pass card. Gorgon and Doxie aren't scheduled for Spotlights so they're presumably LTM/free cards.
This will also be the first season for the new Super Premium Season Pass which will be replacing the previous $15 Season Pass Premium+.
The Super Premium Season Pass will cost $20 and include:
- Instant 10 Season Pass levels (same as Premium+ previously gave)
- 3 Cosmetic Borders
- 1 Exclusive Super Rare Variant
I was hoping that the new Pass would provide enough value over the regular paid Season Pass to be worth it, but this has missed the mark. I suppose in months there you especially love the variant it might feel worth it, but otherwise this doesn't feel worth an extra $10 at all.
February
February’s season is based on the upcoming Captain America: Brave New World film. We previously reported on the abilities of the cards from this season, but we now have full numbers and wording on the cards.
The new Captain America mechanic, which I believe will include both the new Sam Wilson Captain America card and our existing Steve Rogers card, looks super fun and they could possibly find their way into a Spectrum deck together. The rest of the season looks like a bounce player’s dream with the very powerful Redwing and intriguing Joaquin Torres. Diamondback and Bullseye also look quite powerful and fun to build around. Batroc and Cobra are likely to be Limited Time mode freebies, but we're not exactly sure when they'll be available. Batroc could be really good with the right meta, but I'm really hoping Cobra gets an extra point of power before he gets released.
Black Effects
This isn't the first time Second Dinner has tweaked black particle effects, but I think they may have finally gotten them right. Black Krackle effects were difficult to see before and they've been given more white and grey accents.
The change to the other black effects was more subtle and is most noticeable when you first click on that card in your collection.
As a fan of these black effects I'm quite happy with these changes. Let me know how you feel about them in the comments. Did they finally nail them or do you think they still need another pass?
Character Mastery
The most exciting new information from the patch was the additional information we got about Character Mastery. They've added quite a few files related to this new feature, so I'm really hoping this gets added to the game in the January patch.
With Character Mastery, each character will have a rewards track that you can unlock rewards from as you move along the track by earning XP. Right now there are 30 levels, but that could change. Each card you have for a character will count for XP. This means each variant and each unique split you have in your collection will count and it will all count retroactively. It's not yet clear how certain variants without a rarity label, like certain Promo and Bundle variants, will be counted. We do know that there will be different XP bonuses based on the source of the variant, but we don't have those values yet. Perhaps for bundle variants it will be tied to their Collector's Vault rarity in some way.
Using an example from my own collection, I have just two Invisible Woman variants (not counting the Base card), but one of them is the Ultimate variant. I've done 16 Invisible Woman splits. That would put me at 515 XP, good for level 17.
Here's a second example. For Brood I have 3 variants (two rare and one super rare) and have split Brood past infinity 9 times. I'll start at level 13 on the Character Mastery track for Brood with 260 XP.
The system heavily rewards you for really committing to a character by splitting very deep and acquiring variants above the lowest rarity level. Cards that people truly care about are going to be much higher than those that they've simply incidentally collected a lot of free variants for.
If you check out our list of background and particle effects, the ones that can be unlocked in Character Mastery are now labeled!
Background effects
Particle effects
Which effects are you most excited to unlock? Which characters do you have the most XP for?
Highest value bundles
It's a busy week in Snap with OTA balance changes coming out and Twitch drops going on. Check SnapFan daily for all of the latest going on in Marvel Snap. Also be sure to check out our Marvel Rivals coverage!