Does Marvel Snap really want you to be collection complete?
It's a fundamental design concept, as stated numerous times by the game's Chief Development Officer, Ben Brode. At its core, Second Dinner has envisioned a situation where players have different decks and experiment with what they have, not obsessing over what they don't. This seems, on its face, a liberating concept. The idea that it's okay to be missing some cards in your collection, giving you something to look forward to when you open a chest—building this concept to be really excited to try out a new card and find fun new ways to include it in your existing decks or finally having the missing piece to an archetype you want to try out.
But that's not how they design the game at all. This game, like all mobile games, relies incredibly on taking advantage of the FOMO (fear of missing out) effect on players. You can see this in the way the game dangles time-limited access to nearly every facet of its store, progression track, and season rewards.
Season Pass or Pay to Win?
The Season Pass itself, currently $9.99 every month, uses FOMO to entice you; the benefits of purchasing the season pass are high. You receive credits, gold, mystery variants, new card-backs, and season-specific variants, plus a brand new card, which will be only available to those willing to pay for a limited time; these cards can be incredibly meta-altering as well. On release, most season pass cards become the dominant card across the meta for the entire month or further. If you are a Free-To-Play player, you won't even have the opportunity to unlock this card until the next season, when the card will drop automatically into Series 5 for one month before moving to Series 4. So, for an entire season, you may be locked out of the potential number 1 winning deck archetype—something we have explicitly seen with cards like Loki, Zabu, and, more recently, Ms. Marvel.
Second Dinner has stated before that they are often okay with allowing a season pass card to remain a little overpowered through its season month, often opting to nerf its power or ability after it left the feature month. This design choice can make for a difficult season if you aren't joining in on the fun.
Spotlight Caches and New Cards
Then there are the Spotlight caches, which are supposed to be a mechanism to alleviate the demand for the new card of the week by letting players get a 1 in 5 chance to draw the latest non-season-pass card or another series 4/5 you may not have. If you do have those cards, it will provide you with a variant of those same cards. These variants will not appear in the rotating variant store or the collectors' cache/reserve. These caches also rotate weekly. This mechanic, fortunately, has allowed players to be more strategic and gives them more opportunities to get the card they really want or need. With the recent change to move spotlight caches off the collection level track and replace them with spotlight cache keys, it allows players to hoard as many as they want and only use them when they want a specific card or variant. But this system still relies on chance; there is always a 1 in 5 for that first key to land on the random Series 4/5 Card you may or may not have been trying to get. Regardless, this mechanic consistently puts more cards into players' hands than the old system. However, it does still rely on FOMO to try to pry some of those keys out of players' hands, encouraging them to keep trying to get all of the missing cards in the spotlight that week.
Collector Token Shop
Collector Token Shop, just like the rest of the shop, fully utilizes this same mechanic between its new card spotlight being only for a limited time and the rotating series 4 and 5 spot changing day by day. The section for series 4 and 5 cards and the ultimate variant slot allows you to pin the specific card you may want while you grind out the remaining tokens you need to purchase. However, at lower collection levels, you do not receive nearly the number of collector tokens you do when you are at Collection Level 3 complete and 4 or 5. This mechanism encourages you to spend money on Token Bundles to continue to complete your collection or to at least have enough tokens each month to target the specific new release when you don't have enough spotlight keys for caches.
Second Dinner’s Unyielding Refund Policy
In similar card games like Hearthstone, if a card is significantly changed from its original design or altered in a way that affects its play, players will receive some compensation, be it a free "refund" in the ability to dust the card for its full value and spend it on another card of the exact cost, or in extreme cases even gold/cards/currency to ease over the disruption of this change. Marvel Snap, on the other hand, has a firm refund refusal policy for nerfed cards--another function that punishes players for not being collection complete. With this system of picking and choosing your collection, the refusal to do any player compensation is a strange decision.
Players are spending hard-earned tokens or keys to acquire a new or competitive card each month, and it could be modified as soon as you finally pull the trigger, making the card unplayable for weeks, months, or longer. Look at how they completely gutted the functionality of cards like Mobius M. Mobius, changing him from an ongoing effect that prevents your opponent from lowering their card cost or increasing your card cost to a single use on reveal effect for a single turn. You can argue that this was a necessary change, and I would personally agree the card was far too powerful as it was.
However, it still is a fundamental card change and really upended players doing what Second Dinner intends, spending their resources on a card that no longer has a lot of value outside of being a single-turn tech card. This isn't a once-in-a-while issue either; on quite a few occasions, Second Dinner has altered a card to completely change its function, leaving players with buyer remorse for their lost tokens and a sour taste in their mouth, making them skeptical to pull the trigger on future cards on the off chance it becomes a less valuable card in their collection that they could have instead used those tokens/keys on a more deserving card, the only saving grace being that they won't pull that card in a cache or spotlight.
Emotes & Albums are for the whales…
One of the most recent features added in the patch released on 12/5/23 added a new collection mechanic for variants called Albums. These albums have a themed variant collection track, rewarding you at specific milestones for having a specific set of variants. These rewards can be tokens, gold, variants, avatars, and, of course, new emotes.
This seems to be the mechanic they want to employ to push users to go all in on variants they might otherwise have skipped out on when looking at the shop. Now, they have a tangible reward for those players willing to spend their money on the game. Given the currently released albums, with the exception of Dan Hipp, rely heavily on Super Rare level variants, most users who aren’t spending a lot of money on the game may never conceivably complete an album. Users with dozens of Dan Hipp variants were surprised to find that they were still missing quite a number of variants from the most “accessible” album, considering Dan Hipp variants can be in caches since they are Rare variants, not Super Rare.
While this doesn’t implicitly have any bearing on the total collection level at a glance, remember that in order for the store or caches to provide you with a variant, you must first own the Base card for the variant. This provides another avenue where players who are not collection complete are excluded from rewards.
Free to Play… for a Price
Being free to play exponentially increases this issue as well, with each token, key, credit, and gold carefully spent strategically to get the most out of the game. Some players spend thousands of hours min-maxing the daily missions, upgrading their cards, and hoarding gold and spotlight keys to ensure that they are able to get the most competitive cards and remain on top of their game. But this approach requires quite a lot of time and effort, and most importantly, skill. Those FOMO features I mentioned before will consistently tempt your frugal efforts by providing you shortcuts with token bundles, gold bundles, or variant bundles that allow you access to a card you may not have yet. I am not condemning this as while the game is FTP, it still requires some sort of income-generating function to pay the team and fund new features/expansions, and the relative ease of keeping the game engaging without spending any money is a rarity in this genre of game.
Closing Thoughts
Perhaps the way to bridge this gap would be first to move past the mindset that the game is intended to be played without completing your collection and instead continue to provide more features and functions along the collection track. They really seemed to nail the fun and wonder of the first two series levels. That may be due in part to a combination of the predictability of the collection track and the tactful placement of symbiotic cards near each other to encourage players to experiment with specific deck types at each milestone. This design choice isn't a continued experience once you reach about halfway through the collection for Series 3; instead, it is replaced with a lottery-esque system of chance for when you will get the next card you need or not.
They should also consider re-evaluating the refund mentality to be more forgiving to players who are playing as intended and feel punished for hopping on the hype train too late, being left holding the proverbial bag while the higher collection level players had all the fun dominating the ladder.
The game is incredibly accessible and allows new players to jump right into the action and not feel pressured to have the complete collection of cards until they have already committed a significant amount of hours into the game through the first few series pools of cards. As someone who has spent a lot of time and money on this game already, it feels like some of the cracks in the experience really show when you aren't willing to dedicate a lot of either money or time to the game, which is a shame because as a game it's one of the best strategy card games I can play in a 5-6 minute period and I want everyone I know to play too. Still, it's hard seeing their fun get replaced by dread once they realize they will potentially be months away from playing the fun new cards or deck archetypes.
Do you think Marvel Snap punishes you for not being collection complete? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.