At its heart, Marvel Snap is an ever-evolving game. However, recently, it's evolving monetarily, affecting the game's reception. The game features a system that promotes each player an asymmetrical card collection, which could be interesting, but it leaves players without much agency when they are trying to find cards that fit their playstyle. The game lacks ways to allow new players to catch up to seasoned veterans with vast collections of new cards.
With that in mind, I aim to delve deep into the game's system and explore, from my perspective, how it has somewhat deteriorated since its launch. I'll be going from my point of view as someone who loves this game more than he should but is still not critical of its systems and choices.
Spotlight Caches
Marvel Snap Spotlight Caches represent the game's take on the Gacha System, where players use keys to obtain collectible items randomly from four different possibilities. Initially, I was skeptical about this system, fearing it would lead to a pay-to-win scenario. However, it turned out to be a positive shift from the previous token-based card acquisition method.
Each week, the Spotlight Cache updates, offering players a new card, two cards from series 4 or 5 (or their variants if already owned), and a random series 4 or 5 card with duplicates converting into 1000 tokens. By collecting all available free credits, players can earn a Spotlight Key weekly, allowing them to save up for, in the worst possible scenario, a guaranteed brand-new card every month.
Players can decide ahead of time which card they desire and save their keys for when it shows up. However, cards are often changed, and your favorite new card can become a husk of what it was before. Second Dinner has a history of releasing powerful must-have cards and destroying them after a while. I'm not saying they should stop fine-tuning their game, but sometimes the intention appears to be that they release an overpowered card so players could spend their resources grabbing it just to be nerfed into the ground. A clear example of this is Mobius, where they released an overturned card only to dismantle it a month later. Fortunately, they rebalanced the card, which is in an excellent spot balance-wise.
The spotlight system, once celebrated for its accessibility, has incrementally become more expensive. Since January, the previously available "breathing week," which I liked to call at the start of each season and featured only the Battle Pass card, has been eliminated. This change has led to a faster depletion of players due to the continuous release of new cards. Moreover, in recent months, all new cards have been released in Series 5, making them more costly to acquire via tokens and encouraging players to open more Spotlight Caches for these cards.
Another aspect that doesn't feel great about Spotlight Caches is that they remove access to some cards. If a card you desire is far from appearing in the spotlight, your only option to safely acquire it is through the Collector Token Shop, which is a test of patience and resolve since players mostly get 100 tokens here and there through the Collection Track. The saving grace we have about the system is the Series Drop. These events are always a joyful occasion when cards become more accessible, however, a side-effect is that the Series 3 gets more and more bloated. Perhaps Second Dinner could consider dropping some cards to series 2 to alleviate that issue. The Devs mentioned that they will be periodically making more Series Drops. Hopefully they’ll alleviate the struggle of the Series 3 incomplete players in the future.
To put it simply, the system is fantastic in theory. Players get more cards and those who like variants can get more cosmetics variants for their favorites. It’s just a few things that need to be reevaluated. At the end of December, we were in a great spot with card cadence and ways to acquire those new cards. I believe that reverting at least the “breathing week” to make the system as good as it was before would be an ideal step.
A radical addition they could make to make the cards more accessible to newer players is allowing them to pin a card once a season to appear as the 4th option of a spotlight instead of the usual random card and possibly 1000 tokens if it is a dupe. This could quickly soften the gap between veterans and beginners while they push through the sheer immensity of Series 3. Another awesome thing the devs could do is to allow everyone to use the new card in the first few days after it was released, like a trial run. It would shake things off dramatically since everyone would have the initial access to a card, it would spice things up while everyone is trying to figure the card out. After the trial is over, players could decide if they want the card or not. Those are just a few suggestions, there are many changes they could make to make the system feel better for players without giving out that much.
Bundles
Believe it or not, in the very first season, we had no bundles to spend our gold on. We had to choose between buying variants at the store or grabbing more missions to get further into the Battle Pass.
All that changed on a beautiful day when the first gold bundle was released:
This was such a massive moment for the players. I couldn't get it myself, but its release has set the precedent that our gold could have much more value if we had the patience to wait for a Bundle arrival. This has been true; we had many incredible gold bundles worth every shiny gold bar.
But recently, it truly feels like there has been a noticeable lack of big purchases we could make using our gold. The value of gold has been diminished because right now there is not much incentive to hoard your gold unless you are saving for a specific shop takeover from an artist that you like. With the lack of flow of recent leaks, we just can’t be sure if another great value bundle is just around the corner.
While the gold bundles diminish, the real money bundles increase at the store. Most of them are quite expensive and filled with goodies, like this one:
I'm not going into a rant about the value of real money bundles; it's not the article's point. This bundle is designed for those who love the game as much as me but have a bigger budget to spend on their hobbies. That's perfectly fine. I don't look forward to investing much money in my mobile game, so I search for small bundles that I deem worthy. According to the recent data mine, we'll have a good one in the future. This is catered more towards my player profile:
Another recent change is the possibility of arriving at exclusive personalized bundles just for you. This is a fantastic idea! They could analyze your shopping habits in-game and create bundles according to your preference, such as variants from a specific artist or cards you play regularly. However, the implementation has been abysmal, with overpriced offers and little value. To exemplify, here's the one that I have in my shop:
Converting it would cost $20,00, double the price of the Battle Pass with a fraction of its value. To me, it seems absurd. It doesn't fit my spending habits with this game at all. It wasn't made for me; it's just a generic offer they put a "FOR YOU!" tag on. They could still improve the function here. As I mentioned above, it has potential but is far from reaching it. Let's hope the next batch considers the players' habits in the game before offering anything.
Variant Albums
Seeing the developer update for December's Hell Fire Season arrive was terrific! We all saw those cool emotes being displayed. Everyone wanted to be toxic or playful using those during their matches.
Yet, acquiring these emotes has been funneled exclusively through Variant Albums, which was disappointing. The initial albums demanded a complete set of 1200 gold variants, totaling 14,400 gold per emote. With that huge cost, every emotion the emote was supposed to convey has been replaced with "I've spent a ton of gold on an emote.".
We had a couple of accessible Albums with Variants costing only 700 gold, which is a welcomed addition to the game. Even though I might not desire all the cards in the album, they can arrive for free with the game's random Variant rewards. Please do more albums like this!
On the other hand, we also have an album with an Ultimate Variant, meaning that for you to use that emote, you would need to spend 5000 tokens on a single variant to complete the album. I'm not a fan of this, but I suppose Second Dinner has different profiles of players. Even though I'm a huge fan of the artist, I won't pursue completing this album because I value my tokens more than cosmetics.
The albums were not a bad idea, but their implementation has left much to be desired. It is a non-system to me because I barely interact with it. Some random rewards here and there have been a good surprise, but they don't remove the feature's bad aspects. Hopefully, they can do something more interesting, like an album that could be completed with any twelve cards from the same artist.
In Conclusion
The opposite of love is not hate; it is indifference. I say these harsh things because I love the game so much that I can't return to regular card games after enjoying Marvel Snap. The gameplay is fantastic. However, it is surrounded by some awful systems that I must disregard to keep my sanity in check. They don't need to focus on monetizing this game so ferociously; to concentrate on manipulating their loyal fanbase so much with FOMO tactics must hurt them in the long run.
The secret for a game such as this to live for a long time is always to gather new players, but so far, it is truly awful to be a new player after a while. The experience is excellent while in Series 1 and 2; however, after that, there is a slog to catch up. Even though I love this game so much, I can't, in good faith, recommend it to any of my friends because I know that their experience would eventually sour with the slog that is Series 3 and how the game tries to get money at every opportunity.
This game would be perfect if it weren't trying to fight a battle between enjoyment and monetization. Gameplay should be fun, and I'm not getting anxious about next week's new card. Every new addition to the game should be exciting, not terrifying. I want to believe in Second Dinner, but I won't do it unthinkingly; I'll keep demanding better from them. It's time to break away from this predatory cycle and focus more on creating the awesome game that Marvel Snap can be.