And we’re back with another Snap.Fan article about… variants! (I swear, I play the game too.) But this time, I wanted to dive into some of the possibilities regarding the recent patch: specifically, we’re finally starting to see an uptick in album drop rate and a corresponding rise in variants flagged as rewards!
Now importantly, everything is subject to change, and this is all speculation: recent discourse has made it clearer that Second Dinner can change even ‘confirmed’ datamines, so I want to set expectations. Still, I think many of the following are pretty safe bets.
First: our unreleased suspect lineup!
What a roster. First things first— some great variants here, especially for fans of some of these artists and styles! One thing I particularly like as a Hipp enjoyer is being rewarded for buying Hipps with another Hipp, and these seem like they’ll be similar. There’s some exciting stuff here!
And, hey, look, we’ve got some Pixels here too.
We’ve got several albums coming up, and the albums' contents are well known. What we’re speculating on here are those tantalizing rewards, and, luckily for my deductive reputation, it doesn’t look too hard to find what matches where.
Cosmic Companions
Move Your Hipps
Let’s get the easy ones out of the way. Hipp begets Hipp, and (because he’s done so many) each Hipp album will have a direct theme. Cosmic Companions features several cosmic characters from the stars, from galactic terrors like Annihilus and Knull to vast entities like Infinaut, Galactus, and Living Tribunal. Perhaps the odd one out seems like Howard— but our favorite beleaguered Duck actually heralds from his alternate universe, and has routinely rubbed elbows with the cosmic and the Power Cosmic itself. And, of course, it makes sense to headline the rewards with the marquis Marvel cosmic heroine: Captain Marvel.
On the other side, we’ve got Move Your Hipps, a pun I’ve known would come for months. The contents make perfect sense, featuring some of the most prominent Move-archetype cards (as well as cards that happen to move themselves and others around). Perhaps the most out-there inclusion is War Machine, who helps you access locations but doesn’t interact with movement. However, I suppose Nightcrawler has already been in an album, and Jeff’s a Spotlight variant. It’s worth noting that Captain Marvel could work as a reward for either of these albums, but given the theming, she makes more sense for the former. That leaves the werewolf among us, the phenomenal Dan Hipp Werewolf by Night.
(I'm Editorializing here, but I’m so into this Hipp variant, even when I’ve already pulled for Werewolf’s Bronze Age variant. I'm super glad it’s a reward!)
Kim Jacinto
Next up, we’ve got a highly anticipated Album for fan-favorite artist Kim Jacinto. He’s had plenty of variants in the game for a while now, and they’ve basically all been huge hits with players. He’s stylish and dynamic and hugely distinct from many of the other artists in the game, and he’s one of those artists who are so good it’s hard to get too mad at a 1200 gold price point.
(Completely arbitrary as variant rarities are!)
It’s worth noting that as of the last patch, this Album has 11 variants. We’ve got precedent for albums with less than 12 variants now—beginning with the Pixel Discard album and continuing with the Midnight Suns one. With 12 being such a significant number in Snap, I wouldn’t be surprised if a 12th slot is filled with one of Jacinto’s other unreleased variants: currently, Annihilus or High Evolutionary.
Anyway, it’s not like it’s hard to figure out who goes here: as of now, the reward for this album will likely be Jacinto’s slick Moon Knight.
Oops, No Chibis
Oops, All Chibis
We’ve got two amusingly titled Rian Gonzales albums, leaning into her penchant for two divergent styles. The first features cozy, stylish watercolor renditions of your favorite characters. At the same time, the second is a take on classic chibi styling that manages to be miles more charming than much of the more generic Chibi variant work elsewhere in Snap. Both feature her trademark light palette of watercolors, but both are distinct enough that it’s pretty easy to tell which variant will be the reward for which album.
Or, it would be if we didn’t have three Rian Gonzales variants labeled under the Album source. Putting my Sherlock hat on, this points to a possible shift down the line: one of these Silks being the reward for No Chibis, and the identifiably Chibi Iron Lad becoming the reward for Chibis.
It’s also possible that they have two Silk variants on the reward track for No Chibis, which would be a new precedent for Albums— but they’ve been on record saying they’re still actively experimenting and testing different paradigms for Albums, so it’s certainly not off the table. It would be welcome— certainly more so than another cash bundle!
Max Grecke Heroes
Next up, another Snap veteran, Max Grecke, gets his own album. Like Hipp, Rian, and Jacinto, this has likely been a long time in the making. Which makes sense! It’s been a fun, recognizable style in the game since launch (Grecke’s Hulk even being a launch reward) and is the perfect fit for an album. Some of Grecke’s yet-to-be-released work is my favorite, including his Scarlet Witch, a beautiful and expressive take on the character.
The title suggests we may get a villainous counterpart album soon— it shouldn’t be hard to surmise who might end up in that one. But for now, the Grecke Album reward feels like a clear answer: Iceman, looking good in his red uniform.
Pixel All-Stars
Pixels! Love them or hate them (I’m personally undecided), these have become an iconic part of Snap’s culture. (I will never forget that Premium Mystery Variant is an entire rarity that means Not A Pixel). But Pixel albums are widely welcome— with so many Pixels falling into people’s collections by sheer volume, many will find a Pixel album as a wonderful incidental reward for doing nothing. And for any of you crazy, wild individuals actively chasing Pixel collections, I salute you— as does Second Dinner.
The reward here will be Leader, pixelized— while there are two Pixel albums in the pipeline, the other X-Men one will likely need an X-character as the reward rather than your favorite giga-brain gamma mutate.
Steampunk
Next is a bit of a throwback for any Snap oldheads— OGs will remember the old Variant Rushes, initially conceived to incentivize play during a certain period and discontinued by Second Dinner when they missed the mark. A handful of Steampunk variants were dropped like this during the Quantumania season, and a decent number of others have since entered the Variant shop at both 700 and 1200 gold price points.
Now, there’s some strangeness here that points to this album likely not being finalized. For starters, the handful in this album from the original Variant Rush, to my knowledge, haven’t been released to the general shop yet. I believe the initial idea with Variant Rushes was a sense of exclusivity: a way to drive engagement via exclusive cosmetics. If they stay in the album, they’ll likely be dropped into the shop by the time this Album drops. Still, there are also plenty of other unreleased Steampunk variants that could take the place of the Variant Rush variants currently in the album. My guess? Second Dinner hasn’t quite finalized what to do with the ‘exclusivity’ of Variant Rush variants, especially after they decided the Holiday Rush variants could recur this past winter.
There’s also the curious inclusion of Holiday Destroyer, which was explicitly in a previous bundle, and also Is Not Steampunk— it’s probably not going to be in the album at launch. It will probably be replaced with Destroyer’s actual Steampunk variant.
As for the reward? Thanks to convenient labeling, only one scoundrel makes sense here: Apocalypse, vaguely steampunkified. (Gotta love tubes and plates.)
Future Villains
Featuring several of the 3099 variants for various Marvel villains (and notably excluding a couple of villains in Scorpion and Hobgoblin, who were in an exclusive bundle back last June), Giovanni Lorusso gives all of these characters an appropriately menacing tech makeover on linework and Ryan Kinnaird on colors. Now, it looks like the art style would invite a similarly styled variant in the reward track— something adjacent to the base style, as colored by the omnipresent Ryan Kinnaird. But as we’ve whittled down the suspect list, you’ll notice we’re out of those!
Now, theorizing, here are two curveballs that might make sense if you squint. Iron Lad and Alioth are both characters with deep ties to time—the former’s character hinges on their seemingly unavoidable future becoming the terrible villain Kang, and the latter is a monster that exists at the border of the end of all time. There are certainly thematic ties you could draw that could justify these as believable rewards in the Album.
The more plausible explanation is that neither of these are the Album reward here, and both are rewards for unreleased albums. There are plenty of PANDART and Flaviano variants for Alioth and Iron Lad to top off an Album reward track, and they would make much more sense there.
PixelXMen
Instead, the Steampunk and Pixel X-Men albums don’t have any obvious rewards listed under the Album source. It’s possible they forgo a reward variant for these two and opt instead for any number of other rewards. (They’ve done this for both the Tarot and Midnight Suns Albums already.)
Case Not Quite Closed
Still, that’s more likely because those two albums were from an existing set (and existing game) that doesn’t have any other pieces to use as reward variants. There are a few candidates among the unreleased Pixel and Steampunk variants that would work perfectly as album rewards— it’s just as likely Second Dinner hasn’t decided which to land on.
It’s also perfectly possible that more variants will pop up in the next patch— at this point, the speculation is just spitballing. Whether you’re looking for your next project Album to complete or crossing your fingers for easy rewards, though, I hope this peek into the near future for Snap was helpful! Personally, Albums feel better to me the more there are when there are more chances you’ve already got some progress from the variants you own— the added volume of Albums coming through should hopefully offer more people at all levels of investment chances to get some free rewards. But what do you think? Did I miss anything in this little sleuth session? Let me know below!