As Turn 6 gets underway I’ve got this one tied up.
On two of the three locations I’ve built an unassailable lead and, frankly, I don’t understand why my opponent has allowed me to do it. The third location is, as yet, uncontested by either one of us but if they have any surprises planned there I’m inclined to let them have it – I already have the two winning scores I need to take the match.
As expected, a single card from my opponent lands on the third location while I further shore up the other two.
Candy from a baby.
As I am in the lead my cards are revealed first and I watch happily as my superiority racks up, unchallenged. I wait with only mild interest as, finally, their consolation play is revealed.
I’m allowed only a moment to view the card, instantly recognisable as the classic Fantastic Four adversary Galactus, before the view pulls out suddenly. A voice booms, “KNEEL BEFORE GALACTUS!” while I watch a planet explode.
Uh-oh.
The view returns to the game where, as I watch in impotent horror, the cards on the first location, my unbeatable array of heroes, start to explode one by one before the location itself bursts into nothingness. The same occurs on the second location, reducing my numerical advantage to so much digital dust. As this hubristic patina settles, I see that, in claiming the majority of the points on the one remaining location, my opponent has snatched the match from me. I raise my trembling fist toward the bathroom light.
“Curse you, Galactus,” I cry over the hum of the extractor fan, “you destroyer of worlds, you!”
There is an irresistible charm to the online PvP digital collectible card game, Marvel Snap, in that even a crushing defeat can leave you with a broad grin on your face as you bask in the theme and story that the game’s finely tuned mechanics, audio and animations evoke. Sure, that dopamine hit of victory against randomers throughout the world is great and all, but in my experience defeats are where the intrigue lives. Whether you’re coming across cards that you’ve never encountered before, or seeing familiar cards being used in ways that hadn’t occurred to you, Marvel Snap reveals itself coyly and organically to new players and, via its constant refinements, additions and evolutions, finds a host of ways to keep its veteran players engaged also.
Launched in October 2022 and developed by, among others, Ben Brode, one of the developers of Blizzard’s Hearthstone, Snap borrows the Warcraft-themed game’s system of giving players one more resource per turn with which to buy cards but streamlines everything else into a much tighter and faster experience than its forebear.
Rather than grinding the opposing player down from a certain number of lives, à la Hearthstone and the Ur collectible card game, Magic: The Gathering, Snap challenges you to play for control of the majority of three locations, each with four card spaces for you and your online opponent to play into. Each of the cards that you will be playing represent a character from the Marvel comics multiverse and all of these characters are assigned an Energy cost to play and a Power number that they will contribute to your control of the location to which they are played. After six rounds, the player with the most Power at the majority of the locations in the game will win.
So, surely it’s just a case of playing bigger numbers for the win? Well, yes, but this simple concept is impeccably wrinkled not only by the host of fiendishly synergisable abilities offered by almost all of the cards in the game, but also by the assorted effects of the randomly assigned locations across which you and your opponent will play. The setup ensures that no two games are alike.
Marvel Snap ably walks the tightrope between simplicity and complexity. The twelve card decks that you can put together offer you sufficient space to experiment, play and tinker without walking you too far out into the weeds. The card abilities are varied enough to offer plenty of nuance while adhering to a handful of overarching strategies; Power Buffs and Debuffs, Destroying cards to generate Power, Discarding cards to generate Power, and Moving cards to generate Power.
It’s a game about evolution. You start with a set deck and the game walks you through your first ten levels with scripted and carefully explained offline encounters to help you gain an understanding for the mechanics. As you start to play online, you will continue to fill out your roster of available cards, earning new characters at regular intervals, and the game helpfully signposts every unseen card that you come across from other players to try and ensure that you have every opportunity to gain an awareness of how their abilities operate even if you’ve yet to add them to your own collection.
Earning new cards, or witnessing how your opponents are using cards whose potential you’ve not yet fully realised, gives you constant reason to review your collection, tweak your existing deck builds and create new ones. As your understanding of the game grows, so too will your ability to try new things and have fun with it.
The game makers are not only releasing new cards into the Marvel Snaps ecosystem on a regular (and MCU-adjacent) basis, they also regularly update and rebalance the stats and abilities of cards within the game and invite their players behind the curtain to understand why these changes have been made. Now, while this might speak more to my twice-encircled position within the Venn-diagram-overlap between Marvel nerds and game design dorks, these updates are some of the most entertaining patch notes I’ve ever come across. They are also not apologetically hidden away to await studious parsing by games journos and streamers, instead, they are promoted strongly within the app as a facet of the game; “you guys were overachieving with Galactus as a seven-Power card so we’ve pulled him back to five Power and we’ll keep a close eye on it.”
The development of the metagame (i.e. how certain cards or common deck builds are performing – essentially an ongoing effort to ensure that there are no unbeatable deck builds available) is almost as interesting as the game itself and the whole Marvel Snap audience is invited to participate and enjoy that process too.
Alright, come on Galactus, you little scamp. Now that I’ve scraped together the Collector Tokens to add you to my card pool, let’s see whether we can get like Oppenheimer on this one and scare up a few more cubes before the end of the season.
Clarkemywords 