Marvel Snap
For a good long while, I have praised Marvel Snap as being a welcome alternative to other digital CCGs like Hearthstone which rely on buying packs and gambling odds for legendaries to make key decks. For a while, Marvel Snap rewarded pure progression, logging in, playing, doing challenges, and you would fill out your cards that way.
While things slowed down in Pool 3, where you only start getting cards every so often, and it can take a long, long time to fill out your Pool 3 collection, many times more than Pools 1 and 2, it still seemed like you were earning progress. And at first, the new token system where you could save up for specific cards and pin ones you want augmented that.
However, the longer things have gone, the more the “endgame” here seems clear. Marvel Snap is selling larger and larger bundles that contain units, for racing through collection levels, and tokens, for saving up for big cards. Bundles that cost anywhere from $20 to $100 at a time, most of the time well over $50. And if you don’t pay? Good luck.
The problem is that now when Marvel Snap is introducing new cards, it’s either a singular card in the season pass (which itself costs $10), or new cards are added to the Series 5 pool, where it’s a literal 1 in 100 chance to get one from a normal Collection cache, or you can save up 6,000 tokens for one, six times the cost of a Pool 3 card. New cards like Knull, Sentry and Darkhawk have all been Series 5. And already, we have seen some of the most powerful cards in the game, Galactus, Bast, Shuri, all be introduced at Series 5.
Marvel Snap
I am someone who plays Marvel Snap literally every day, completing every challenge, and I have saved up something like 5500 tokens so far, including the free 3,000 I got for hitting a certain collection level before the tokens were introduced. The earn rate on tokens outside of buying bundles means it will take months, if not closer to a year to save up 6,000 for a single series 5 card. In terms of getting one naturally, I’ve only gotten one series 4 card since they were introduced, though that’s a 1 in 10 shot from a card cache, not a 1 in 100 shot, and I still have zero series 5 cards as a result.
The sad part is, I am still a whale in Marvel Snap. I have been periodically buying cool variant art for cards I like. At first I did this to justify throwing some money at a game I loved from time to time, and not feeling like I was “cheating” by doing so, as those purchases contain no units or tokens, but now, as more and more of these megapriced bundles are rolled out, and more and more unobtainable series 5 cards are introduced, I am feeling far less generous and far more skeptical of this game’s monetization than I was before. If this keeps happening and 80% of new cards are being a massive paywall, I’m not sure how long I’ll stick around here.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.