“Its meta never has a chance to settle”
Going places in MARVEL SNAP
Your average CCG runs on a pretty predictable cycle. A new expansion launches, and for a while competitive play is a Wild West of deck ideas, as people get to grips with the new cards. But then, the meta settles.
People figure out the best combos, and soon the game boils down to a few key decks you see again and again. People eventually get bored, and the only way to shake things up again is another expansion full of new cards, kicking off the cycle once again. It just comes with the territory of the genre. But what if you changed up that territory?
Marvel Snap isn’t a game of huge depth—it’s sort of Hearthstone meets Gwent, but much faster and simpler. Decks are only 12 cards, and so far it doesn’t even do traditional expansions, instead dropping one new card a month. And yet its meta never has a chance to settle.
SNAP DECISIONS
It’s because of ‘locations’. Matches are played across three lanes, each with a different, randomly determined location that imposes its own unique rules. Atlantis, for example, grants you +5 power if you only play one card there, while Central Park adds a free squirrel minion to every lane.
They hugely change how each match plays out, ensuring there’s no one-size-fits-all solution—but, more importantly, they frequently change. The devs regularly add new locations, and crank up the frequency of specific locations coming up, and every time they do the whole meta has to shift. Swarm decks are no good when a location that kills off weak minions is in the ascendancy, but you’ll want to bring it back when the Cloning Labs are out in force again.
It’s brilliant, because it gives the devs a lever they can pull completely independently of players and their library of cards. They can create that Wild West whenever they want, without the intensive work that new sets of cards demand.
I’m not sure whether Marvel Snap has long-term staying power on PC. But one thing’s for certain—thanks to its ever changing locations, it’s never going to have a settled meta, and that’s an innovation every card game designer should be taking notes on.