Been playing a lot of Marvel Snap lately. I've been having fun with it, but it has a lot of fundamental problems.


Deck Building

One of the biggest problems is ironically deck building. There aren't too many cards in the game, but because of that not many cards substitute for each other. Cards are only obtained by upgrading cards you have, and the currency to upgrade cards is restricted by daily missions or purchasing it in the shop (still limited per day).

If you want to build a deck around, say, card destruction, you better hope you got lucky and rolled all the cards you need. As of a recent patch there is a way to buy new cards in the shop, but those cards are random and often very high priced. There are also seasonal pass cards, which means there are exclusive cards with exclusive effects that if you want for your deck you cannot obtain retroactively, or as a free player. So more and more you find yourself permanently missing cards beyond the possibility of randomly rolling those cards with a slow progression system, but you'll still see various styles of "meta" deck since your deck can only have 10 cards which means you'll have to synergize the 3-4 key cards anyway.

Play Fields

One upside/downside is the play fields. The upside is that there are 3 random fields with 3 random effects each game, making play a little more dynamic. Every few days a certain field effect with be favored, meaning you can build a deck around the idea an effect is likely to appear. The downside is that certain field effects can just turn off some cards, which means you can stumble into games where you can't play your deck at all and just need to concede because the game said you couldn't play that round. And again, if a field effect favors card destruction, you had better hope you can build the deck that uses that effect.

Cards

Another problem can be that some card effects just might not be in the game. A number of cards affect your deck, but only 3 things affect card draw (1 conditional on winning a field, 1 that makes your opponent draw cards, and 2 field effects that can draw cards) which means if you want that to be your deck, it doesn't exist yet. A few other conditions are like that, but card draw always stands out to me. I know it would be a huge effect in a 6 turn/10 card game, but you also have such a high chance of having garbage added to your deck that a baseline missing 40% of your deck and then potentially adding 5 more garbage cards swings that number so much harder.

Mulligan

Hey I know what they said about it, I read that interview. I also think that quitting and finding a new game because my hand never shaped up sucks. Having a guaranteed pull on turn 1-2 is great and all, but the cards are mediocre to bad in most decks. You'll have a turn 1 play with a bad hand, which doesn't help.

Poor UI

Even after playing the game a lot, it can be hard to determine who is actually going first in the card reveals. And turn order matters since cards that are on the field face down aren't "played" yet, meaning you can't react to your opponents plays before their cards resolve. And I've had a lot of games where the winner is determined by who went first.

With that as important as it is, the UI for who is going first is a barely noticeable light border around the player name in a game full of light effects. And there is no UI for the turn order of cards played.

Maybe with enough time some of these problems will be addressed, but right now they kind of all combine into a frustrating experience. I'm even someone who really likes a lot of randomness in games, but without a stable foundation that randomness tends towards disappointment rather than interest.


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