Marvel Snap is taking mobile phones and PCs around the world by storm, quickly becoming one of the phenomena of the year 2022. If you are one of the players embarking on the adventure, here is a short guide to help you to start well.
With its fast-paced gameplay and unique mechanics, Marvel Snap quickly established itself as one of the benchmarks for collectible card games. Especially since the game’s artistic direction displays unconditional love and respect for the Stan Lee universe, giving this little application both punch and charm. In short, Marvel Snap is a must-have, for TCG players and for fans of the Marvel multiverse trying out the format for the first time. It is also for all new players that we have concocted a small guide offering you all the useful advice to start on the right foot.
Marvel Snap is a TCG that pits you against an opponent for a six-turn game. Its particularity is that instead of a single tray, it has three. These three lands are chosen randomly from the 80 available, and each displays its own rules. In order to win a game, you must control at least two lands out of three at the end of turn 6. You will therefore have to adapt your game to the different lands, knowing that only four of your cards can be placed at most per land.
Each player comes into the game with a predefined deck (by himself) of twelve cards. Each card has two statistics, its mana cost, and its power. Some (most) also have a unique power influencing its statistics, those of the opponent’s cards, or simply the course of the game.
The game is therefore organized in six rounds, with each round you gain an additional mana point allowing you to gradually play cards with increasing mana cost. Obviously, the higher the mana cost of a card, the more powerful it is, but you can only play it at the end of the game. The player with the most power on a given land at the end of turn six wins the land, two controlled lands on you will win.
Another specificity of Marvel Snap is the operation of the cosmic cubes, which are a kind of competitive currency and which are offered with each victory. The number of cosmic cubes a player has determines his rank, and each defeat will cause you to lose a set number of cosmic cubes. Indeed, a cosmic cube is put into play by default in each match, knowing that in the last turn, the amount of cubes put into play is doubled.
At any time during the game, one of the two players can decide to double the amount of cubes to be won (or lost) by performing what is called a “Snap”. Both players can “snap” bringing the maximum number of cosmic cubes in play to 8. When your opponent “Snaps”, you have the opportunity to “retreat” i.e. to concede a defeat before the amount of lost cubes is doubled.
Before being competitive, Marvel Snap remains a collectible card game. Your card collection therefore plays an important role in your progress in the game and directly influences your collector level, linked to your account. By playing, you will get credits and boosters, which are the two main currencies to improve your cards. Credits are tied to your account, while boosters are tied to the cards you play each game. The more often you play cards, the more their boosters will be. These two resources combined allow you to increase the rarity of a card, which changes its appearance without changing its stats. Because looking cool is important.
The more you increase the rarity of your cards, the more you will progress in your collector level. Each collector level allows you to unlock new playing cards, with increasing power. Nothing makes more sense then than to divide the players according to their level of collector, given that they have access to different cards. The players are therefore divided into three groups which are commonly called pool 1, pool 2 and pool 3. They are defined as follows:
- pool 1: levels 18 to 214
- pool 2: levels 222 to 474
- Pool 3: levels 474 and above
TRICK : Each time your Collector level hits one of these milestones, you’ll start encountering players from your new pool. Suffice to say that the first games in a higher pool will be complicated, since you risk facing players who have unlocked all the playing cards of the said pool. We therefore advise you to keep and accumulate your improvement resources (credits, boosters) at the end of a pool (around level 180 for example) in order to unlock a maximum of collection levels at once and thus gaining access to the playing cards of the next pool in one go.
You now have all the cards in hand to start playing… cards. All you have to do is create a deck that suits you and get started in the wild games of Marvel Snap. Available on mobile and computer.