Hey Giant Bomb community and Marvel Snap enthusiasts! I come to you asking for help and advice on the inevitable problem that you always face when getting into a mobile game: the moment when you have run out of the "free" currency they give you at the start of the game. With Snap, this currency is tied to your ability to level cards and levelling cards impacts your ability to keep up with your online matches. Again, this is not my first mobile gacha rodeo where this has happened. What tends to happen with me is I bump into sub-systems that progress at a crawl or reach the point where I do not want to cross where if I want to continue playing, I need to pay money. And that usually results in me either uninstalling the game and trying again or bouncing off entirely.

I do that with dailies you can pick up around 500 per day and the quest systems are a must, but I was wondering how everyone else who has played the game and continued to enjoy it reacted to this highly inevitable point of the game.

Honestly you should be running out of boosters before you're running out of credits. The "quick boosts" are a bad value to go for, so as long as you stop using those to boost your collection level and just focus on doing dailies and the season pass challenges, you'll quickly rebuild a huge amount back.

For a while, it felt like credits would be the bottleneck to progress, but at this point, it's the boosters. I hit the maximum amount of credits the other day, which I didn't realize was possible, and had to go for some of those quick boosts in the shop. It all depends how much you're playing outside of grinding daily quests.

At some point after the first few days of being showered in currency, I just accepted that it’s gonna be a gradual grind. You do the quests, and get your finite credit amount per day, and that’s kinda the deal.

fwiw, the bigger issue I’d raise is that the “collection level” system is split into pools 1, 2, and 3, but they work differently. Pool 1 has its specific set of cards, which you gradually unlock in a random order. Pool 2, same deal. Pool 3 has a set of cards, but instead of unlocking at a set rate like every other Collection Level milestone, you start receiving chests which *may* contain a new card, but often are just boosters/gold/credits. Pool 3 feels gacha-like where you have to keep upgrading for a chance at a new card, and it’s a dumpster fire imo.

Game fun as heck, tho.

Yeah as said it really depends on how much you play. Once a day just to do the dailies and you'll eventually run out of boosters. If you do play a lot you'll quickly run out of credits for all the boosters you've earned during gameplay. There's no real way to get past the 500ish per day limit beyond the bonuses from the Battlepass and completing the full weekly.

That said, credits are extremely expensive compared to how attainable they are in game, and in Pool3 you could be spending as much as $20 for a CHANCE at a new card.

The temptation to pay just isn't there for me because I get enough credits playing for 1-2 hours a day to unlock roughly one new card CHANCE a day, and the price to buy enough credits to matter is so outrageous I don't even consider it.

I'm early-ish in pool 3 btw, CL 768

The pool system also matters a ton here.

You can only matchmake within your pool.

I imagine you are Late Pool 2 / Early Pool 3 at this point.

If you are still pool 2 (before CL500, CL462 or something you can Google it) then don't go into pool 3 until you've built up a reserve of a few thousand credits. That way you can get a handful of pool 3 cards instead of just 1 when you start getting matched against pool 3 players.

@dareitus: So I've seen this thrown around a bit, but I don't believe holding in Pool 1/2 does much. There is a hidden MMR system where you will start to fight people in higher pools if you match whatever that metric is, so you'll still end up going against people with more options.

If you want to wait at the top end of Pool 2 for a while, that's totally fine, and it might slightly decrease what your opponents have, but you will at some point certainly start matching against people in Pool 3. I was seeing Pool 3 cards before I hit the end of Pool 2, and the videos I saw floating around Youtube also seemed to have been debunked. Again a lot of this info on all sides is just anecdotal so ymmv. Just follow the "What would I have more fun doing" rule. Saving and waiting to get a few cards, or just having that constant drip of Collection Level ups.

@zombiepie: As people have said above, the quick boosts are a bad value. I was using them at the beginning, but you are basically wasting credits. And, unless you want some cool looking variants or whatever, as long as you are playing the game and aren't capping out on resources or missions, Gold should be used for missions (just a better value than getting credits straight up) and credits should be used to upgrade the cards you have boosters for (which you get by using them in your decks). As you probably already know, the best value is the first upgrade, as it is 1 Collection Level for 25 credits, after that it stays constant at 1 CL for 50 Credits I believe.

@dareitus: Agreed that the shop prices are so horrendous that there’s absolutely no temptation for me to spend any money on the game. The advancement is still extremely slow even if you pay money, so the entire shop seems geared to investment banker/Saudi oil prince whales, and anyone below that level of wealth need not apply.

Even the battle pass is highly questionable, given that you’re paying $10 USD for one unique card, some cosmetic variants/profile pics, and otherwise just a handful of boosters/gold/credits. I’m sure if you run the numbers, the battle pass is probably a little more bang for your buck than straight up buying gold in the shop, but the value for $10 still seems underwhelming.

I cannot conceive of how this game is making money, but maybe I’m not the target consumer. Is the rest of the gaming audience just conditioned to blindly buy battle passes for any game they play?

@bisonhero said:

It always feels like a very Idiocracy-quoting, terminally cynical thing to say, but yeah. Some people don't really care or think too far ahead on Battle Pass/Item Shop transactions and it's such an alienating feeling, but I can't blame people for dropping $10 on a game they're already enjoying for free. As someone who came up pretty poor and saw new games/spending money on existing ones as a rarity though, (I will never get the $20 in birthday money I sank into TF2 crates back, c'est la vie,) it sometimes surprises me just how little thought some people give to the money they drop on F2P games. I was burned a lot in the early years of F2P micro-transactions, and games-as-a-service continues to be a serious problem, so I feel NO desire to ever spend money on Snap. But I just know they're making a decent chunk of change on this before it inevitably peters out and shuts down.

I'm already at collection level 273 with one deck I love and two I'm growing confident in, but I cannot be fucked to game the booster & credit system. Any time I feel like I'm being bottle-necked or otherwise constrained by Snap, I just stop playing for the day.

Is that Morph Saxophone variant some of the most baller shit I've ever seen? Totally. Is it $12 cool for art you actually only see in your hand, then on the battlefield for ~2 seconds before it transforms into another card? Nope!

Also, like... I can get a chicken sandwich combo from Wendy's for about that much. Morph variants don't come with piping hot french fries OR vanilla coke.

@astrobstrd: I’ll admit the distinction is a weird one in my head, but I think I basically *get* the purchase of a cosmetic skin as a “tip jar” sort of purchase in a free game. Is that $2-$10 skin worth it if you like a character/unit/card? Up to you, and your appreciation of the worth of game art. Is that $30 skin worth it to you for those fancy Dota 2 or League of Legends skins? Only if you are truly a maniac.

But when the “tip jar” purchase in a F2P game is basically just some currency in the form of a battle pass, unless the value seems insanely good, I’d rather just skip it entirely. I’d rather give devs money for new art that visually enriched my game time than for accelerating the hamster wheel F2P grind by like 10 milliseconds.

Like I’m sure on some spreadsheet, you would have to F2P grind Marvel Snap for 700 days on average to unlock all the cards currently in the game (note: I have not researched this whatsoever, number is completely made up). Do I need to get fleeced for $10 a month just to shave a couple weeks off the total time of that practically unreachable collection level? I would be happier to just keep the $10 in my pocket than support the devs in this way that has minuscule impact on my own experience.

Alternately, if there was a one-time only, give the Marvel Snap devs $60 and get all currently released cards, I’d be dangerously close to spending that money. But mobile games have moved away from that kind of wide-ranging unlock-all, as they’d much rather get the forever revenue of shaking you down for battle pass money indefinitely, and hoping the usual whales spend a small fortune in their low-value-proposition shop.

@bisonhero: I mean, the Season Pass does give some cosmetic skins for cards, plus the currency and what is essentially a guaranteed card that, while it will eventually join the rotation of unlockable cards, doesn't for a few seasons iirc. I'm not saying that invalidates anything you said, but you can kinda have both if you aren't picky on which card you are getting a new version of.

Also someone did do the math here: https://youtu.be/KY-Kbf1gzfs

Looks like about 6+ months to unlock everything if you are F2P and not getting above Rank 60 each season. Obviously more stuff is coming out, so this will only get longer, but this video has a decent breakdown if you are curious just how long the treadmill is at the outset.

It's a weird thing to begin with because the game is still the game yet (at least for me) I find myself only really playing when I have some currency awarding mission go play because I want to unlock cards and just playing to play feels like a "waste of time" (not to say I don't have a few hours of just cube grinding).

If I had the option to pay $60 for all the cards I would. But would I play after? Maybe? A little? But it kinda is the treadmill that has me running in the first place so I'm not in too much of a hurry to get it all

I've just been doing daily and weekly quests. It's not the constant feed of credits as in the beginning of the game, but it's enough to keep me hooked for a good fifteen minutes every day. And my deck is basically comprised of starter-ish cards, so you don't really need to worry about the unlockables. Just keep grinding stuff out.

You get a ton of credits per week and honestly from what I've heard and personal experience around like month one or two you will ideally have gotten out of pool 2 and a good chunk of the cards out of pool 3.

Its honestly really up to you if you want to do that though since that is a commitment over a long period of time rather than committing alot of time in such a short span. I'm hitting that point though where early pool 3 is incredibly stagnant because I'm really only running into two types of decks at this point and its getting boring either knowing that i have to run away if i played it incorrectly due to my poor draws or my opponent runs away due to me playing around the deck specifically made to disrupt every pool 3 deck in the format.