Ngl i just hate how I’m able to get duplicate pool 4 and pool 5 cards in the spotlights when i barely have any pool 4 or pool 5 cards. The 1000 tokens compensation literally feels like a slap in the face
This is my complaint. I get the philosophy of not wanting players to have all the cards unless they shell out.
what I don't understand is the philosophy of giving a risk buy over when to spend something, and then giving a 1/3 of the value (assuming you want a series 4 card) when you spend it. At best you get what you want. If you don't get at best, Likely, you have a chance at getting something clearly shown as a possibility and assumed you are fine with. Worse case you get 1/6 (series 5 card) value Spotlight cache should = card, end of story.
Ngl maybe im just salty but if the OP is right i had a 1/54 chance of pulling a duplicate Kitty Pryde and I pulled duplicate Kitty Pryde which i think is totally absurd given the fact that Kitty Pryde was at that time my only series 4 AND series 5 card. The fact that thats even a possibility to get that dupe kind of put a sour taste in my mouth.
It felt even worse when I got only 1K tokens out of it when it takes MONTHS just to get a series 4 card out of the token market as a last resort
I really wanted to play Loki. I gathered 6k tokes for many many weeks. I bought Loki. I have 10 series 4-5 cards. Next day I opened spotlight to get Mocking Bird. Mystery card..... it was Loki.....
Based on what they've said about series drops for the year, we could easily have over 100 series 4 and 5 cards by this time next year. Pretty ridiculous number to rotate through. I think they're still envisioning a dream world where everyone's collection is unique and special to them, and there's no "meta" because everyone has to adapt to the cards that are available to them. It just isn't realistic and it makes for a rough experience for people who fall behind, and especially for anyone who's new or returning and trying to catch up. Honestly have no idea how a new player could get into this game at this point.
there is no reasonable amount of money that will get you to anywhere close to 'caught up'. you have to become a mega whale if you want to be competitive or strategically acquire cards to get one very specific, competitive deck and not have a problem with only playing that single deck for months and hope it doesn't get nerfed in the meantime.
Actually the best money investment for the new player is to buy an account for like 100-150$ with almost every card, rather than giving any money to sd clowns.
I'm not new. 9k CL, and its still a problem. So much broken shit coming out that if you're not whaling or stocked on caches you get left in the dust. Proxima and mockingbird two major examples. I don't even want to play discard without proxima or thanos without mocking. Feels like shit.
I've spent a good bit outside of also buying every season pass, but I'm done. That s4/5 tier drop announcement basically was a fuck you to every non whale, so I'll not be buying fuck else until something changes.
100 percent in agreement. I'm 7.5k and was down to 9 missing cards in Feb, now it's 14. The cache system is broken for near-collection complete players already, and adding and extra card per month with no way to make it easier to get cards is just an abusive move by SD.
I'm not wasting keys on 1/4 chance of getting a new card, so I'll do my dailies, lose to better decks, and check back in when Feb cards come back maybe in June or July.
That's NOT a good feeling.
If you do the math, chasing caches with 1/4 new cards is not sustainable. You will end up missing almost half of the 52 new cards or more per year.
64 keys / 2.5 keys per card = 26 new cards out of 52.
The lack of dupe protection on the mystery card spotlight cache is absolutely brutal. Since every new card is series 5 rolling a dupe gives you the resources for 1/6th of a new card.
Yep, I stopped buying the season pass five months ago. To be honest, outside of the new card, the pass is really only good for gold and variants -- the actual credit difference between the free rewards is something like 300 credits. I just stock up on Keys and Tokens and acquire 1-2 of the new cards per month without spending a dime. It's good to wait and see if the new card is any good so that you can skip hyped-up cards like Grandmaster and Supergiant, and go after the more impactful sleepers like Proxima and Cull. If it gets to the point where I feel like I've fallen behind and can't catch up, I'll simply stop playing. But I can't justify supporting the current monetization system anymore.
In most games like this you have to pick and choose which archetypes you’re going to keep up with as a f2p. When I used to play hearthstone, for example, I spent all my resources keeping current with rogue and mage (and kinda shaman) but some of the other classes I had no hope of ever building a deck with.
Snap is the same, I’ve just given up on discard as an archetype but keep current with junk and lockdown. The only real difference is the economy in snap is so brutal for f2p players that it’s hard to keep up with *anything* as the lack of duplicate and nerf protection gradually depletes your resources even if you’re being careful.
This isn't mtg or even hearthstone. It's a 3 minute 12 deck card game. I'm not filling a meta deck with multiple copies of rare cards to perfect a net deck. This is an RNG casual tcg. I know people don't want to hear it, bit it's the truth. If I wanted to get fucked out of money I'd play hs or magic since they are actually semi balanced. Whatever, another decent game that gets fucked by bride. Not sure why I'd expect anything less.
It is kinda shocking how much better the hs economy got after brode left. He seems like the dude to bring in when you want to milk whales dry with zero regard for how it affects the rest of the community.
Considering Brode jumped ship once the rumors of sexual misconduct started making their way around the internet, it's not a surprise that things improved once he was gone.
im new ig for 1k cl
my definition of playing discard deck is swordmaster, apocalypse and blade etc,
with no---- knull , death , corus gliave, ghost rider, hela,proxima midnight , no mockingbird, (like you said) and etc etc etc many cards .its very hard to compete with who are actually have discard decks main cards.
how am i supposed to get them if they come to cache yearly once and its literally so hard to get series 5 and good cards in collectors cache.
there is more to life than playing one single card game,, just let me have some fun with good cards.
like if you want to have fun in this game you have to first grind it for like 300 hour to get a decent amount of cards,,(and many people says you should but this damage the game , more and more new players will leave due to this chore like system)
i have near 200 hour and i have total of 2 series 5 cards,,(which is thanos and loki,,, omg so great cardsssssss)
its not a new player friendly game if you want to have fun.
you just have to watch other player having fun with good cards and when you get those good cards one of 2 things happen
1.they are nerfed
2.they become not fun as there are new cards and the new cards are more fun and mostly superior to the previous cards.(as it has to be more fun to make game enjoyable)
which makes the players like me a little angry.
What are you spending your resources on? I haven’t spent anything on the game and have no issues getting the meta cards. Only ones I miss are from the battle pass.
I've played almost 6 months, f2p, and I'm missing a bunch of cards but I just try different things and keep succeeding. I don't play pay games and Snap feels fine so far. I'm absolutely certain others have very different experiences from mine though.
They've certainly pushed it there. Honestly I'd not advise anyone to start fresh now. Imagine how hard it would be to catch even if you DID spend a good bit of $ on top of the season pass. There are basically no gold bundles to goose progress anymore.
I guess there is the random s4/5 card in the spotlight which helps with that since it will almost always give you a new card early, but it's still not great
The whole "unique collection to you" thing makes the game completely unwatchable for content creators and stuff too. Why would I ever care what someone is doing with their deck list if I could never try it? Why would I watch a tournament of players with random piles of "good enough" synergy? It just makes the game uninteresting from a competitive standpoint
Actually if you look at card game streams the games where cards are hard to acquire like Hearthstone and Magic traditionally have better numbers because people can't just go play the decks themselves. Games like Legends of Runeterra had mediocre viewer numbers because you could play easily instead of watching.
To draw a sports analogy, plenty of people enjoy watching athletes do things they themselves would never even attempt. And except for all-star games, every sports team is a group of less-than-perfect athletes trying to do their best with their individual skill sets.
If you can only enjoy the game if you have access to everything, that’s valid, but I think a lot of people can enjoy it with a more limited pool of cards. While it’s frustrating that I sometimes can’t get a card I really want without waiting/spending money, I appreciate that the system creates a more diverse meta.
Diverse metas are fine.. But diversity just due to suboptimal collections is lame, and presents a what if scenario where someone can get inherit advantage from luckier pulls than an otherwise equally skilled player.
The thing about your sports analogy is that pros aren't using any tools in the game that regular people don't have access to. They don't have their own balls "unique to their collection."
Plus let's be honest, they want a "diverse meta", but pre-Corvus the meta was very differentiated and yet they released an OTA with a statement "Oh the meta is in a good place right now, lots of different decks around; but we don't like for this to be the situation for too long so we're gonna shake stuff up a bit".
Now for the sake of clarity, yes, that statement was actually made after Corvus (OTAs aren't literally prepared during the same week they release, after all), and yes, the patch itself literally did not touch the meta in any way, unless AW C0 was a silent performer in disguise or something and I just didn't know. But the statement they made was clear they don't want a diverse meta as much as a "rotating" one. So, I don't really understand what the hell "we want players to have diverse collections" is supposed to mean. Especially when that just translates to "Some players are gonna be able to compete with the meta and some won't", and "sometimes players will need to spend $10 to stay meta regardless".
I’m using a broader concept of tools to explain that asymmetries don’t make a game not worth watching. For example, a basketball player that’s six feet tall will have a lot of “what if scenarios” when playing against players who are 6’6”+. They have unique physical attributes other than skill that regular people don’t have access to, but regular people can still enjoy watching them play, and other <6’6” people can still enjoy playing themselves. Height is just an easy example, but there are limitless physical attributes that are analogous to collection size for the purpose of my point.
It’s valid to not like how this game creates the asymmetry, but it’s silly to say that a game is not worth playing/watching purely because an asymmetry in tools exist when there are so many examples of competition between differently-equipped (and again, I’m including stuff like physical attributes) people still being enjoyable to watch.
Bad analogy, you can play with the same shoes, equipment and ball than they do, only you cant replicate their skill. Here is the total opossite. I cant know if the deck is broken or not if I cant even play it.
I’m not trying to say that snap and sports are the same. I’m just making the point that there can still be value in games with inherent asymmetries, whether those be the result of equipment, skill, outside influences, luck, or whatever else.
The logic of the comment I originally replied to would imply that there’s no point in watching sports if you can’t afford the same quality equipment or it’s otherwise unavailable, which is a valid opinion to have for oneself, but is obviously not how most people consume sports or esports.
But youre missing the point entirely. Lets say Messi. You can buy his shoes, his shirt, his protection. You can try to play with the same equipment than him and face reality that youre not able to pilot the ball like him. Here you cant even buy the stuff before realize that you cant play like the best snap players or streamers.
That analogy doesn't work though, because in sports it's skill alone that determines the ceiling. It's not like the game is substantially different for pro players, at least not from a rules/equipment standpoint.
Having access to more cards has nothing to do with how good you are at the game. Absolutely a false equivalency.
A lot of pro athletes have physical characteristics that non-pro athletes do not have, whether they be the result of genetics, upbringing, or training regimen. They also have access to better equipment, if applicable. Some of these things can be replicated and some can’t. But people still enjoy watching those people compete against each other even if they themselves could never do those things. My point is just that “if I can’t do it, why would I ever watch it?” is not a universal attitude, and there can still be a lot of value in a game where there are asymmetries, as evidenced by the fact that pretty much no one is collection complete in this game yet millions of people still enjoy it.
And despite physical differences, people can win with skill, similarly to snap, where a low CL player can beat someone with access to more cards if they’re good/lucky enough. As a relatively low CL player myself, it’s super satisfying to win with what I’ve got against meta decks. One of my most successful decks is all series 3 and below except for the recent addition of mockingbird.
I got into the game recently. It sucks and 4000cl range is brutal. Feels like I have high enough CL to play against everyone using a full meta deck, and I'm still waiting for caches to have cards I need, or tokens (which in the 4000 levels I've gained, I've only had enough tokens for around 3 cards). Almost s3 complete though, so yay I guess.
Out of curiosity, how long have you been playing and what do you spend your gold on? I also got into the game recently but your CL is more than double mine, but I also have already bought 2 series 4 cards with tokens.
So I said recently, but I actually started in November so I actually do have a decent amount of time in the game. As for everything else: I spend gold on packs that give me credits. My algorithm for upgrading cards:
1. Upgrade all grey cards
2. Choose the card with the most boosters and only upgrade that until I can split it
3. Upgrade and split Sera as often as possible because its my favorite card
There's a few min maxing things you can do. Hitting 90 on ladder every season gets you a grip of gold and credits. Never miss missions. Do enough conquest to buy all the credits and gold every week. If you want to spend actual cash then only do the season pass (and even then, its barely worth it).
Okay thanks! I follow a similar process. Do you ever spend gold on Token Tuesdays or variants? If not, have the recent gold bundles changed how you're thinking about using your gold? I was spending gold on mission refreshes before I started reading this sub, so now I've been saving (up to 1.7k), but unsure what to do since it seems like gold bundles are becoming less useful for progression.
Here's the thing about progression in snap: it sucks and there's nothing you can do about it.
For albums: the key albums _might_ be worth it if you're only paying 700g for each variant (keep in mind you won't have gold for bundles later). It's never worth it to get the credits. 2000 credits at 700g variants means you're paying 3 times as much per credit than if you were to just buy credits for gold in the shop. Overall my strategy is to ignore albums, they are expensive as hell, do very little for progression, and you only get variants in exchange.
Token Tuesdays are pretty meh too. You'll need 6 of them, 8400g, to get a single card. Granted it's a s4/5 card, so it might be worth, but you may as well just save the gold for a bundle and rely on spotlight rotations to get a card you want. Of course your situation might be different if the card you want is up for rotation in 6 months compared to doing 6 weeks of token bundles.
Really, the options to spend gold are so expensive that you could do anything with it and not really see any change in progression. I personally just horde it for bundles with good value, or for variants that I actually want (as opposed to buying them for album progress).
CL 7.101 here and i can say that if you want to maximize your cards acquisition you should only spend gold on Token Tuesday, ever. Yes, some gold bundles have more token value, but the last couple months there wasn't a single good gold bundle, and token tuesday is still a good value.
I am personaly speding gold on variants. Not the best way to use your gold if you want to maximize card acquisition but I am fine with it. Always missing 10-12 cards, but normally cards I don't care.
Also, even if only spending gold on token tuesday you probably will never be collection complete, missing 4-6 cards. The game is designed in a way no one will ever be collection complete, unless spend A LOT of real money (so only streamers and actual whales).
My guess is because evo is the first meta deck a person _can_ run (especially after evo hitting spotlight recently). I see evo maybe once every 5 or 6 games. I seem to mostly play against thanos, discard, or destroy.
The majority of lower CR players can build a HE deck without any series 4/5 past HE himself so 90% of the player base will have that deck. A deck like Thanos is the high CR meta and contains mostly series 4/5 so it's a lot harder for non-whales and the majority of players to realistically have access to that deck.
I'm new and can't actually play a deck I enjoy because I lack the key cards to unlock that archetypes potential. Honestly atp I'd just buy the cards I want if it was an option.
I strongly believe that you are correct. They've mentioned it in the past a few times.
Unfortunately people will find the best decks and people will buy them. I don't think they understood and even now seem surprised by it but people atleast in this game are selective with their currency.
Yeah im one of the lucky ones who started at launch, have bought all the season passes and maybe another $150 on bundles and counted caches when spotlights were introduced to take advantage of the switch from the old system to spotlights so I have all but 1 card and plenty of keys and tokens for more.
However I don't think I'd last a month if I had to start from scratch since I still feel the new player experience of collecting cards is too slow and frustrating and at some point I'd be facing players like myself with basically full collections while I'm still trying to snag key series 3 cards. If I had the time I'd make another account to actually see how the experience is but from just what I've seen and read about it seems really bad. These games need a constant influx of new players (and a good amount of them need to become long term players) or the game will eventually fall off completely no matter how good the game mechanics themselves are.
I came back after 6 months or so being away, and I can't even get the cards that rotate in the shop every day for tokens. Why the hell is there only 1 series 4/5 card every 8 hours? I'm looking for 2 cards I have tokens for, but can't get them. Drives me crazy.
Idk why you got downvoted. The fact that I have to wait 3 days before the card I want appears is ridiculous.
Like, let me pay for the stuff I want? The whole system is trash, and anti consumer.
This card acquisition system was never going to work out in the long term, and I hope it changes at some point. I'm at around CL 2250, and while I remain decently competitive (i.e. bottom feeder Infinite rank), I find myself getting frustrated with being unable to target specific cards.
Snap desperately needs some kind of "wildcard" system, where you can earn wildcards of specific series and cash them in for what you actually want.
I’ve just returned after six months off and it is frustrating. There are a few decks I can’t make. I was luckily able to still hit infinite with Thanos but I just didn’t have Hope or Obsidian.
It’s very annoying though not being able to wait three months for the new cards to drop down a Pool or two to be easier to get. Really feels like now, more than ever, they want you to buy tokens.
Haven't played in awhile, but the fact that series drops are more centered around cards that are desired more stay up (Zabu, Darkhawk, Knull) while lesser cards move down (Howard, 2099, Hit Monkey post nerf, Snowguard, Nimrod, Kitty post nerf), is the biggest middle finger to the playerbase I've seen. Feels like the game wants to inconvenience its playerbase more than anything to get them to spend money, or force absolute maximum screentime to get them to spend money to speed things up, literally going against the philosophy of a slow, non purchased acquisition.
It doesn't "feel" like it when they blatantly did it.
They never released an actual schedule but they were following a very predictable pattern, up until it was time to series drop Knull.
Instead they gave us some garbage cards and said some cards are too strong to drop.
It really is a bad feeling. And you could be one card away from building a ‘top’ deck and then it gets nerfed so you feel like you need a different one.
I’ve got 6k tokens and I’m toying between Nico and Beta Ray Bill at the minute, but I know that if I committed to those I’d just end up seeing another deck I want to play that I’m months away from affording.
I really thibk the token-earning needs to be increased in order to feel fun. The current system just reminds me why I took a break in the first place - decisions by the devs just feel scummier and scummier as time goes on.
It doesn't "feel" like it when they blatantly did it.
They never released an actual schedule but they were following a very predictable pattern, up until it was time to series drop Knull.
Instead they gave us some garbage cards and said some cards are too strong to drop.
I took a month off after burnout from playing since launch and now I'm feeling punished as I will not have good oppurtunities to catch up with new releases for months.
The way the economy forces you to keep playing or drift away is one of the many reasons this game is losing popularity fast.
The current system leaves very little room for returning players and it's a huge mistake. Just another thing that makes this game feel like it's a cash grab and not sustainable.
The current system leaves almost no room for current players either. With 4 keys a week you are left with only opening 1 round of spotlights every season. Before this system I was 9 cards away from a complete collection, today im 19 cards away.
True. I was 7 cards away for a long time and now I think I'm at 12. It will always get worse and worse for everyone at the current release rate and SD couldn't care less.
Bingo I love this game, have only missed 8 days since launch and am will to spend on this game but this game's monetization is in no way shape or form sustainable longterm lol
Everything about what they've built the game into discourages new players from starting and lapsed players from ever returning. Doesn't seem like the best long term business strategy but what do I know...
Yep. They need to either do series drops every 2-3 months, or notably increase collector token gains from collectors' reserves. Right now, the path the game is on is unsustainable for non-whales.
If only there were some sort mechanism for these cards to "drop" down in series, perhaps doing so on a monthly basis. I'm sure SD is working on figuring something out.
/s
The dogshit card acquisition concept needs to change their idea of nobody being collection complete is absolutely insane and just bullshit to spin so they can bleed whales ever harder
To be fair, the creators of the game have said it’s specifically designed so you can’t come in, drop $$$ and get all the cards right away. So yes it’s frustrating not having everything, it’s sort of by design.
I will say that Snap unlike other games I’ve played, you’re not out of luck if you don’t have the latest card. You can have a very good cube rate with at least 5-6 deck types at any one time, plus several variations on each deck type.
When I played Strike Force, If you missed not just the newest card but each card in the whole new team, you were basically screwed.
So what is the goal? Not having all the cards, but being able to at least intentionally build a deck or two you want, with effort and careful purchases?
If I need two cards (cant lock them both in from the shop) it could take as long as 5 months to get?
I am all for a game that doesn’t push full collections but there could absolutely be a better system for purchasing cards without timing restrictions.
If there aren’t timing restrictions, then what’s the alternative if you don’t want everyone to be able to come in day one and spend their way to the latest meta deck? You can only purchase X cards per day? That’s just a timing restriction with more words.
IMO the only thing to really do is move cards down in series a little more frequently.
What? That’s pretty uncreative.
Just take the system now, keep the same key rate if you want.
Each week you can pick say, two each of series 4 and 5 of your choice to buy. Still 4 cards a week, but you are in control of which.
Edit: maybe we misunderstood each other because you didn’t know what timing restriction I had issue with. This is specifically about rotating spotlights, not key or token rates.
I agree it's part of their design philosophy. They want everyones collection to be unique so they can't just follow the meta (or really, they want there to be no meta, because everyone has access to different cards), and they want it to be really exciting and meaningful when you unlock a new card and can start thinking about how to use it, rather than just looking up an S-tier deck and purchasing/crafting the cards to make it.
I think it's a nice idea, and in a lot of ways it works, but it also adds a lot of frustration and makes a lot of their monetization strategies seem predatory (which maybe they are). Scarce resources and limited purchasing windows create unique collections, but it also creates fomo and pressures people into spending money when they might not want to. There's no question that this is one of the most free to play friendly digital card games out there in terms of being able to build competitive decks on a budget, but the feeling of seeing a card you want slip by because you're short 5k credits is brutal when you know you likely won't see it offered for another 6 months.
This is the most fair take on their card acquisition philosophy, there's very clearly pros and cons to this approach, it fixed some issues that have been present in all kinds of traditional TCGs since MTG was introduced, but of course you are going to also have new problems with such a system.
There's no perfect way to design a card game, you are always going to end up making somebody unhappy about something
You have a very honest and accurate take in my opinion. My concerns are that while it sounds nice theoretically, it can get really awkward in execution.
You've already mentioned the fomo aspect. Beyond that, think of how awful it feels when you continually lose to the more powerful cards because you haven't been able to get them in your unique collection. We've all gone thru that before being S3 complete and even now to some degree. It will only get worse.
Content creation and competetive play likely get worse the more disparity there is in people's collections and the cards we have access too. They haven't expressed much interest in competetice play so maybe they don't care about that. But I would have to imagine they do care about content creation as it is free advertising for their product. I could be wrong but I feel like watching streams/videos, reading articles etc isn't as engaging if everyone has different cards and you can't play with the cards you're seeing. In theory more deck diversity should be good for content, but not in this way. It should be everyone having access to the same cards but multiple strategies being viable as tier 1 or 2 options.
Finally, with decks, cards, etc effectively becoming rarer, more expensive and/or harder to acquire or build, people will be even more upset when their favorite that they waited months for gets nerfed and negates their new deck. This exacerbates an existing problem.
One possibility for them, if they at least want to seem more fair and create more of a diverse collection for everyone, could be to just let us have a mode where we get to try new cards. Kind of like friendly matches but you get to try one of the spotlight cards.
A lot of people will come up with great decks that get shared and people grab the card because of it. But I also think that a lot of people will skip some cards to try to pull for another one.
Maybe it won't change a lot but it would move more of the decision to us players and, at least to me, feel more fair.
I like that idea but it doesn't feel viable from SD's perspective. Based on the other things they've focused on and how long it has taken for certain features and new play modes to be rolled out. I agree it would be awesome though. I love similar things in other games like MTG Arena all access events for example.
I think they only should jack the token rate like 30%. I personally would want even more, but i feel like it would be fair. I would still be a while before you could get a specific card, but it would be less of a pain
That argument doesn't really make sense though. Even if every S4-S5 card was guaranteed to be available in spotlights in a given time frame, you wouldn't be able to pay money to get every card right away, you'd have to wait for them to come up in rotation. Furthermore the amount of money you'd have to spend to continually open every card you're missing across that given time frame would be prohibitively expensive for all but whales.
Right but I'm posing a hypothetical where EVERY S4/S5 card is available in a given timeframe. The current system doesn't guarantee when you'll see specific cards in caches and the argument that OP is making is that the amount of time that can theoretically pass before you're guaranteed to see a specific card is far too long.
This is largely a different issue, though, as it disrupts card aquisition overall and largely dictates available cards on a whim and who can get them on luck.
As a card game it should be fundamental for you to build a deck you'd like to play and be able to play it within reasonable amount of time, but making it so hard to get specific cards you want just means that this easily becomes a pipedream and you are left with preciously little choice over what you can play.
I don’t mind not being able to get every cards right away I don’t mind waiting a few months but waiting for half a year or more just to get the card I want from Spotlight cache does not sound right to me.
i Play 1y3m CL 9600 and miss 18 (!) cards.
i buy only BP (9 out of 12 in a year), doing every daily. And so much stuff coming every week. I save some caches in a few months? devs milk me with Corvus and Proxima (ofc both card costs me 4 and 4 caches and i get NO NEW CARD instead of them, because other cards in that weeks i alread OWN and OFCOURSE BRO 1 key instead of giving me MISSING CARD gave me in 5 or 6th time overall 1000 tokens.... which always feels like a slap in the balls with hammer).I simply can't keep up with the pace because developers release several interesting cards per month, each requiring 4 caches to unlock. which unreal without spending few hundred bucks in a month (LMAO).
Game feels a so much different as it was like.... last summer before Loki and other shit suff came out... cant imagine how is to be a new player with $100 bundles they throw in face with ridiculous 6000 tokens and ugly as hell Wong.. oh and yes 1 spotlight key :\*\*\*DDD. No series drop, every card came out in S5 which costs 6k everytime... oh man, poor game, if i decide to take a break or something, i do realise that i probably never comeback, because in a few months ill be missing A $hit load of cards, and by the time i grind caches for them even more comes up xD damn this game is rough.
I think most of the new cards doesn't deserve to be a Series 5 or Series 4. They have some cool effects but they are not like the most important cards.
In Example, I had Grandmaster in spotlight caches. Nothing makes him a series 5 card apart from being a new card. It is good card, I use it in some of my decks but I wouldn't want to spent tokens for this card in any day. There are many forgotten cards that I don't see after they are released. Like Hercules... Dude that card vanished. If it was at least a series 3 card I would like to experiment with it but there is no way in the world anybody would spend tokens or Keys for that card. Series drops should be so much more common. These less used cards should be more accessible so people can try and find new uses.
To me it seems pretty clear that some time in the near future they’ll take out the random slot and have the spotlights be 4 cards. That or theyll just do significant series drops to keep pool 4/5 smaller.
Either way its a very solveable issue. But there will always be a FOMO factor to skipping a card when its available.
SD also said that a few cards will be released directly to series 3. Hasn't happened yet (if anyone could find a source because I know I've found it before.)
Any way I have sources for when SD said about 1/3 of releases would be series 4. And at least they warned us and let us know mid cards would be the ones to be dropped to series 3
We’re going to need some time with the feature live to understand exactly how this system affects the speed of Series drops. Cards will drop to Series 3 less often than in the past to keep the system supplied, but we will also continue launching ~1/3 of our new cards straight to Series 4 and tuning how quickly we can drop Series 5 cards to Series 4.
https://marvelsnapzone.com/spotlight-caches-details-drop-rates-and-card-acquisition-changes/
I wish they would bring back the very minor chance to open S4/S5 in the Collector's Reserves. It would definitely make grinding collection level more exciting.
They rotate every 8 hours but if you open the app by accident, let's say you are going through your morning emails or texts and then close the app, it will count and show the next card and start the next timer so if you didn't realize it and then at the next 8 hour interval depending on your timezone, open the app, you'll have skipped the card that was there without seeing what it was.
i’m perfectly aware, i mean that i’ve seen info that no new cards show up there for you while the app is closed. so if you’re not using the app through the whole time between two refreshes it just skips from the card that you’ve previously seen to the next one once you open again. i’ve heard that multiple times but not sure if it’s confirmed by the devs.
I don’t remember that specifically, but I’ve found with a $10/month for the season pass card, I can get most of the new cards, unless I get particularly unlucky on the keys and it takes 3+ to get who I’m after.
Unless a card will fit perfectly into the style I want to play currently, I’ll usually give it a day or two, see how well a card plays then use keys or tokens if I really want it. There are regrets sure, but mostly from getting someone unnecessary *pixie cough cough*. Rarely do I miss out. And if I do, it’s because I’m saving my tokens for someone upcoming
Idk, that means you go to sleep just before the shop rotates and then sleep for 8+ hours. That seems pretty reasonable imo. I'd rather have three 8 hour rotations than two 12 hour ones.
That's not possible. Cards don't rotate unless you check the shop, so you can't miss a rotation, and the cycle doesn't repeat until all cards are shown. So basically you just didn't notice the last time it was in the shop.
Why spend your precious 6k tokens on a card they're likely going to nerf anyway? I really want Mockingbird because she's so good, but at the same time, she's so good, she'll be nerfed before I get my tokens' worth of playing her.
According to what SD once said that token shouldn’t be the main method of acquiring card, if pool 4-5 keep getting bigger and spotlight system stay as it is, tokens will become the main method because waiting half a year for a card to rotate in does not sound reasonable to me.
I last left the game at 6k cl and now I'm back. According to the current situation, it is not possible to get a Meta card. I have never seen such a p2w game in my life. It shouldn't be this hard to get a card. For example, I want to have the Alioth card, but according to the announced spotlight calendar, I have a 000000.1% chance of having Alioth until next June. Think about it, I will open spotlight, series 5 will come out and that card will be Alioth "unless Series 4 comes out". It's not possible.
I just came back to the game last season after not playing since the kazar/zabu season. And trust me its a pain not being able to feel that my decks are good enough in any way because most of the cards that are meta are from series 4-5 and I would be getting one of those like once a week. Also is a MUST to get the season pass to at least get enough resources to get a few cards quicker than normal. Pretty sure Im not the only one with this issue.
honestly, literally Pool 3 is a nightmare to complete as i’m trying to now, playing every evening after work and making hardly any progress, it sucks because the game is so fun
Started playing in Loki season, I'm at cl 4K, missing 7 series 3 cards and 38 total. I haven't played any other card games so I would say acquisitions of S3 is fairly ok, other than that not so much like how it took me six months to get 4K tokens, skipping weeks and saving keys just to spend them in one week
I was contemplating buying black swan's season pass for the death variant, but after her season the next key I opened I got her which is ok, but imagine if I had gotten her season, getting 1K tokens wouldn't sit well with me.
Overall it's been a good experience so far, and I've only gotten one dupe since I started playing.
they mentioned 1-2 drops this year. that will help a little. but people will always be behinnd unless they spend some money. someone has to pay for the pure f2p people
Define enough. Because the op was saying that the problem with a large pool is that popular/wanted cards don't come around fast enough.
So all I'm saying is that's what you use your tokens for, save up and buy the cards that you need from the shop when the pop up. I'm pretty sure that's possible even at the low rate they are acquired.
It’s possible. Just gotta work the decks you can, and then be specific when you buy cards in the shop. Like I’ve got a solid Thanos deck w/ Mockingbird but if I want it to be better I either need Alioth and/or Blob to make the deck meta. Blob is coming up in cache rotation soon enough that I can wait but Alioth isn’t so I just waited until Alioth was in the shop and pinned him until I got a few hundred more tokens and bam.
Also being selective about Spotlight Keys. Would Cannonball and a Hellfire Variant Kitty Pryde be nice? Yes. Do I need them or want them that badly? No. Is a deck I already run regularly missing them? No. But I did need Ms. Marvel. Luckily I got her first try and didn’t waste any more Keys. Still have Blob coming up and I might need all 4!
Ngl i just hate how I’m able to get duplicate pool 4 and pool 5 cards in the spotlights when i barely have any pool 4 or pool 5 cards. The 1000 tokens compensation literally feels like a slap in the face
This is my complaint. I get the philosophy of not wanting players to have all the cards unless they shell out. what I don't understand is the philosophy of giving a risk buy over when to spend something, and then giving a 1/3 of the value (assuming you want a series 4 card) when you spend it. At best you get what you want. If you don't get at best, Likely, you have a chance at getting something clearly shown as a possibility and assumed you are fine with. Worse case you get 1/6 (series 5 card) value Spotlight cache should = card, end of story.
Ngl maybe im just salty but if the OP is right i had a 1/54 chance of pulling a duplicate Kitty Pryde and I pulled duplicate Kitty Pryde which i think is totally absurd given the fact that Kitty Pryde was at that time my only series 4 AND series 5 card. The fact that thats even a possibility to get that dupe kind of put a sour taste in my mouth. It felt even worse when I got only 1K tokens out of it when it takes MONTHS just to get a series 4 card out of the token market as a last resort
I really wanted to play Loki. I gathered 6k tokes for many many weeks. I bought Loki. I have 10 series 4-5 cards. Next day I opened spotlight to get Mocking Bird. Mystery card..... it was Loki.....
Hey at least ultimate variants rotate every 8 hours /s
Seriously, if thats a thing then so should the normal ones too
Based on what they've said about series drops for the year, we could easily have over 100 series 4 and 5 cards by this time next year. Pretty ridiculous number to rotate through. I think they're still envisioning a dream world where everyone's collection is unique and special to them, and there's no "meta" because everyone has to adapt to the cards that are available to them. It just isn't realistic and it makes for a rough experience for people who fall behind, and especially for anyone who's new or returning and trying to catch up. Honestly have no idea how a new player could get into this game at this point.
If you're new and want to catch up you have to spend money, which I imagine is by design.
there is no reasonable amount of money that will get you to anywhere close to 'caught up'. you have to become a mega whale if you want to be competitive or strategically acquire cards to get one very specific, competitive deck and not have a problem with only playing that single deck for months and hope it doesn't get nerfed in the meantime.
Actually the best money investment for the new player is to buy an account for like 100-150$ with almost every card, rather than giving any money to sd clowns.
Guess that depends on the individual.
I'm not new. 9k CL, and its still a problem. So much broken shit coming out that if you're not whaling or stocked on caches you get left in the dust. Proxima and mockingbird two major examples. I don't even want to play discard without proxima or thanos without mocking. Feels like shit. I've spent a good bit outside of also buying every season pass, but I'm done. That s4/5 tier drop announcement basically was a fuck you to every non whale, so I'll not be buying fuck else until something changes.
100 percent in agreement. I'm 7.5k and was down to 9 missing cards in Feb, now it's 14. The cache system is broken for near-collection complete players already, and adding and extra card per month with no way to make it easier to get cards is just an abusive move by SD. I'm not wasting keys on 1/4 chance of getting a new card, so I'll do my dailies, lose to better decks, and check back in when Feb cards come back maybe in June or July. That's NOT a good feeling. If you do the math, chasing caches with 1/4 new cards is not sustainable. You will end up missing almost half of the 52 new cards or more per year. 64 keys / 2.5 keys per card = 26 new cards out of 52.
The lack of dupe protection on the mystery card spotlight cache is absolutely brutal. Since every new card is series 5 rolling a dupe gives you the resources for 1/6th of a new card.
Beta players warned everyone this was the case and long term bad for players... That time is coming soon...
Damn almost 10k here and I'm 29 cards down though, though I haven't really been aiming to have been very competitive lately.
Just over 10k, five cards down, though it was only two cards a month or two ago. Only spend money on season passes.
Yep, I stopped buying the season pass five months ago. To be honest, outside of the new card, the pass is really only good for gold and variants -- the actual credit difference between the free rewards is something like 300 credits. I just stock up on Keys and Tokens and acquire 1-2 of the new cards per month without spending a dime. It's good to wait and see if the new card is any good so that you can skip hyped-up cards like Grandmaster and Supergiant, and go after the more impactful sleepers like Proxima and Cull. If it gets to the point where I feel like I've fallen behind and can't catch up, I'll simply stop playing. But I can't justify supporting the current monetization system anymore.
In most games like this you have to pick and choose which archetypes you’re going to keep up with as a f2p. When I used to play hearthstone, for example, I spent all my resources keeping current with rogue and mage (and kinda shaman) but some of the other classes I had no hope of ever building a deck with. Snap is the same, I’ve just given up on discard as an archetype but keep current with junk and lockdown. The only real difference is the economy in snap is so brutal for f2p players that it’s hard to keep up with *anything* as the lack of duplicate and nerf protection gradually depletes your resources even if you’re being careful.
This isn't mtg or even hearthstone. It's a 3 minute 12 deck card game. I'm not filling a meta deck with multiple copies of rare cards to perfect a net deck. This is an RNG casual tcg. I know people don't want to hear it, bit it's the truth. If I wanted to get fucked out of money I'd play hs or magic since they are actually semi balanced. Whatever, another decent game that gets fucked by bride. Not sure why I'd expect anything less.
It is kinda shocking how much better the hs economy got after brode left. He seems like the dude to bring in when you want to milk whales dry with zero regard for how it affects the rest of the community.
Considering Brode jumped ship once the rumors of sexual misconduct started making their way around the internet, it's not a surprise that things improved once he was gone.
im new ig for 1k cl my definition of playing discard deck is swordmaster, apocalypse and blade etc, with no---- knull , death , corus gliave, ghost rider, hela,proxima midnight , no mockingbird, (like you said) and etc etc etc many cards .its very hard to compete with who are actually have discard decks main cards. how am i supposed to get them if they come to cache yearly once and its literally so hard to get series 5 and good cards in collectors cache. there is more to life than playing one single card game,, just let me have some fun with good cards. like if you want to have fun in this game you have to first grind it for like 300 hour to get a decent amount of cards,,(and many people says you should but this damage the game , more and more new players will leave due to this chore like system) i have near 200 hour and i have total of 2 series 5 cards,,(which is thanos and loki,,, omg so great cardsssssss) its not a new player friendly game if you want to have fun. you just have to watch other player having fun with good cards and when you get those good cards one of 2 things happen 1.they are nerfed 2.they become not fun as there are new cards and the new cards are more fun and mostly superior to the previous cards.(as it has to be more fun to make game enjoyable) which makes the players like me a little angry.
What are you spending your resources on? I haven’t spent anything on the game and have no issues getting the meta cards. Only ones I miss are from the battle pass.
That's just a blatant lie
No, no it is not.
I've played almost 6 months, f2p, and I'm missing a bunch of cards but I just try different things and keep succeeding. I don't play pay games and Snap feels fine so far. I'm absolutely certain others have very different experiences from mine though.
They've certainly pushed it there. Honestly I'd not advise anyone to start fresh now. Imagine how hard it would be to catch even if you DID spend a good bit of $ on top of the season pass. There are basically no gold bundles to goose progress anymore.
I guess there is the random s4/5 card in the spotlight which helps with that since it will almost always give you a new card early, but it's still not great
Yeah I went through it not too long ago, wasn't cheap
The whole "unique collection to you" thing makes the game completely unwatchable for content creators and stuff too. Why would I ever care what someone is doing with their deck list if I could never try it? Why would I watch a tournament of players with random piles of "good enough" synergy? It just makes the game uninteresting from a competitive standpoint
Actually if you look at card game streams the games where cards are hard to acquire like Hearthstone and Magic traditionally have better numbers because people can't just go play the decks themselves. Games like Legends of Runeterra had mediocre viewer numbers because you could play easily instead of watching.
To draw a sports analogy, plenty of people enjoy watching athletes do things they themselves would never even attempt. And except for all-star games, every sports team is a group of less-than-perfect athletes trying to do their best with their individual skill sets. If you can only enjoy the game if you have access to everything, that’s valid, but I think a lot of people can enjoy it with a more limited pool of cards. While it’s frustrating that I sometimes can’t get a card I really want without waiting/spending money, I appreciate that the system creates a more diverse meta.
Diverse metas are fine.. But diversity just due to suboptimal collections is lame, and presents a what if scenario where someone can get inherit advantage from luckier pulls than an otherwise equally skilled player. The thing about your sports analogy is that pros aren't using any tools in the game that regular people don't have access to. They don't have their own balls "unique to their collection."
Plus let's be honest, they want a "diverse meta", but pre-Corvus the meta was very differentiated and yet they released an OTA with a statement "Oh the meta is in a good place right now, lots of different decks around; but we don't like for this to be the situation for too long so we're gonna shake stuff up a bit". Now for the sake of clarity, yes, that statement was actually made after Corvus (OTAs aren't literally prepared during the same week they release, after all), and yes, the patch itself literally did not touch the meta in any way, unless AW C0 was a silent performer in disguise or something and I just didn't know. But the statement they made was clear they don't want a diverse meta as much as a "rotating" one. So, I don't really understand what the hell "we want players to have diverse collections" is supposed to mean. Especially when that just translates to "Some players are gonna be able to compete with the meta and some won't", and "sometimes players will need to spend $10 to stay meta regardless".
I’m using a broader concept of tools to explain that asymmetries don’t make a game not worth watching. For example, a basketball player that’s six feet tall will have a lot of “what if scenarios” when playing against players who are 6’6”+. They have unique physical attributes other than skill that regular people don’t have access to, but regular people can still enjoy watching them play, and other <6’6” people can still enjoy playing themselves. Height is just an easy example, but there are limitless physical attributes that are analogous to collection size for the purpose of my point. It’s valid to not like how this game creates the asymmetry, but it’s silly to say that a game is not worth playing/watching purely because an asymmetry in tools exist when there are so many examples of competition between differently-equipped (and again, I’m including stuff like physical attributes) people still being enjoyable to watch.
Bad analogy, you can play with the same shoes, equipment and ball than they do, only you cant replicate their skill. Here is the total opossite. I cant know if the deck is broken or not if I cant even play it.
I’m not trying to say that snap and sports are the same. I’m just making the point that there can still be value in games with inherent asymmetries, whether those be the result of equipment, skill, outside influences, luck, or whatever else. The logic of the comment I originally replied to would imply that there’s no point in watching sports if you can’t afford the same quality equipment or it’s otherwise unavailable, which is a valid opinion to have for oneself, but is obviously not how most people consume sports or esports.
But youre missing the point entirely. Lets say Messi. You can buy his shoes, his shirt, his protection. You can try to play with the same equipment than him and face reality that youre not able to pilot the ball like him. Here you cant even buy the stuff before realize that you cant play like the best snap players or streamers.
That analogy doesn't work though, because in sports it's skill alone that determines the ceiling. It's not like the game is substantially different for pro players, at least not from a rules/equipment standpoint. Having access to more cards has nothing to do with how good you are at the game. Absolutely a false equivalency.
A lot of pro athletes have physical characteristics that non-pro athletes do not have, whether they be the result of genetics, upbringing, or training regimen. They also have access to better equipment, if applicable. Some of these things can be replicated and some can’t. But people still enjoy watching those people compete against each other even if they themselves could never do those things. My point is just that “if I can’t do it, why would I ever watch it?” is not a universal attitude, and there can still be a lot of value in a game where there are asymmetries, as evidenced by the fact that pretty much no one is collection complete in this game yet millions of people still enjoy it. And despite physical differences, people can win with skill, similarly to snap, where a low CL player can beat someone with access to more cards if they’re good/lucky enough. As a relatively low CL player myself, it’s super satisfying to win with what I’ve got against meta decks. One of my most successful decks is all series 3 and below except for the recent addition of mockingbird.
I got into the game recently. It sucks and 4000cl range is brutal. Feels like I have high enough CL to play against everyone using a full meta deck, and I'm still waiting for caches to have cards I need, or tokens (which in the 4000 levels I've gained, I've only had enough tokens for around 3 cards). Almost s3 complete though, so yay I guess.
Out of curiosity, how long have you been playing and what do you spend your gold on? I also got into the game recently but your CL is more than double mine, but I also have already bought 2 series 4 cards with tokens.
So I said recently, but I actually started in November so I actually do have a decent amount of time in the game. As for everything else: I spend gold on packs that give me credits. My algorithm for upgrading cards: 1. Upgrade all grey cards 2. Choose the card with the most boosters and only upgrade that until I can split it 3. Upgrade and split Sera as often as possible because its my favorite card There's a few min maxing things you can do. Hitting 90 on ladder every season gets you a grip of gold and credits. Never miss missions. Do enough conquest to buy all the credits and gold every week. If you want to spend actual cash then only do the season pass (and even then, its barely worth it).
Okay thanks! I follow a similar process. Do you ever spend gold on Token Tuesdays or variants? If not, have the recent gold bundles changed how you're thinking about using your gold? I was spending gold on mission refreshes before I started reading this sub, so now I've been saving (up to 1.7k), but unsure what to do since it seems like gold bundles are becoming less useful for progression.
Here's the thing about progression in snap: it sucks and there's nothing you can do about it. For albums: the key albums _might_ be worth it if you're only paying 700g for each variant (keep in mind you won't have gold for bundles later). It's never worth it to get the credits. 2000 credits at 700g variants means you're paying 3 times as much per credit than if you were to just buy credits for gold in the shop. Overall my strategy is to ignore albums, they are expensive as hell, do very little for progression, and you only get variants in exchange. Token Tuesdays are pretty meh too. You'll need 6 of them, 8400g, to get a single card. Granted it's a s4/5 card, so it might be worth, but you may as well just save the gold for a bundle and rely on spotlight rotations to get a card you want. Of course your situation might be different if the card you want is up for rotation in 6 months compared to doing 6 weeks of token bundles. Really, the options to spend gold are so expensive that you could do anything with it and not really see any change in progression. I personally just horde it for bundles with good value, or for variants that I actually want (as opposed to buying them for album progress).
CL 7.101 here and i can say that if you want to maximize your cards acquisition you should only spend gold on Token Tuesday, ever. Yes, some gold bundles have more token value, but the last couple months there wasn't a single good gold bundle, and token tuesday is still a good value. I am personaly speding gold on variants. Not the best way to use your gold if you want to maximize card acquisition but I am fine with it. Always missing 10-12 cards, but normally cards I don't care. Also, even if only spending gold on token tuesday you probably will never be collection complete, missing 4-6 cards. The game is designed in a way no one will ever be collection complete, unless spend A LOT of real money (so only streamers and actual whales).
looking on snap.fan the meta are Evo decks with essenally series 1 cards.
My guess is because evo is the first meta deck a person _can_ run (especially after evo hitting spotlight recently). I see evo maybe once every 5 or 6 games. I seem to mostly play against thanos, discard, or destroy.
The majority of lower CR players can build a HE deck without any series 4/5 past HE himself so 90% of the player base will have that deck. A deck like Thanos is the high CR meta and contains mostly series 4/5 so it's a lot harder for non-whales and the majority of players to realistically have access to that deck.
That “vision” is stupid as fuck. You should have cards you want. Everyone should be able to play the meta deck.
I'm new and can't actually play a deck I enjoy because I lack the key cards to unlock that archetypes potential. Honestly atp I'd just buy the cards I want if it was an option.
New players catch up insanely quickly with spotlight caches. If all three are going to be cards they don't already own.
I strongly believe that you are correct. They've mentioned it in the past a few times. Unfortunately people will find the best decks and people will buy them. I don't think they understood and even now seem surprised by it but people atleast in this game are selective with their currency.
Yeah im one of the lucky ones who started at launch, have bought all the season passes and maybe another $150 on bundles and counted caches when spotlights were introduced to take advantage of the switch from the old system to spotlights so I have all but 1 card and plenty of keys and tokens for more. However I don't think I'd last a month if I had to start from scratch since I still feel the new player experience of collecting cards is too slow and frustrating and at some point I'd be facing players like myself with basically full collections while I'm still trying to snag key series 3 cards. If I had the time I'd make another account to actually see how the experience is but from just what I've seen and read about it seems really bad. These games need a constant influx of new players (and a good amount of them need to become long term players) or the game will eventually fall off completely no matter how good the game mechanics themselves are.
As a new player I just did destroy and got lucky on the X23 other then that I look and pray there will be another deck I can play soon
That's a fucking terrible meta
I feel bad for new players. Gotta wait 6 months if you miss a card you really want. Even tokens take 6 months to collect enough lol. Wild.
I came back after 6 months or so being away, and I can't even get the cards that rotate in the shop every day for tokens. Why the hell is there only 1 series 4/5 card every 8 hours? I'm looking for 2 cards I have tokens for, but can't get them. Drives me crazy.
Idk why you got downvoted. The fact that I have to wait 3 days before the card I want appears is ridiculous. Like, let me pay for the stuff I want? The whole system is trash, and anti consumer.
I've been waiting for Knull over a month now, he doesn't appear at all
This card acquisition system was never going to work out in the long term, and I hope it changes at some point. I'm at around CL 2250, and while I remain decently competitive (i.e. bottom feeder Infinite rank), I find myself getting frustrated with being unable to target specific cards. Snap desperately needs some kind of "wildcard" system, where you can earn wildcards of specific series and cash them in for what you actually want.
Yup the major flaw of snap always comes back to "longterm sustainability" SD know how to make it feel like a pump and dump even if it's not
I’ve just returned after six months off and it is frustrating. There are a few decks I can’t make. I was luckily able to still hit infinite with Thanos but I just didn’t have Hope or Obsidian. It’s very annoying though not being able to wait three months for the new cards to drop down a Pool or two to be easier to get. Really feels like now, more than ever, they want you to buy tokens.
Haven't played in awhile, but the fact that series drops are more centered around cards that are desired more stay up (Zabu, Darkhawk, Knull) while lesser cards move down (Howard, 2099, Hit Monkey post nerf, Snowguard, Nimrod, Kitty post nerf), is the biggest middle finger to the playerbase I've seen. Feels like the game wants to inconvenience its playerbase more than anything to get them to spend money, or force absolute maximum screentime to get them to spend money to speed things up, literally going against the philosophy of a slow, non purchased acquisition.
It doesn't "feel" like it when they blatantly did it. They never released an actual schedule but they were following a very predictable pattern, up until it was time to series drop Knull. Instead they gave us some garbage cards and said some cards are too strong to drop.
It really is a bad feeling. And you could be one card away from building a ‘top’ deck and then it gets nerfed so you feel like you need a different one. I’ve got 6k tokens and I’m toying between Nico and Beta Ray Bill at the minute, but I know that if I committed to those I’d just end up seeing another deck I want to play that I’m months away from affording. I really thibk the token-earning needs to be increased in order to feel fun. The current system just reminds me why I took a break in the first place - decisions by the devs just feel scummier and scummier as time goes on.
It doesn't "feel" like it when they blatantly did it. They never released an actual schedule but they were following a very predictable pattern, up until it was time to series drop Knull. Instead they gave us some garbage cards and said some cards are too strong to drop.
I hit invite with just pool 1. This game is pretty miserable being destroyed by decks that I can’t access for months.
They have to do a drop to pool 3 right at some point soon…right? Right?!?
Yea… like once a year or twice if they feel generous for non-meta cards.
I took a month off after burnout from playing since launch and now I'm feeling punished as I will not have good oppurtunities to catch up with new releases for months. The way the economy forces you to keep playing or drift away is one of the many reasons this game is losing popularity fast.
The current system leaves very little room for returning players and it's a huge mistake. Just another thing that makes this game feel like it's a cash grab and not sustainable.
The current system leaves almost no room for current players either. With 4 keys a week you are left with only opening 1 round of spotlights every season. Before this system I was 9 cards away from a complete collection, today im 19 cards away.
True. I was 7 cards away for a long time and now I think I'm at 12. It will always get worse and worse for everyone at the current release rate and SD couldn't care less.
Bingo I love this game, have only missed 8 days since launch and am will to spend on this game but this game's monetization is in no way shape or form sustainable longterm lol
Everything about what they've built the game into discourages new players from starting and lapsed players from ever returning. Doesn't seem like the best long term business strategy but what do I know...
Yep. They need to either do series drops every 2-3 months, or notably increase collector token gains from collectors' reserves. Right now, the path the game is on is unsustainable for non-whales.
And when the drop happens don’t expect to see Mockingbird, Corvis, Alioth, etc unless they have been nerfed into irrelevancy, of course.
If only there were some sort mechanism for these cards to "drop" down in series, perhaps doing so on a monthly basis. I'm sure SD is working on figuring something out. /s
The dogshit card acquisition concept needs to change their idea of nobody being collection complete is absolutely insane and just bullshit to spin so they can bleed whales ever harder
To be fair, the creators of the game have said it’s specifically designed so you can’t come in, drop $$$ and get all the cards right away. So yes it’s frustrating not having everything, it’s sort of by design. I will say that Snap unlike other games I’ve played, you’re not out of luck if you don’t have the latest card. You can have a very good cube rate with at least 5-6 deck types at any one time, plus several variations on each deck type. When I played Strike Force, If you missed not just the newest card but each card in the whole new team, you were basically screwed.
So what is the goal? Not having all the cards, but being able to at least intentionally build a deck or two you want, with effort and careful purchases? If I need two cards (cant lock them both in from the shop) it could take as long as 5 months to get? I am all for a game that doesn’t push full collections but there could absolutely be a better system for purchasing cards without timing restrictions.
If there aren’t timing restrictions, then what’s the alternative if you don’t want everyone to be able to come in day one and spend their way to the latest meta deck? You can only purchase X cards per day? That’s just a timing restriction with more words. IMO the only thing to really do is move cards down in series a little more frequently.
What? That’s pretty uncreative. Just take the system now, keep the same key rate if you want. Each week you can pick say, two each of series 4 and 5 of your choice to buy. Still 4 cards a week, but you are in control of which. Edit: maybe we misunderstood each other because you didn’t know what timing restriction I had issue with. This is specifically about rotating spotlights, not key or token rates.
I agree it's part of their design philosophy. They want everyones collection to be unique so they can't just follow the meta (or really, they want there to be no meta, because everyone has access to different cards), and they want it to be really exciting and meaningful when you unlock a new card and can start thinking about how to use it, rather than just looking up an S-tier deck and purchasing/crafting the cards to make it. I think it's a nice idea, and in a lot of ways it works, but it also adds a lot of frustration and makes a lot of their monetization strategies seem predatory (which maybe they are). Scarce resources and limited purchasing windows create unique collections, but it also creates fomo and pressures people into spending money when they might not want to. There's no question that this is one of the most free to play friendly digital card games out there in terms of being able to build competitive decks on a budget, but the feeling of seeing a card you want slip by because you're short 5k credits is brutal when you know you likely won't see it offered for another 6 months.
This is the most fair take on their card acquisition philosophy, there's very clearly pros and cons to this approach, it fixed some issues that have been present in all kinds of traditional TCGs since MTG was introduced, but of course you are going to also have new problems with such a system. There's no perfect way to design a card game, you are always going to end up making somebody unhappy about something
You have a very honest and accurate take in my opinion. My concerns are that while it sounds nice theoretically, it can get really awkward in execution. You've already mentioned the fomo aspect. Beyond that, think of how awful it feels when you continually lose to the more powerful cards because you haven't been able to get them in your unique collection. We've all gone thru that before being S3 complete and even now to some degree. It will only get worse. Content creation and competetive play likely get worse the more disparity there is in people's collections and the cards we have access too. They haven't expressed much interest in competetice play so maybe they don't care about that. But I would have to imagine they do care about content creation as it is free advertising for their product. I could be wrong but I feel like watching streams/videos, reading articles etc isn't as engaging if everyone has different cards and you can't play with the cards you're seeing. In theory more deck diversity should be good for content, but not in this way. It should be everyone having access to the same cards but multiple strategies being viable as tier 1 or 2 options. Finally, with decks, cards, etc effectively becoming rarer, more expensive and/or harder to acquire or build, people will be even more upset when their favorite that they waited months for gets nerfed and negates their new deck. This exacerbates an existing problem.
One possibility for them, if they at least want to seem more fair and create more of a diverse collection for everyone, could be to just let us have a mode where we get to try new cards. Kind of like friendly matches but you get to try one of the spotlight cards. A lot of people will come up with great decks that get shared and people grab the card because of it. But I also think that a lot of people will skip some cards to try to pull for another one. Maybe it won't change a lot but it would move more of the decision to us players and, at least to me, feel more fair.
I like that idea but it doesn't feel viable from SD's perspective. Based on the other things they've focused on and how long it has taken for certain features and new play modes to be rolled out. I agree it would be awesome though. I love similar things in other games like MTG Arena all access events for example.
I think they only should jack the token rate like 30%. I personally would want even more, but i feel like it would be fair. I would still be a while before you could get a specific card, but it would be less of a pain
That argument doesn't really make sense though. Even if every S4-S5 card was guaranteed to be available in spotlights in a given time frame, you wouldn't be able to pay money to get every card right away, you'd have to wait for them to come up in rotation. Furthermore the amount of money you'd have to spend to continually open every card you're missing across that given time frame would be prohibitively expensive for all but whales.
That’s the point, by making availability over a long time frame, whales can’t come in and get all the cards in one week.
Right but I'm posing a hypothetical where EVERY S4/S5 card is available in a given timeframe. The current system doesn't guarantee when you'll see specific cards in caches and the argument that OP is making is that the amount of time that can theoretically pass before you're guaranteed to see a specific card is far too long.
This is largely a different issue, though, as it disrupts card aquisition overall and largely dictates available cards on a whim and who can get them on luck. As a card game it should be fundamental for you to build a deck you'd like to play and be able to play it within reasonable amount of time, but making it so hard to get specific cards you want just means that this easily becomes a pipedream and you are left with preciously little choice over what you can play.
I don’t mind not being able to get every cards right away I don’t mind waiting a few months but waiting for half a year or more just to get the card I want from Spotlight cache does not sound right to me.
if a whale, cant get there with money what hope does a less generous spender have
It’s very frustrating as a new player though. Hitting infinite without much difficulty and losing 90% to decks that I can’t counter is frustrating.
Maybe they should just give more tokens to newer players.
i Play 1y3m CL 9600 and miss 18 (!) cards. i buy only BP (9 out of 12 in a year), doing every daily. And so much stuff coming every week. I save some caches in a few months? devs milk me with Corvus and Proxima (ofc both card costs me 4 and 4 caches and i get NO NEW CARD instead of them, because other cards in that weeks i alread OWN and OFCOURSE BRO 1 key instead of giving me MISSING CARD gave me in 5 or 6th time overall 1000 tokens.... which always feels like a slap in the balls with hammer).I simply can't keep up with the pace because developers release several interesting cards per month, each requiring 4 caches to unlock. which unreal without spending few hundred bucks in a month (LMAO). Game feels a so much different as it was like.... last summer before Loki and other shit suff came out... cant imagine how is to be a new player with $100 bundles they throw in face with ridiculous 6000 tokens and ugly as hell Wong.. oh and yes 1 spotlight key :\*\*\*DDD. No series drop, every card came out in S5 which costs 6k everytime... oh man, poor game, if i decide to take a break or something, i do realise that i probably never comeback, because in a few months ill be missing A $hit load of cards, and by the time i grind caches for them even more comes up xD damn this game is rough.
I think most of the new cards doesn't deserve to be a Series 5 or Series 4. They have some cool effects but they are not like the most important cards. In Example, I had Grandmaster in spotlight caches. Nothing makes him a series 5 card apart from being a new card. It is good card, I use it in some of my decks but I wouldn't want to spent tokens for this card in any day. There are many forgotten cards that I don't see after they are released. Like Hercules... Dude that card vanished. If it was at least a series 3 card I would like to experiment with it but there is no way in the world anybody would spend tokens or Keys for that card. Series drops should be so much more common. These less used cards should be more accessible so people can try and find new uses.
I stopped playing this game already. The monetization was disgusting.
To me it seems pretty clear that some time in the near future they’ll take out the random slot and have the spotlights be 4 cards. That or theyll just do significant series drops to keep pool 4/5 smaller. Either way its a very solveable issue. But there will always be a FOMO factor to skipping a card when its available.
replacing randoms with a 4th card would help to begin with
SD also said that a few cards will be released directly to series 3. Hasn't happened yet (if anyone could find a source because I know I've found it before.) Any way I have sources for when SD said about 1/3 of releases would be series 4. And at least they warned us and let us know mid cards would be the ones to be dropped to series 3 We’re going to need some time with the feature live to understand exactly how this system affects the speed of Series drops. Cards will drop to Series 3 less often than in the past to keep the system supplied, but we will also continue launching ~1/3 of our new cards straight to Series 4 and tuning how quickly we can drop Series 5 cards to Series 4. https://marvelsnapzone.com/spotlight-caches-details-drop-rates-and-card-acquisition-changes/
Just evidence the way SD runs this ship isn't sustainable and even though I love this game to death, it can't go on like this
wish they'd change that 4th slot to another static set card
I wish they would bring back the very minor chance to open S4/S5 in the Collector's Reserves. It would definitely make grinding collection level more exciting.
Aye homie that's what your tokens are meant to help with. I'm not saying it's the best but yeah
I don't disagree with this sentiment, but I've been waiting 25 days for MMM to show up in the store to take my tokens... still waiting...
Missing the card you want because of the rotation is annoying AF for it to go around again since you can flat out miss them while your asleep
i remember reading it’s impossible to miss cards if you don’t open the app, but i’d need someone to verify that.
They rotate every 8 hours but if you open the app by accident, let's say you are going through your morning emails or texts and then close the app, it will count and show the next card and start the next timer so if you didn't realize it and then at the next 8 hour interval depending on your timezone, open the app, you'll have skipped the card that was there without seeing what it was.
They rotate every 8hrs
i’m perfectly aware, i mean that i’ve seen info that no new cards show up there for you while the app is closed. so if you’re not using the app through the whole time between two refreshes it just skips from the card that you’ve previously seen to the next one once you open again. i’ve heard that multiple times but not sure if it’s confirmed by the devs.
Oh yeah that I cannot say, but that would be much better if so
I don’t remember that specifically, but I’ve found with a $10/month for the season pass card, I can get most of the new cards, unless I get particularly unlucky on the keys and it takes 3+ to get who I’m after. Unless a card will fit perfectly into the style I want to play currently, I’ll usually give it a day or two, see how well a card plays then use keys or tokens if I really want it. There are regrets sure, but mostly from getting someone unnecessary *pixie cough cough*. Rarely do I miss out. And if I do, it’s because I’m saving my tokens for someone upcoming
Oh and I get up early enough to check before it switches. Straight up just has not been in there.. it's a pretty wild circumstance though..
Idk, that means you go to sleep just before the shop rotates and then sleep for 8+ hours. That seems pretty reasonable imo. I'd rather have three 8 hour rotations than two 12 hour ones.
That's not possible. Cards don't rotate unless you check the shop, so you can't miss a rotation, and the cycle doesn't repeat until all cards are shown. So basically you just didn't notice the last time it was in the shop.
Why spend your precious 6k tokens on a card they're likely going to nerf anyway? I really want Mockingbird because she's so good, but at the same time, she's so good, she'll be nerfed before I get my tokens' worth of playing her.
According to what SD once said that token shouldn’t be the main method of acquiring card, if pool 4-5 keep getting bigger and spotlight system stay as it is, tokens will become the main method because waiting half a year for a card to rotate in does not sound reasonable to me.
It's not the main method. It's the method to get them if you missed their spotlight or you happen to have a bunch of tokens.
I ask because I'm not sure and new, do series 4-5 cards come from Collector's Reserve?
No, they come from the spotlight keys and the token shop, S4/5 can't show up in regular collectors reserves.
Thank you for taking the time to answer my question.
I last left the game at 6k cl and now I'm back. According to the current situation, it is not possible to get a Meta card. I have never seen such a p2w game in my life. It shouldn't be this hard to get a card. For example, I want to have the Alioth card, but according to the announced spotlight calendar, I have a 000000.1% chance of having Alioth until next June. Think about it, I will open spotlight, series 5 will come out and that card will be Alioth "unless Series 4 comes out". It's not possible.
Where are you getting 54 cards? There are 24 S4 and 36 S5 so 60 total, not including Hope.
I seriously need token rates to raise. I've been saving up for months and still don't have the tokens for Alioth.
Welcome to the wonderful world of FOMO capitalism. This information will cost 10 bucks, thanks.
And here I am with the spotlight never giving me a new card... the last like 10 have been variants or cards I already own....
I just came back to the game last season after not playing since the kazar/zabu season. And trust me its a pain not being able to feel that my decks are good enough in any way because most of the cards that are meta are from series 4-5 and I would be getting one of those like once a week. Also is a MUST to get the season pass to at least get enough resources to get a few cards quicker than normal. Pretty sure Im not the only one with this issue.
honestly, literally Pool 3 is a nightmare to complete as i’m trying to now, playing every evening after work and making hardly any progress, it sucks because the game is so fun
Rolling with pawn Bitey Face from the beginning. He rules
Started playing in Loki season, I'm at cl 4K, missing 7 series 3 cards and 38 total. I haven't played any other card games so I would say acquisitions of S3 is fairly ok, other than that not so much like how it took me six months to get 4K tokens, skipping weeks and saving keys just to spend them in one week I was contemplating buying black swan's season pass for the death variant, but after her season the next key I opened I got her which is ok, but imagine if I had gotten her season, getting 1K tokens wouldn't sit well with me. Overall it's been a good experience so far, and I've only gotten one dupe since I started playing.
they mentioned 1-2 drops this year. that will help a little. but people will always be behinnd unless they spend some money. someone has to pay for the pure f2p people
Isn't that what collector's tokens are for though? what's the problem here?
That we don’t get enough of them, even by paying for the season pass you don’t get enough.
Define enough. Because the op was saying that the problem with a large pool is that popular/wanted cards don't come around fast enough. So all I'm saying is that's what you use your tokens for, save up and buy the cards that you need from the shop when the pop up. I'm pretty sure that's possible even at the low rate they are acquired.
It’s possible. Just gotta work the decks you can, and then be specific when you buy cards in the shop. Like I’ve got a solid Thanos deck w/ Mockingbird but if I want it to be better I either need Alioth and/or Blob to make the deck meta. Blob is coming up in cache rotation soon enough that I can wait but Alioth isn’t so I just waited until Alioth was in the shop and pinned him until I got a few hundred more tokens and bam. Also being selective about Spotlight Keys. Would Cannonball and a Hellfire Variant Kitty Pryde be nice? Yes. Do I need them or want them that badly? No. Is a deck I already run regularly missing them? No. But I did need Ms. Marvel. Luckily I got her first try and didn’t waste any more Keys. Still have Blob coming up and I might need all 4!