I’ve been playing Marvel Snap a bunch this week. While I’m not here to uncritically sing its praises for its microtransaction practices it is refreshing to see a collectible card game make use of a random content delivery system that isn’t based on gachapon-style random pulls or boosters.
Instead, as players spend soft currency upgrading their cards’ appearance ratings, they are awarded collection levels. When players hit certain collection level milestones they are awarded a mystery card that they do not already own.
This system has some features which have positive consequences for the player:
Every card is important: Since card upgrades are strictly necessary to unlock new content, even ‘bad cards’ have value to the player.
Experimentation is rewarded: Switching new cards into your deck or building a deck around new cards allows those cards a chance to earn upgrade points after each match, incentivising more frequent deckbuilding.
No duplicates: Strictly speaking, a player is guaranteed to see a new card each time that they unlock one. There are some cosmetic ‘variant’ cards which don’t introduce new gameplay mechanics, but it will be a new card that might be a cooler-looking version than the one the player has.
The order in which cards are unlocked is randomised for each player up to a point. Cards are divided into pools. Pool 1 comes before Pool 2 and so on. The player will unlock all of the cards in Pool 1 in a random order before they can start seeing Pool 2 cards. I’ve yet to do a strict analysis of the power differences of cards between the Pools but I have noticed a few things already:
Cards from later Pools have more complex effects: Keeping the rules text simpler for new players allows early-ranked games to be more readable and playable for those with less experience with the game.
You can betray your collection depth to players: If you aren’t repping cards from Pool 2 in games, savvy players may realise that you don’t have many cards from Pool 2 and will not have to worry about seeing them as much when they are deliberating their endgame moves.
I also wonder about the long-term content delivery system for Marvel Snap and how it will balance the needs of new and existing players. Will a new card pool only be of interest to existing players who can access the content much sooner? Will there be a tendency to slowly tick up the power level of cards from later pools to gate players with weaker collections from the most competitive ranked play? This I can’t say for now, but I’m looking forward to finding out!