A Comprehensive Guide to the Marvel Snap Economy
You can tell this game is good because it has three separate progression tracks!
Marvel Snap is a new collectible card game featuring Marvel Comics characters from a studio called Second Dinner, which was founded by members of the team that originally made Blizzard’s popular card game Hearthstone, and headed by Ben Brode, who was the lead designer and face of Hearthstone from 2015 until his departure in 2018 to found his new studio.
Snap is a simpler, quicker game than Hearthstone, with matches ending after six turns, and lasting no longer than five minutes, and decks limited to twelve collectible cards. It’s mobile first, and in many ways more casual-friendly than other popular online card collecting games, but there’s a lot of depth to it, and it takes skill and commitment to climb the game’s ranked ladder.
The game has been very popular, topping the charts on Apple’s App Store and earning millions in revenue in the week of its launch, and getting positive reviews from most critics, but a lot of the commentary and analysis about the game has been pretty surface level. I have a lot of experience with these kinds of games; I’ve been playing Hearthstone since its beta in 2014 and I went pretty deep on Snap and was able to climb to the highest rank on the Snap ladder in the first two weeks of launch. So I am in a position to go in depth on some of the intricacies of the game. In this piece, I am going to demystify Marvel Snap’s somewhat freemium economy, and help you gain a better understanding of how to deploy your resources, whether you should bother spending money on this game, and whether it is worth it to either invest in the game or try to compete as a free-to-play player.
A Complicated Freemium System
Marvel Snap has a complicated freemium economy, and if you’ve got any experience with free-to-play games, you are probably suspicious, as soon as you see multiple currencies in a game like this, that somebody is trying to play a shell game with you and rip you off.
The good news is that Marvel Snap isn’t trying to egregiously rip you off — at least, not right now. Here’s the backstory: Prior to its October 18, 2022 global launch, Second Dinner had a beta version of the game live for players who were invited to play and players in certain territories like the Philippines. During the beta, they ran several season passes, rebalanced the cards and, in July 2022, they pushed a feature called a “Nexus Event.”
The Nexus Event was a ploy to get you to buy loot boxes. You paid about $2.50 in premium currency, and you got a box that would contain either currencies, cosmetic items or a new card. There were four cards that were only available from the Nexus Event loot boxes, and these cards were central to several of the game’s most powerful decks, and the new cards were rare enough pulls from the boxes that, to get them all, a player would have to spend hundreds of dollars
Everybody hated this. Backlash was swift and intense. Popular streamers quit the game in outrage. Second Dinner recognized that this kind of monetization could kill their game and reversed course very quickly, cancelling the Nexus Event, refunding all money beta players had spent on the loot boxes, and adding the event-exclusive cards back into the pool of cards that players can earn for free. What remains at launch is a game that is actually mostly monetized around selling premium cosmetics and is very friendly and accessible to players who don’t spend any money, but it’s wrapped in a complicated economy built for the much grubbier monetization scheme the game almost had.
A lot of its features aren’t intuitive, and there’s a lot of stuff going on, but it’s not that hard to understand. Let’s get into it.
Three Progression Tracks
In this game, you have three progression tracks. The first is the Ranked Ladder. This is the competitive mode where you attempt to use your decks to beat other players to climb through 100 levels and achieve the top rank, Infinite. When you win a game, you move up a little bit, and when you lose a game, you move down a little bit, so climbing means you need to win quite a bit more than you lose, and you need to win bigger and lose smaller using the Snap and Retreat mechanics to bet big on the games you think you’re winning and cut your losses on the games you think you’re losing (If people want more Marvel Snap content from me I might write more about this in the future).
Every ten ranks, you get a prize, which is mostly currency. At rank 70, you get a random cosmetic Variant for one of your cards, and at Infinite rank, you get a unique cosmetic card back for your deck. Second Dinner has not released statistics on how many people achieve the top rank, but it is likely fewer than 1%.
The second progression pass is the Season Pass, which runs concurrently with the Ranked Ladder. If you pay $9.99 for the premium version of the Season Pass, you get a new card that is exclusive to the Pass, and several cosmetic variants and player avatars related to the pass’s monthly theme. If you don’t buy the pass, the exclusive card will become available from the Collection Level track two months after Season Pass purchasers get it. The free version of the Season Pass mostly awards some extra currency.
You progress the Season Pass by earning experience for it. You get a little bit of experience for each game you play, and you also get experience as a reward for each daily mission you complete and for your Weekly Challenge. Additionally, you get a bunch of special Season Pass missions that only award season pass experience.
After you earn 50 tiers of the Season Pass, you will get all of the pass specific rewards, and every subsequent level awards you a Season Cache loot box, which will contain a small amount of extra currency or, once every 20 boxes, a cosmetic Variant for one of your cards.
The most important progression track is the Collection Level. This is a meter that increases when you upgrade your cards, and it is the mechanism by which you unlock new cards.
The cards in Marvel Snap are divided into three “pools.” When you are awarded a new card, it is chosen at random, but you have to get all the cards from Pool 1 before you start getting cards from Pool 2, and you have to get all the cards from Pool 2 before you start getting cards from Pool 3.
You will obtain the final card in Pool 1 at Collection Level 214 and the final card in Pool 2 at Collection Level 474. Most players will reach this level within a couple of weeks.
Once you get past Collection level 500, instead of getting cards every few levels, you start getting caches — loot boxes which may contain cards, but may also just contain small amounts of currency, which stretches out the process of completing the collection. From Collection Level 500 to 1000, you get “Collector’s Caches,” which have a 50% chance of containing a card, and after 1000, you get “Collectors’ Reserves” which only have a 25% chance of containing a card, but can contain cosmetic items in addition to currencies.
Three Kinds of Currency
There are three main currencies in Marvel SNAP.
The first currency is Credits. Credits are used to upgrade your cards’ cosmetic appearance, and every time you upgrade a card, you advance along the Collection Level progression track, which awards you new cards. Credits are gated by the passage of time. Every 24 hours, you can get 50 free Credits by opening your shop tab and scrolling past the goodies the game is trying to sell you, and every eight hours, you get two missions; an easy one worth 50 credits and a harder one worth 100 credits. Missions also award some experience to help you progress along the Season Pass progression track.
Missions aren’t too difficult to complete; they just require you to draw a few cards, play cards with certain energy costs, or, at most, win a couple of games. But you get six per day, and if you don’t clear them, you don’t get new ones, so you have to log in daily and keep your mission log clear to earn the maximum amount of Credits. If you complete your six daily missions and get the free 50 Credits in the shop, that gives you 500 credits each day. Additionally, you get a Weekly Challenge that awards you currency for every five missions you complete, five times each week. This gives you 1250 additional Credits per week. You can also earn credits along the Ranked Ladder and Season Pass progression tracks.
The main thing to understand about Credits is that they’re the limiting factor in how much you can progress along the Collection Level progression track each day. Whether you log in for fifteen minutes to clear your quest log or you play for six hours, you get 500 Credits for the day. So this currency is the reason we talk about how many weeks or months it takes to acquire a complete collection instead of how many hours you have to play.
The second currency is Boosters. Boosters are actually hundreds of different currencies, because there is a unique Booster currency for each card. Every game you play, you will receive one character specific Booster for a card in your deck for each turn you played. You will also receive random Boosters for characters in your collection as you progress along the Collection Level and Season Pass progression tracks.
There is no limit on the amount of Boosters you can earn; you’ll get 4 to 6 Boosters for every single game you play with no cap, so Boosters should never be a limiting factor on your progression. It is possible that if you’re only playing enough to complete the missions each day, you’ll have a bunch of Credits and not enough Boosters to upgrade anything, but you can always correct this by playing a few more games. If you push on the Ranked Ladder at all, you will likely accumulate a large surplus of Boosters.
The third currency is Gold. Gold is pretty straightforward — it is a premium currency you can buy with money. You can buy it in different amounts and, as is typical with premium currencies in free-to-play games, you get more if you buy it in larger bundles. You get 300 gold for $5, and you get 8000 gold for $100, so you get significantly more currency if you buy the big bundle.
Mostly, the way you get gold is by buying it, but you can get small amounts of gold from means other than buying it directly for cash. You get 200 gold per week if you complete the full Weekly Challenge, which lets you get a free Variant about once a month. You will occasionally find small amounts of Gold in the caches you earn at the higher tiers of the Collection Level progression track, and you can also get some from the Season Pass. If you advance to rank 90 on the Ranked Ladder progression track, you get 500 gold.
Gold has two purposes. The first is buying Variants, which are cosmetic skins for your cards — different artwork. Each card has about five different cosmetics. Some of these look cool, but they cost a lot of money: 700 gold, or around $10, for “rare” variants and 1200 or $17 for “super rare.” You are offered a selection of six variants for cards in your collection that you can purchase each day, and the pressure is on, because if you don’t buy the daily offer, it will disappear, and that variant might not cycle back through your shop for months. If you’re satisfied with the base card art, just don’t worry about these, but if you care about collecting Variants, they can wind up costing you a lot of money.
The other thing you can do with gold is buy Credits. You get can get 150 Credits for 120 Gold, or 500 Credits for 400 gold. You can also pay 120 Gold to get two extra Missions, which is the same as buying Credits, except that the missions also give you some Season Pass experience and let you complete your Weekly Challenge if you have fallen behind on it.
500 Credits is the amount you can earn in one day, so you buy credits with gold, you’re paying about $5 to gain one day’s worth of progress on the Collection Level track. If you’re impatient to get another card it can feel really tempting, but this rabbit hole can get very expensive.
Upgrading Cards and Progressing Your Collection
Upgrading your cards improves their cosmetic appearance, and moves you along the Collection Level progression track which awards you with new cards. The upgrades themselves only change the cosmetic appearance of a card; a base common version card functions the same way as a foil-upgraded Infinity version card with particle effects.
Every card starts at the Common rarity level with a white border. For 25 Credits and five of the character-specific Booster, you can upgrade this to Uncommon, which breaks the character art out of the card frame. This gains you one Collection Level. For an additional hundred credits and 10 Boosters, you can upgrade the card to Rare, which gives it a 3D effect, and gain two Collection Levels. For 200 Credits and 20 Boosters, you can upgrade the card to Epic, which gives it an animated effect, and gains 4 Collection Levels. For 300 more Credits and 30 more Boosters, you can upgrade the card to Legendary, which gives it a shiny logo and gives you six Collection Levels. An additional 400 Credits and 40 Boosters makes the card Legendary, which gives it a shiny border and gives you 8 Collection Levels. The final upgrade costs 500 Credits and 50 Boosters and gives you 10 Collection Levels.
Fully upgrading a card allows you to perform an “Infinite Split,” which gives you a new common version of the card with a special effect like a rainbow foil background. You can start the entire process of upgrading the new version again, and collect up to 16 permutations for each card and variant. I’m embedding a video from YouTube creator Jeff Hoogland, which shows you all the possible Infinite Splits, since he was in the beta and has a lot more of them than I do.
Upgrading cards makes them look cooler, but the main thing you’re doing by upgrading cards is progressing the Collection Level. And one thing many people are wondering is how long it takes to get all the cards, and how spending money affects that process. That means it’s time to do math!
Upgrading cards awards you one Collection Level for every 50 credits you spend. The very first level for each card is half price — 25 credits for a level, which we’re going to ignore for purposes of our calculation of how long the process takes, but it may be a significant enough difference to shave a couple of days off the total time it takes to get everything.
For simplicity’s sake, we’re going to start at the start of Pool 3, at tier 500 of the Collection Level track. At this point, you’ve gotten 2 cards in Pool 3, and will now be getting caches instead of a guaranteed random card every dozen or so levels. From Tier 500 to Tier 750, you get a cache every 8 levels, and afterwards, you get a loot box every 12 levels. That means there are a total of 51 Collector’s Caches which contain a card half the time between levels 500 and 1000, out of which you should expect to get 25 cards. After that, you get Collector’s Reserves boxes every 12 levels, and they contain a card every four boxes. You get 83 boxes per 1000 Tiers, which will result in about 21 cards per thousand tiers, so you should have everything by around Tier 3300.
Every day, you get 500 Credits from your missions and your 50 Credit freebie, for a total of 3500 per week, and you get an additional 1250 from the weekly challenge. These credits earn you 95 Tiers per week. Just these credits alone would earn you 1000 Tiers in 10.5 weeks.
But you also get 50 credits every 12 levels after Tier 750 (before that, you get extra credits slightly less often because you get the boxes more often). This doesn’t feel like a lot, but it actually gets you 83 tiers for every 1000, which means you can now complete 1000 tiers in 9.6 weeks.
Except that there are also sometimes credits in the boxes. The 51 Collector’s Caches you get between Tier 500 and Tier 1000 have a 15% chance to contain 150 credits, which will get you about 1150 credits on average, and a 5% chance to contain 300 credits. Call the average out of these boxes 1900 credits and reduce the total grind by about four days.
The Collector’s Reserve boxes that you get after tier 1000 have a 15% chance to contain 200 credits and a 5% chance to contain 400. That means out of the 83 boxes you earn each thousand tiers, you’ll get an average of 12-13 200 credit boxes — call it 2500 credits — and you’ll get the 400 credit box about 4 times, for 1600 more. That means you only need about 41,850 Credits to earn 1000 tiers, which will take about 8.8 weeks.
All in all, without spending any money, but diligently keeping up with every daily task, you will collect every card in Marvel Snap in about 7 months. If you buy the $10 monthly Season Pass every month, that comes with 2600 extra credits, which reduces the total grind by about three weeks. The monthly Ranked Ladder awards 1350 Credits, if you reach rank 80, so if you are a pretty dedicated ladder grinder, you can shorten the process by a further week and a half.
All free-to-play games, and really most online or live service games push for you to engage with them daily in order to progress, so what it really comes down to is whether you want to play Marvel Snap for fifteen or twenty minutes every day for the foreseeable future to get the little dopamine hit of winning the games and opening the prize boxes.
Compared to other games that let daily rewards stack up for a couple of days before you’re punished for failing to attend to them, Marvel Snap really wants to force you to play every day, but the tasks aren’t hard to finish. You’re unlikely to have a long play session where you fail to achieve the quest conditions, even for the harder ones like winning games after snapping or winning lanes with only one card. This is a pretty chill game, unless you want the exclusive card back for reaching the Infinite tier on the ladder, in which case this is a nail-biting, super-sweaty game. But that’s a subject for a different post.
In case you’re wondering how spending money affects this process: If you were to buy three 500 Credit bundles for 400 Gold or $5 each every day, you’d get an additional 10500 credits per week and you could earn 1000 Tiers of your Collection level in 2.7 weeks and get the whole collection in 8 weeks. This would cost you $840.
My take is: If you like the game and want to support Second Dinner, maybe buy some variants or something, but don’t do that.
A Final Note: The Thing You Should Never Buy
One thing in the store tab that I haven’t discussed previously is the option to pay Credits to immediately upgrade some cards without using Boosters.
This option is basically just buying Boosters with Credits.
Never buy this. Credits have a hard daily limit to the number you can earn, and you can get as many Boosters as you want by just playing more games. Every time you click this button, it increases the amount of time you will have to play before you complete your collection. It is a bad deal.
The steel-man case for the existence of this feature is that you can sometimes complete the six daily tasks in fewer games than it takes to earn the 50 Boosters you need to spend 500 Credits, and very casual players will accrue excess credits and not have the Boosters to spend them, and therefore it makes sense to buy Boosters. All I can tell you is that the timeline for completing your collection gets a little longer every time you pay a premium in Credits on extra levels to save yourself Boosters.
And that’s it: That’s the basics of the Marvel Snap economy.