We’re trying something a bit different this week. We asked five game critics for a piece on a mobile game they play regularly, but never get to actually write about.
Our final piece is from legendary games writer and author Christian Donlan:
Every now and then I find myself wondering about my Desert Island Games list, and if Marvel Snap would be in it. I’m increasingly certain that it would be. Marvel Snap’s a collectible card game made by some of the developers behind that other collectible card game Hearthstone. I loved Hearthstone for a bit, but I eventually felt left behind by the meta. I’d join a game and wouldn’t have much of an idea of what was going on.
Marvel Snap, however, is something I’ve stuck with pretty much since the launch. I don’t know if I’m good at it. I suspect I’m actually pretty bad at it. And yet it’s the first thing I fire up on my phone every morning. Sometimes, it’s the last thing I see before I put my phone down at night.
And this is weird. It’s weird for two reasons. The first is that I’ve always suspected I’m a bit too thick for CCGs. I like collecting things and unlocking things, but the part of my brain I need to plan combos and think about synergies isn’t really there when I call on it. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a magician handle a deck of cards and briefly transform them into a living thing as they spring around and snap from one delicate hand to the next? And then you hold the deck yourself and it’s just: who killed this thing? The whole deck’s suddenly shockingly inert? It’s the same situation for me with combos. Other players can use them. But when I get my opening deal, I’m in plodder mode. I can play one card and then another, but the relationships between cards do not easily speak to me.
The second reason is a lot simpler: I don’t know very much about Marvel. So the rich tradition and storied lore that Marvel Snap builds on is largely missing for me. I had to look up Mysterio to see why his card conjures illusions. I had never heard of Agatha Harkness – my favourite card in the deck but I’d need 3000 words and a white board to explain why – before she became a staple of my starting hand. (A clever friend once leant me the Matt Fraction and David Aja run of Hawkeye, and I thought it was luminously good, but I don’t play Hawkeye in my deck in Marvel Snap, not even out of solidarity, so it doesn’t help much in terms of orientation.)
Here is the thing, though. None of those reasons for not clicking with Marvel Snap really matter. I have clicked. And I continue to click. And I think the reason is actually pretty simple. Beyond being colourful and fun and lively, beyond having short matches and decks of just 12 cards, so that even I have the brain space to put something interesting together, Marvel Snap gets at something deeper, richer and also simpler. It reminds me of how much fun game design must be. To play Marvel Snap is to feel a bit like a game designer yourself.
And this in turn is because of the cards – those beautiful, intriguing, playful cards. Marvel Snap tasks you and a rival with playing cards across three locations, with the mana rising each turn, which means that you can play increasingly powerful cards as the game progresses. If you win two of the three locations by the end of the sixth round, you win the match. So the agenda is both extremely simple and has a decent amount of leeway to it. You can really biff one location – reader, I often do – and still scrape by on the others and win. There’s a bit of gamesmanship to it as well because of those three locations. It’s not just about guessing what your opponent is going to play, but where.
All fine. But if it wasn’t for the cards, none of this would be worth talking about. And the cards properly sing. Like a lot of CCGs, Marvel snap has decent straight-ahead attack cards, and it has cards that do cool things like give you more mana, that boost other cards in interesting ways, and that change up locations and location powers and maybe even grant players a seventh round. All fine. But then it has the cards that do things where you read the text and go: huh. How is that going to work? What does that even do?!
To keep this brief I will give you just two short examples. Or perhaps it’s one example that isn’t so short.
Captain Marvel (no idea, I’m aware there was a movie) is a decent power card, but her big trick is that at the end of the game, if she can move to a location that wins the game for you she will. I love this. I don’t even have to be semi-competent and if I’m playing the Captain, maybe I’ll sneak a win. But then there’s this other card, Martyr (really no idea about this one, and I’m pretty sure there hasn’t been a movie) who is low cost but high power, and at the end of the game if you’re winning, she can move to a location that will lose you the game.
The gamble, obviously, is that you’re getting a lot of power for a little cost with Martyr, and you just have to hope that she doesn’t erupt at the end and ruin everything. But for me, when I saw Martyr, who can’t wait to lose things for you, and I was already used to playing Captain Marvel, who does the absolute opposite, I started thinking: what happens if you play them both together? At the end of the game one is zinging off to win, and the other is zinging off to lose. How does the game cope with that? Does your phone just suddenly explode?
What happens is…well, I won’t spoil it. And it doesn’t actually matter what happens. What matters is that the game pushed me towards thinking of some truly braintwisting possible mechanics just because the design was so outré I had to dig into it. For a few days, while I was really experimenting with Martyr and Captain Marvel, I felt like I was a designer. I felt like I was painting with cards and numbers and abilities.
This is exactly what keeps me playing. It keeps me experimenting with the cards I know and longing for the cards I don’t have yet. I’ve spent a fair amount of money on Snap over the years – only through the Battle Pass equivalent, because it’s less like spending money and more like making a donation in order to get a bunch of Christmas presents – and it’s partly because I like to earn certain cards a little quicker, but mainly because I feel like the core, free game is generous and playful and makes me think so much, so I want to chuck the developers some money for that. This is probably the best case scenario for a free-to-play game if you ask me. You pay now and then because you want to say thank you to these people who have given you so much joy.
That’s it, I think. Really I’m playing – and paying – because in between the playing of one card and another I get these fleeting glimpses of really smart designers who really love their work, and love pushing card design past the point where most other teams would leave it. Cards that spring to life and try to lose you the game! Cards that play your entire game for you (Agatha H, until she was nerfed). Cards that literally don’t make sense to me because I can’t even imagine how someone would make a deck around them.
Marvel Snap is my favourite Forever Game – I don’t have a better term – for exactly the same reason that I always read the patch notes for it, and I don’t think I’ve ever properly read patch notes for anything before now.
Suddenly, though, I want to know about the balance changes. I want to know about the thinking that goes into cards, and how the developer sees the meta and how it nurses the meta and keeps it alive, like some kind of cosmic monster that it has conjured late at night through a process of complex enchantments.
So yes, I guess Marvel Snap belongs in my Desert Island Games list. And I don’t regret a single penny I’ve chucked in its direction.
