I’ve played Marvel Snap almost every day since May 2022, essentially making it a daily hobby for myself. But the disastrous launch of Deadpool’s Diner almost made me quit the comics-based collectible card game (CCG) last month.
My hobby started to feel more like work. Excitement for the first new mode to hit the game in over a year transformed into dread when it asked me to spend real money or wait over an hour after losing my first game and all of my mode-specific currency along with it. While Second Dinner eventually fixed Deadpool’s Diner to make it more newcomer-friendly, playing this high-stakes mode to get Cassandra Nova burnt me out because it did something Marvel Snap never had before: it made losing not fun.
I considered quitting a game that had become a core part of my daily routine. Thankfully, before I could do that, a new feature arrived and saved Marvel Snap for me. That feature is Alliances, Marvel Snap‘s take on a clan system that finally added a stronger in-game social element to the CCG. Speaking to developers from Second Dinner about the creation of this mode, I came to understand that Alliances were tailor-made to appeal to players like me, who just needed the encouragement to break out of the grind and not feel burnt out.
Marvel Snap design director Kent-Erik Hagman told Digital Trends in a roundtable Q&A that the overarching goal for Alliances was to “do something new that hasn’t been done in CCGs, and that is really bring a big, strong social system.” In practice, it does just that. Up to 30 players can join a clan and then work together to accrue points from earning cubes in Marvel Snap matches and completing Bounties. Those can range from moving or discarding a certain number of cards to winning matches with specific card combos. Along the way, Alliance members can chat with a new in-game function, see each other’s 8-cube wins, and enjoy a big payout of rewards every Tuesday if they earn enough points from Bounties.
It’s a fairly simple system, but smartly designed in ways that got its hooks into me and prevented burnout. First off, it fits right into Marvel Snap aesthetically and mechanically, not rocking the boat too much in the way that Deadpool’s Diner did. Lead UI designer CJ Robinson tells Digital Trends that the original ideas for Alliances were a bit more esoteric: transporting players to an alleyway or spaceship. “While we loved those, it just wasn’t Snap,” Robinson says, adding that Second Dinner instead needed to focus on “what was the most fun and usable out of everything we worked on.”
Mechanically, Alliances encourages players to play the preexisting modes of Marvel Snap, just from a different angle. Many of its first-week bounties focused on archetypes that aren’t that “meta” at the moment, such as Move or Discard. While I hadn’t played either in quite a bit, Alliances got me to pick up and enjoy those decks, which were some of the first I fell in love with in Marvel Snap. Revisiting these decks added more variation to how I played the game and made me not feel guilty about it. I didn’t care about losing and instead focused on having fun, which is the exact opposite of the feeling I got while playing Deadpool’s Diner.
If I had to pinpoint a specific feeling that stopped me from quitting Marvel Snap altogether, it was that Alliances made playing feel more like a fun hobby than an excruciating treadmill to stay meta-relevant. This is why I was relieved that this was the exact kind of gameplay encouragement that Second Dinner wanted Alliances to give players.
“What I’ve found is that players just want an excuse to play a deck that they know is suboptimal. They need the game to tell them, ‘No, it’s okay.’” Hagman says. “You can play that Move deck, even though your win rate might take a 3% hit. If the game gives you an excuse, like giving you all these Bounty points for slamming Heimdall into your deck, you can finally blow the dust off that Heimdall deck. The game gives you an excuse to play the deck you want to play, and now you feel like you’re doing the right thing and starting to have fun again.”
The mishap of Deadpool Diner’s launch and some other recent controversies left me feeling in the dumps about Marvel Snap, a game I still think is genuinely fantastic at its core. While the Deadpool’s Diner’s grind could feel like a second job, Alliances just felt like an added bonus that encouraged experimentation during play. It can be ignored if you don’t care about its booster and credit rewards, which makes it feel like another part of my hobby I can engage with whenever I like rather than a checklist item I need to complete.
“We were looking to build a social feature, not a job, and I think we succeeded in doing that,” Robinson says, and I couldn’t agree with that sentiment more. Marvel Snap is starting to feel like a hobby to me again.
Marvel Snap is available now on PC, iOS, and Android.
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