malvasia bianca

I don’t have a lot to say about Marvel Snap. It’s well done; it’s got an honest monetization strategy, where money gives you cosmetic stuff and unlocks the possibility to earn some cards in the current season. (And that earning is done in a deterministic way, it’s not a random draw.) Or at least that’s the way the monetization strategy worked when I was playing it; with games like that, you can never tell how it will change!

You build a deck to play with (like Magic or Netrunner or Hearthstone), but in Marvel Snap, the deck is only 12 cards, and a game (usually) only lasts 7 rounds and takes maybe five minutes; I appreciate how nice and tight that is. So you build your deck around one or two synergies; and then the randomness in the play comes from drawing, from your opponent, and from the environment.

And it’s fun? I played for a while, coming up with a couple of decks with synergies that I wanted to play with. And there were clearly more synergies available: I couldn’t build a deck that did anything great with destroying cards, but I’m pretty sure that, as I unlocked more cards, a deck built around that would be playable. (And I appreciated the game nudging me to try that out through its challenge system.)

I didn’t keep going, though it’s not hard to imagine an alternate world where I did. I don’t care about the theming (I didn’t mind it, it just didn’t do anything for me), and I didn’t dig deep enough to find combos that really surprised / pleased me, or to feel like I had a great sense of how to respond to randomness. And, if I wanted to go deeper, I’d probably want to spend money to get the paid cards for each season; the amount of money that a season past cost seemed fair (I’ve certainly spent enough money on Netrunner cards), but I wasn’t enjoying the game enough to want to go deeper. Still, the time I spent with it was pleasant enough.