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The March 12, 2024 patch update introduced the Custom Card feature to Marvel Snap. This is one of the first features from the latest Development Roadmap to go live. We’ll be looking at what it does, how it works, and some of the ways it will be improved later.
- April 3, 2025: Added the Character Mastery section and the guide has been updated.
What’s A Custom Card?
Largely, it’s what it sounds like. It lets you adjust the cosmetics on your cards. It’s quite limited in its current interaction, essentially just letting you change the border on your cards. In fact, the patch notes wisely described the feature as “Custom Border”.
It’ll be easiest to just demonstrate how it works. I’ve got a great example in Black Swan. I like my Black Swan exactly how she is. The base art is great, and I like that the red border matches her environment, eyes, and name.
When I look at my list of variants, there’s the new “Custom Card” slot, as well as the variant from hitting level 50 in last month’s Season Pass. Every character has a “Custom Card” slot now. You’ll notice mine for Black Swan is locked. I can unlock it by fully upgrading any Black Swan variant. I’ll do that right now.
A booming voice announces, “INFINITY!” and… uh, it’s still locked, despite the in-game message. Turns out, you actually need to split a card. Hang on…
There it is! Fully unlocked. Let’s look at what you can do with the Custom Card.
Customizing a Card
When you’re looking at a custom card, the upgrade button in the lower right is replaced by an edit button. We’re gonna hit that and see what we can do!
We get tabs to pick a variant, a border, and a combination of finish and flare. I can bring her right back to the red Ultra border I prefer for her.
You can use Custom Card to display any of your existing splits and variants with any border. For example, I could give an Infinity border to either the In-Hyuk Lee variant, or my brand-new prism split. Since I’m not actually upgrading these cards, it doesn’t cost any Credits or Boosters.
It’s worth noting that custom cards always are shown with the full effects of Legendary rarity. That is, frame break, 3D, animated, and shiny logo. You can see the frame break and shiny logo on this custom card despite its gray border. You’ll have to trust me that it’s 3D and animated, too. This looks killer with ink finishes!
The Limitations of Custom Effects
You can only choose a combination of finish and flare that you have already unlocked for the variant you’ve selected. I’ll be using Valkyrie instead of Black Swan in this section. I have a lot more Valkyrie splits, so that’s helpful here.
The Peach Momoko variant at the end (featuring the pegasus, Aragorn) has a single split. If I try to use that variant with Custom Card, I only have two options for finish and flare: none with none, or gold with gold glimmer.
By comparison, I have tons more options for my (clearly) beloved Pixel Valkyrie.
As you can see, finishes and flares are tied to specific variants. They’re also a package deal — you can only use the combinations you’ve unlocked by splitting. You can’t mix and match. For instance, I can’t use rainbow Krackle with any other finish. I’ve only unlocked it for use with the prism finish.
The Future of Custom Card
Though it’s launched as “Custom Border”, Custom Card is a feature that will expand over time. Here are some of the features we know are coming. This information comes primarily from answers by Stephen Jarrett on the official Marvel Snap Discord server.
- More split types. We know some new split types will be tied to the upcoming Character Mastery feature. Stephen also said that one future surface effect would essentially be “none”, so that you could use flare without affecting a card’s background.
- Collectible borders. These will be a new cosmetic type that you can acquire then apply to a character to unlock that border for that character’s Custom Card. I expect you’ll be able to choose which character you apply it to. I’m personally hoping for one that’s slick and black (how good would that look with ink splits?!), and another that’s cute and pink.
- Unlock combinations at the character level. It’s only for now that finish and flare combinations are tied to specific variants. In the future, they will be tied to characters instead. Like, I could immediately apply all my pixel Valkyrie combinations to my unsplit Artgerm Valkyrie. I’m thrilled by this, and think it’s an excellent compromise (versus full mix-and-match with finishes and flares).
Why not full mix-and-match? I know people can be cynical of official answers, but I think Stephen’s is spot-on. Splits would be so much less meaningful if you could just unlock 4 finishes and 32 flares to make any combination.
Using Your Custom Card
Make sure to hit the star on your custom card to swap it into your decks!
If you’re not aware, the specific copy of a card you’re using in your deck can affect its chance of getting Boosters after a match. The short version is: if you don’t have enough Boosters to upgrade that specific copy, it has a higher chance to get Boosters. Infinity borders also get this bonus, until you have 50 Boosters. The long version is in my Ultimate Guide to Boosters.
It’s my best guess that custom cards work just like Infinity borders. You get the extra Booster chance until you have 50 Boosters. There are several hints that this might be the case, but we won’t know for sure until we get an official answer, or somebody tests it and collects a significant sample size.
The hints:
- Custom cards have all the visual effects of a fully upgraded card
- Custom cards are sorted with your Infinity-border cards when you sort your collection by Quality
- Tokens generated by custom cards (like Korg’s rock or Mister Sinister’s clone) appear to have Infinity borders when you tap to examine them
Custom Cards and Character Mastery
The addition of Character Mastery brought a whole host of new finishes and flares that your splits can have (more on that here). So far, all of the future features, including more split types, collectible borders, and character-wide combinations, have made it into the game. So what do Custom Cards look like today?
With 25+ finishes, 40+ flares, and more Borders added every day, there are a staggering number of combinations your cards can have. The editing menu has been updated as well, so let’s dive into how it works!
The first thing you’re greeted with when editing your custom card is that character’s border shop. This shop contains the same six borders for every character, but buying them here only unlocks that border for that specific character. You’ll get six new borders every 8 hours, so check back later if nothing catches your eye.
You might have noticed there are three different prices for some borders: 400 gold, 750 gold, and 1000 Collector’s Tokens. These prices correspond to the rarity of the border, which is similar to variant rarity (Rare, Super Rare, Ultimate, etc.). The April 2025 patch introduced Mystery Borders and Premium Mystery Borders as well, so we can expect even more borders to become available in this shop.
The next section allows you to choose the variant you would like to display. All of your finish and flare combinations can be applied to any of these variants so feel free to pick your favorite! Any more variants you unlock will show up here too, which makes it easy to swap yours out when you find something cooler.
After you choose your variant, you’ll have the opportunity to apply a custom border to it. Your custom card will have all the effects granted to cards of Legendary rarity (just like before), regardless of which border you choose. All the borders you unlock outside of a specific character’s shop, like from the season pass, alliance rewards, events, albums, and even the regular shop, will appear here for all your characters. However, once you choose to unlock a border for a character here, it will only be available for this character. The basic borders (Common, Uncommon, Rare, Epic, Legendary, Ultra, and Infinity) will always be available for every character.
The last thing you can choose for your custom card is, of course, its finish and flare. Once you unlock a finish/flare combination, you’ll have three options: use both the finish and flare together, or use either the finish or the flare. Any flare you unlock will be available to apply to the base art of the variant you chose. Similarly, any finish you unlock can be applied without flare to the background of your variant. Unfortunately, the only way you can apply a specific finish/flare combination is to have a split with that combination for your character. You can only get each finish/flare combination once per character, but finding additional flares with the same finish gives you the opportunity to personalize your custom card a little more.
For example, say I got a Nebula split with the Ink finish and purple tone flare. I’m not particularly happy with that one, so I split my Nebula again and get the Ink finish with red stardust flare. Now I can choose to customize my Nebula with the Ink finish and either the purple tone flare or the red stardust flare. Or, if I don’t like either flare, I can display the Ink finish without any flares (I could also display the red stardust flare with no finish, but that’s less fun).
Custom cards are sure to continue improving with updates to Character Mastery and new ways to add a personal touch to your favorite characters. Check back here for the latest information!
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