January introduced the biggest change to the Marvel Snap economy since the introduction of Spotlights. The simultaneous release of Skaar and Caiera gave that season an extra card — five weeks, six cards. February and March each featured an extra card, too.

Also today, the simultaneous release of an extra article. Fitting, right? That companion article contains my interview with Stephen Jarrett, Senior Director of Product & Strategy at Second Dinner. It is focused on the team’s thoughts surrounding card acquisition, but we talked about a bunch of other stuff, too. Make sure you check it out after you finish this one!

Marvel Snap Economy (pt. 2): An Interview with SD’s Stephen Jarrett

One extra card each season may not seem like such a big deal, but it is! Today, an in-depth review of not one, but four recent changes to card acquisition. Changes that I think are being underestimated in how those extra cards affect card acquisition. We’ll also be digging into a few other recent economy changes.

About this Article

Card acquisition affects every one of us, so I want this article to be accessible. Putting it together has taken so many more hours (and weeks 😬) than I expected; it’s proved challenging to hit a sweet spot that’s informative without being overwhelming.

The article’s based on lots of math using my model of the game economy. My model is pretty damn good, but it isn’t the point of this article. So: I’ll be glazing over many details to focus on the impact of the changing economy.

If you want to talk details, hit me up on Twitter/𝕏 or through Marvel Snap Zone’s Discord server.

The Ever-Changing Economy

The Snap economy is changing all the time. That’s to be expected! It’s a live service game, and it’s young. Second Dinner is constantly evaluating how to best monetize it so that development can be funded for years to come. It’s no different in 2024 — I’ll be covering four recent changes to the Marvel Snap economy. All four have a significant effect on card acquisition!

1. An extra card released each season
2. The return and reduction of Series Drops
3. The reduction of cards released directly to Series 4
4. The introduction of the Gold Pass

That list probably isn’t comprehensive. There are small adjustments that can be hard to detect, quantify, or predict. Things like… adjusting the average value of bundles, or giving away free resources during special events. I’ve seen concerns about Gold bundles being scaled back. I think it’s too soon to be sure about that being a long-term trend. The early 2024 Gold bundles look a lot like the early 2023 Gold bundles did.

We’ll get into the good stuff ASAP, but let’s start with some concepts of card acquisition. This’ll be review for some of you.

Rubber-Banding

The Spotlight-based card acquisition system has fairly strong rubber-banding. Meaning that it pulls you to a certain percentage of card ownership. On top of that, it pulls harder the further you are from that percentage. Rubber-banding is great for catching up! The downside is that cards get more expensive as your collection gets more complete. That doesn’t mean it’s bad per se — the details matter an awful lot.

For instance, what percentage are you being pulled to? Well, everybody is pulled to 100% for Series 1, 2, and 3. It may take a while to complete Series 3, but it’s easy to stay at 100% once you get there. It’s a different story for Series 4 and 5, so we’ll focus on those going forward.

Your percentage is determined by three things:

1. Money
2. Strategy
3. Luck

The Gravity Chart

Back when the Spotlight system was introduced, Equinox reached out to me to collaborate on a chart she’d invented. The gravity chart is a tool that visualizes rubber-banding. It makes it simple to compare strategies and see the impact of something like buying the Season Pass. Importantly, it helps us find the percentage that a given strategy will be pulled towards. We call this the “gravity percentage”, because it is where you are pulled towards. Get it?

To start with, we’ll only be charting the effect of the first two factors: money and strategy. We’ll assume average luck. We expect most players to have near-average luck over time anyway. I’ll talk about extremes in luck further on.

You may be familiar with the gravity chart. I’ve posted versions of it on Twitter, and it was also featured in our Ultimate Guide to Spotlight Caches.

The Ultimate Guide to Spotlight Caches

Don’t worry if you’re not. I will explain it for anybody who’s interested. While I highly recommend understanding the gravity chart, it is ultimately optional for today’s discussion.

Here’s a little Choose Your Own Adventure for you, then:

• If you’d like to learn how to use the gravity chart, read on!
• If you already know how, go to the heading The Full Chart.
• If you want to skip past the charts, go to the heading The Impact of Each Change.

How to Read the Chart

I know the chart is intimidating at first. Trust me! I was intimidated myself when Equinox introduced me to her version (and then she patiently explained it to me).

The chart covers three seasons of Marvel Snap. Why three? Because every three seasons is 13 weeks long: two four-week seasons and one five-week season.

The fact that the system pulls you to a percentage of ownership makes this chart very flexible. It isn’t affected by how big Series 4 and 5 get. It would yield the same results if it covered any multiple of three seasons (e.g., one year).

The blue lines on the chart represent specific spending and card acquisition strategies. Dotted lines are free-to-play (F2P). Solid lines buy the Premium Season Pass (SP) each month. Lines with a shared color use the same card acquisition strategy. Both our blue lines represent the current economy, converting your Gold to Credits via mission refill, and a strategic use of Spotlight Keys.

The Gravity Line

The dashed line in Snap Zone purple is our “gravity line”. It’s a line that represents maintenance (sexy!). Basically, it represents the number of cards you need to acquire during the 13 weeks to end with the same percentage of ownership you started with. As an easy example, let’s say you start with 100% of Series 4 and 5 cards. Over the next 13 weeks, you’d need to acquire all 16 new releases to stay at 100%.

Here’s the cool part: pick a strategy (one of the blue lines) and find the percentage where it crosses the gravity line (purple). That’s the percentage of ownership that combination of spending and strategy will be pulled to. The F2P line crosses around 76%. The SP line crosses around 94%.

The Full Chart

Alright, time to take off the training wheels. We were using a simplified version of the chart. It had two strategy lines and one gravity line. The version below uses eight strategy lines and two gravity lines.

FYI, the blue strategy lines and purple gravity line are exactly the same as in the previous chart. The additional strategy lines represent other economies and strategies we’d like to compare. The new lilac gravity line is for a year with 52 new releases. The original purple gravity line is for a year with 64 new releases.

The 52-card year represents the previous release rate of only one card per week. We had exactly 52 cards added to Marvel Snap throughout 2023. The 64-card year represents the new release rate with an extra card each season. Assuming that’s a permanent change, there should be 64 cards added throughout 2024. That’s 52 weekly, plus 12 seasonal extras.

For practice, let’s look at the blue strategy lines again. The dotted blue one still crosses the purple gravity line around 76%, but crosses the lilac one around 86%. The solid blue strategy line still crosses the purple gravity line around 94%, but crosses the lilac one around 106%.

By the way, the downwards slant of the “New System” lines is because of rubber-banding. The smaller your collection is, the more cards you expect to acquire over 13 weeks. Notice that the lines for the “Old System” (in pink) are much flatter. The rubber-banding was much weaker in the pre-Spotlight economy.

About the Strategies

Here’s how to interpret the various factors listed in the chart’s legend:

• Old System: Based on the Token-based economy of mid May 2023
• New System: Based on the Spotlight-based economy of late February 2024
• F2P: Spending no money
• SP: Buying the Premium Season Pass each month (but spending no other money)
• Gold → Credits: Converting your Gold to Credits via mission refill
• Gold → Tokens: Converting your Gold to Tokens via Token Tuesday bundles
• Spotlight: Strategic: Optimized Spotlight Key usage (see below)
• Spotlight: Open ASAP: Spending Spotlight Keys as soon as they are earned

Here’s a breakdown of what Spotlight: Strategic means:

• Only spend Keys when you could spend four
• Target one featured card when you spend Keys
• Stop spending Keys when you get your target card
• Spend Tokens on Series 4 cards

The Impact of Each Change

Ah! Finally, we’ve arrived at the part where we talk about the impact of the recent changes to the economy.

Card Release Rate

First and foremost, an extra card every season. In case you skipped ahead, the faster release rate means 64 new cards per year instead of 52.

And there’s our first clue for how big of a difference it makes: adding 12 more cards each year represents a 23% increase in card releases. Or, for players who routinely buy the Season Pass, it represents 30% more cards to acquire with Spotlight Keys or Tokens.

23–30% sounds like a sizable chunk, but it’s much more meaningful to look at what those percentages actually translate to.

A Tale of Two Gravity Lines

Changing the card release rate means we need a new gravity line. There are now 16 new releases every three months instead of 13. That’s why the purple “64CY” gravity line is steeper than the lilac “52CY” one.

We’ll use the gravity chart to compare the best strategies shown for both the old and new economies. Note that there are better strategies which are not featured on the chart. I’ll get to those. They’re not included on the chart because they are unpredictable (spending Gold on bundles) or come with drawbacks (skipping some new releases to get them months later). Think of the ones on the chart as baseline or conservative.

Some abbreviations I will be using:

• 52-card year: 52CY
• 64-card year: 64CY
• Series 4 and 5: S4/5

Comparing Release Rates

We need several metrics to effectively compare different systems and strategies within the Snap economy.

First, Gravity Percentage. This is the percentage of S4/5 cards that a specific combination of strategy and system pulls you towards. In other words, it is the percentage of S4/5 ownership you can expect to maintain in the long run. We get it from looking at line intersections on the gravity chart.

Second, S4/5 Pool Size. This describes how many Series 4 and 5 cards exist at a time. In the old system, Series Drops happened at a set cadence. The pool only permanently grew with the release of a new “Big Bad” (a card that will never drop below Series 5). The last Big Bad, High Evolutionary, set the pool to 23 S4/5 cards. Currently, Series Drops are intermittent, and the pool of S4/5 cards will grow constantly. As of last week’s release of War Machine, there are 62 S4/5 cards.

Third, New Releases Quarterly. This represents how many new cards are released in a three-season (13-week) period: 13 in a 52-card year, 16 in a 64-card year.

The Impact of Card Release Rate

We simply multiply the Gravity Percentages by each of the other metrics. Multiplying by S4/5 Pool Size tells us how many of the S4/5 cards you will own. Multiplying by New Releases Quarterly tells us how many of those new releases you can expect to acquire each quarter. All of these describe the long term, when you’ve reached your Gravity Percentage (and will hover around it going forward).

Just like the charts, any tables I include are for reference. Reading through the table yourself is optional. I’ll highlight the most interesting points as we go. For a little visual distinction, columns concerning missing cards have red headers (with black text).

Notice that one Gravity Percentage is over 100%. Of course, you can’t get more than 100% of the cards. It’s still worth listing as 107.5%, though. Being further above 100% means being pulled up to 100% more strongly. In other words, there’s more room to have bad luck and suboptimal strategy without missing any cards.

Missing More S4/5 Cards…

Jumping from the lilac 52CY gravity line to the purple 64CY one lowers your Gravity Percentage. That means that when the pool of S4/5 cards is the same size, you’ll be missing more cards.

The table below uses the same data as the previous one. I’ve now placed 52CY and 64CY side by side to feature the differences.

Without any other changes, going to a 64-card year means:

• Free-to-play players will be missing 6.51 more S4/5 cards
• Season Pass buyers will be missing 2.48 more S4/5 cards

…But Also Acquiring More New Releases

At the same time, going to a 64-card year means more new releases. Obviously. We’ve covered that Gravity Percentage represents the percentage of S4/5 ownership you’ll maintain in the long run. Importantly, it also represents the percentage of new releases you can expect to acquire in the long run. That’s how maintenance works mathematically. If you start at 50% and acquire 50% of new releases, you end up at 50%.

Turns out, a drop in Gravity Percentage and a bump in New Releases Quarterly kind of balance each other out. The 64-card year means you’ll both miss more new releases and acquire more of them.

Once again, we’re using the same data, but with 52CY and 64CY side by side to highlight the differences.

Without any other changes, going to a 64-card year means, each quarter:

• Free-to-play players acquire 0.95 more S4/5 cards and miss 2.06 more
• Season Pass buyers acquire 2.36 more S4/5 cards and miss 0.64 more

Note that this quarterly impact is unaffected by S4/5 Pool Size. New cards will be released at the same rate regardless of how quickly cards drop to Series 3.

A Paradox of Acquisition

It may seem contradictory to both miss and acquire more cards. It’s an interesting effect that makes the increased release rate a clever change for Second Dinner.

How is it possible? Essentially, by letting the pool of S4/5 cards grow faster and bigger than ever before.

Crossing the Threshold: A Red Flag

The switch to the 64-card year is what inspired this article (and my interview with Stephen). See, Spotlights meant more cards for everybody — as long as the pool of S4/5 cards didn’t grow too large.

We’ve already covered that the 64-card year means both missing and acquiring more cards. I’m including this section to further highlight how big of a difference the 64-card year makes. Specifically, we’re talking about a threshold in how big the pool of S4/5 cards is. At what point do F2P players miss more cards than they did in the pre-Spotlight economy?

The old system pulled F2P to 65% ownership of the 23 S4/5 cards. That means they’d be missing about 8.05 of cards at any given time. The introduction of Spotlights pulled that 65% up to 87.5%, but with a growing pool of S4/5 cards. We can use algebra to calculate the threshold. It would have taken 65 S4/5 cards for the Spotlight system to mean F2P missed more cards than before.

In barges the 64-card year. The gravity percentage for F2P drops from 87.5% to 77%. Algebra again. It would take 35 S4/5 cards for the Spotlight system to mean F2P missed more cards than before.

In a 52-card year, we weren’t due to cross that threshold until the end of March. The 64-card year moved the threshold, and we were suddenly well beyond it.

Is the 64-Card Year Good or Bad?

Uh… it depends? The 64-card year means all of these numbers go up:

• Cards owned
• Cards missed
• New releases acquired
• New releases missed

Is it a good trade-off to get more cards if it also means you’ll be missing more cards? What’s more important: owning more cards or missing fewer cards?

“Owning more” means you have more game pieces to play with, and you get new ones more often.

“Missing fewer” means you’ll experience the disappointment of seeing a cool deck you can’t play less often.

I asked via Twitter poll. Of course, the quality of such a poll only goes so far. Among other problems, each choice has a max length of 25 characters. Players on Marvel Snap Twitter (like anybody reading this) are not representative of casual players. Still, this should provide a rough idea of how the more passionate players feel. Across 288 votes, only 30% thought owning more cards is a good trade-off regardless of how many more you’ll miss.

Personally, I love experimenting with cards. I enjoy variety. I want every game piece I can get my hands on.

Even so, I voted for the middle option. I think players can get away with missing some low amount of cards. Around 10–20, depending on how much variety they play. There are some cards that just aren’t very influential, like Martyr or Howard the Duck. There are also cards that are very archetype-specific, like Sebastian Shaw or Hercules. Those are easy to skip when their archetype is one you don’t play or enjoy much.

But on the flip side, there is some number of cards that is too many to be missing. At some point, you’re missing enough that it will hurt your ability to compete in the meta.

A Growing Problem

If we measure by the number of missing cards, the Snap economy is currently the worst it has ever been for F2P. When looking at the following table, remember that end-game players have 100% of Series 3 cards. The last column might as well read, “All Cards Missing”.

The number of missing cards grows with the pool of S4/5 cards. That number grows a lot slower for Season Pass buyers. F2P will miss 1 of every 4.35 cards in the pool. Season Pass buyers? 1 of every 25.00 cards.

Like most changes, there are pros and cons to the 64-card year. Ultimately, there is one giant factor that makes it easy for me to evaluate the 64-card year: it introduces the biggest gap between free and paying players that has ever existed in Snap.

That alone makes the 64-card year bad. I am a Season Pass buyer myself, but F2P players are critical to the health of the game. I don’t want them pushed away! Some people already accuse Snap of being pay-to-win. I don’t think we’re there yet, but that’ll be an increasingly hard position to defend as the gap grows. And the gap will grow. Every new addition to the pool of S4/5 cards widens the gap.

I’ll end this section with one last table. I’ve added numbers for if the pool of S4/5 cards reaches 100. Also, I’ve placed F2P and SP side by side to include the differences.

We’ve been talking about the growing pool of S4/5 cards. Let’s talk about how that pool shrinks!

Series Drops

In January, we got the long-anticipated first Series Drop since the introduction of Spotlights. At that time, five cards were dropped into Series 3. What does the future of Series Drops look like? Here’s what we know:

This first bit comes from a Discord channel for members of the official Creator Program. The conversation in these channels is typically protected by NDA. However, Stephen Jarrett (who I interviewed for the companion article) specifically gave permission to share this response. He said:

More recently (March 15th), he gave this answer in the public #team-answers channel:

It seems to me that his statement that they hope future Series Drops will be like January’s is specifically about it being “a big moment”. Will they also be similar in scale, with around five cards dropping to Series 3 each time? That matters an awful lot!

Drop Quantity

When Spotlights were announced, we were told they meant “more cards for more players”. Like, that’s a direct quote from the official announcement. They even used it in the title!

It’s ambiguous what “more cards” means. When I asked Stephen, he made it sound like it means “more new releases”. In that case, they never need to drop another card to S3 ever again. Giving out brand-new cards is a huge strength of the Spotlight system.

For visual distinction, the column showing Cards Dropped to S3 Quarterly has a blue header (with black text). See how S4/5 card acquisition is better in the new (Spotlight) system, even without Series Drops?

If you look at the last column, you’ll see that F2P would end up with fewer cards overall. That’s because of how many Series 3 cards they acquired in the old, pre-Spotlight economy.

What happens if we hold Second Dinner to a higher standard?

A Higher Standard

Here’s that table again, but I’ve adjusted the blue column. Now, it represents the minimum number of Cards Dropped to S3 Quarterly needed for “more cards” to mean “more cards overall”

The effect of the 64-card year is huge here. It makes it possible for Series Drops to happen a lot less often while still providing more cards to F2P.

The first two F2P lines (and the first two SP lines) highlight the effect of the Spotlight system. Either way, players would acquire 13 cards per quarter. Spotlights just shifted the balance so that more of those 13 were S4/5 cards.

You’ll notice that in a 52-card year with Spotlights, Series Drops needed to return to their pre-Spotlight pace. Honestly, that’s what I expected would happen eventually, based on the promise of “more cards for more players”. Instead, they’ve added the twist of the 64-card year.

In a 64-card year, only three cards need to drop to Series 3 each quarter! To be clear, that’s just an average. It’s okay for them to fall a little behind as long as they catch up later.

With five already dropped this year, they’re ahead of schedule! As such, I think it’s entirely reasonable to hold Second Dinner to this slightly higher standard.

Is the Reduction of Series Drops Good or Bad?

For end-game players, Series Drops are just good. No downsides. We’ve gotta consider other players, though.

The way the current system works, Series 3 and Series 4/5 (combined) are both growing indefinitely. There are already 104 Series 3 cards. It currently takes six–seven months to get them all with active play and a monthly Season Pass. That’s a looong time.

The experience may be different for casual players. Personally, I felt familiar with all of Series 3 by the time I was a quarter through collecting it. Working towards 100% was a chore. And almost every S3 card you get is randomly selected (you can choose one per season). There are some Series 3 cards that are way more important than others. What if your last one is an archetype staple? Something like Silver Surfer, Venom, Mister Negative, Cerebro, or Patriot.

There’s a lot more agency when it comes to acquiring Series 4 and 5 cards. And while you may argue it’s still not enough, it’s undeniably more than what’s offered for Series 3. You choose what to buy with Tokens. You choose which Spotlight weeks to spend Keys on.

I think reduced Series Drops are good, for now. Slowing down the expansion of Series 3 is good for any player who hasn’t yet completed Series 3. As long as we’re getting the three per quarter needed for F2P to end up with “more cards”.

It would be really good for Series 3 acquisition to be updated a bit, though. I’m not sure if that means increased speed, increased agency, or both. In the long-term, I think the whole Series system needs a rework. It’s just not sustainable for Series 3 and Series 4/5 to grow forever — but that’s a discussion for another day.

Direct-to-S4 Releases

One of the many economy changes leading up to the addition of Spotlights was the “Flexible Series Release”. I don’t think anybody actually uses that term, though. It’s the formal way to say “some cards start in Series 4”.

At the time, devs estimated that about a third of new releases (excluding Season Pass cards) would be direct-to-S4. They exceeded that in 2023, with nine of 24 releases starting in Series 4. Lately, they’ve, uh, really been exercising that flexibility. Among the 2024 releases, only one of the first 18 non-Pass cards started in Series 4 (including April’s cards).

Series 4 cards cost just as many Keys as Series 5 cards do. When it comes to Tokens, though, Series 4 cards cost half as much (3,000 versus 6,000). That’s made Series 4 cards the best use of Tokens since the introduction of Spotlights.

Bluntly, if there aren’t Series 4 cards to spend Tokens on, it slashes the value of Tokens in half.

A Logical Change

It remains to be seen if direct-to-S4 cards have been severely reduced or completely eliminated. I asked Stephen about it. He said they would still release cards to Series 4 “when it makes sense.” To me, that sounds like we’ll still get some — but it’ll be a trickle. Of course, his answer leaves room to never release another card directly to S4 again.

Of the four changes we’re looking at today, this is the only one with no direct benefit to players. You’ve gotta stretch to find an upside. Something like… Spotlights need to be made less generous for Marvel Snap to survive. I would consider Marvel Snap’s continuation a benefit — but is that the situation we’re in? I’m not in any position to know.

When I call this “a logical change”, it’s not that I know anything about those financial details. It’s that, if it were my job to make Snap less generous, I’d start by reducing direct-to-S4. In fact, I predicted back in July that direct-to-S4 releases would stop within a year.

If It Were My Job…

See, I actually like this change more than the change to release an extra card each season. The extra cards widen the gap between F2P and paying players. A reduction in direct-to-S4 releases has the opposite effect. And, importantly, it closes the gap by pulling paying players down.

Now, I think it’s fine to try converting free players into paying ones (as long as you don’t completely push them away). It seems easier and more effective, though, to get a little more from players who are already paying.

And… I know there are those who are extremely critical of Second Dinner’s monetization. Who will cry foul at the game getting any more expensive. I see it on Twitter. I was called a shill because my initial review of Spotlight Caches was positive.

But, like, the Spotlight System as introduced was really generous. It made it a lot easier for everybody to get new cards at release. It made it dramatically cheaper to have a full collection. It wouldn’t make any sense to implement it that way if Second Dinner were only motivated by greed.

I think they overshot their goals with the Spotlight System. Now they’re dialing it back. Just like with Loki or Elsa (who started much too strong, then got adjusted down).

It’s important for us to watch how far they dial it back. It’s possible for them to dial it back a little and still end up with a system that’s meaningfully better than the pre-Spotlight economy. Well, as long as you’re not a F2P player who values missing as few cards as possible. It’s too late for those players.

As previously mentioned, this article (and the interview) came about because I’ve been watching. Everybody should be aware of how the economy changes affect them. I had concerns about it getting worse. Not just worse than when Spotlights were introduced, but worse than the pre-Spotlight economy.

Disproportionate Impact

How is it that reducing direct-to-S4 releases hurts paying players more?

Firstly, paying players simply get more Tokens. Which means they have more to lose by Token value being slashed.

Secondly, because only players with near-full collections will run out of S4 cards to buy with Tokens. Even if a smaller-collection player completes Series 4, they should have more available to them whenever Series Drops happen. Compare that to a player with a full collection. If a player has 100% of Series 5, then they’ll have 100% of the cards dropping to Series 4.

More Gravity Charts!

The impact depends very much on how much direct-to-S4 is being reduced. I made gravity charts for five scenarios. #2–4 seem possible going forward. The other two are there for comparison only.

1. S4 cards cost 6,000 Tokens
2. No more direct-to-S4
3. 1 direct-to-S4 per quarter
4. 1 direct-to-S4 per season
5. 1-in-3 (non-Pass) releases are direct-to-S4

#1 represents the worst-case scenario for Series 4. A hypothetical situation where they either cost the same as Series 5 cards, or don’t exist at all.

#5 represents the direct-to-S4 rate we enjoyed between July and December of 2023. Notably, it’s also the rate I used in previous sections of this article. Spoilers: we’re building up to a new gravity chart, completely updated for 2024.

Five gravity charts are a lot to take in. I’ve found flipping between them works best, so I’ve put them together in a rotating animation. I’m also taking the opportunity here to simplify. The old system and 52-card gravity line have been cut! I’ll miss the pink…

<<insert animation (Gravity Chart Direct-to-S4 Comparison (75cs delay))>>

Observations

Even without evaluating the exact gravity percentages, there are observable trends.

First, the solid lines (SP) and the white lines (converting Gold to Tokens) are affected the most. That makes sense: these strategies have the most Tokens, so they’re the most affected by losing S4 cards to buy.

Lines change angles (in the middle of the line) when having a full-enough collection means you run out of S4 cards to buy. This actually affects several of the lines, but it’s usually subtle. You can see it pretty clearly when the solid white line is at its highest position (chart #5).

Lines stop changing between charts when they run out of Tokens before they run out of S4 cards to buy. This is observed in all three dotted (F2P) lines. Which goes back to the point of direct-to-S4 reduction affecting paying players most of all. F2P players nearly max out if we get only one direct-to-S4 per quarter.

The white lines are only higher than the blue lines when there are the most S4 cards available. That’s representative of how important S4 cards are for Token value. When the blue lines are higher, you get more progression by spending your Gold on Credits than on Tokens.

What’s the Damage?

Let’s look at the actual gravity percentages now. I’ll select the best gravity percentage for each point, since it’s negligibly easy to change how you spend your Gold.

In my opinion, the sweet spot SD should aim for is one direct-to-S4 per quarter. At that point, you reduce the gravity percentage by 5.5% for Season Pass buyers, but only by 1.5% for F2P.

Is the Reduction of Direct-to-S4 Releases Good or Bad?

Strictly speaking, it’s just bad to reduce direct-to-S4 releases. It hurts all players with no upside. Additionally, it seems weird to reduce the value of Tokens when your biggest spenders already have more Tokens than they know what to do with.

Let’s take it as a given that the economy must be made less generous for spending players (whether or not that’s actually true). In that case, reducing the number of direct-to-S4 releases is one of the best changes possible. You can meaningfully affect paying players while minimally affecting F2P. And there’s still plenty of gap left between them to make the Season Pass a great deal.

In other words, the reduction of direct-to-S4 releases might be rated as “good” if it prevented worse changes from being implemented.

Gold Pass

Here’s the last change we’ll be investigating today. It’s a simple one — a new, consistent bundle: $5 (USD) for 1,800 Gold.

How it Works

300 of the Gold is given immediately on purchase. The other 1,500 is distributed daily over 30 days (50 Gold / day). You do need to log in once a day to collect the Gold. You’ll lose it if you don’t, just like the daily 50 Credits everybody gets for free.

Think of this as a once-per-month offer. You can’t speed it up. Buying a second Gold Pass gives the 300 instant Gold, then extends your pass by 30 days. It doesn’t mean you’ll start getting 100 Gold per day. You can extend your Gold Pass until you’ve got a year saved up.

The Value

If we compare it to other money bundles, the Gold Pass is excellent. The best rate for buying Gold outright that is always available is 8,000 Gold for $100. Bang-for-buck, the Gold Pass is worth 4.5x as much.

Let’s also compare Pass vs. Pass. The Season Pass has historically provided the best bang-for-buck in the game, by a wide margin. A huge part of this is the Series 5 card it gives you. I’ll also include the value if you don’t care about that card at all (using it only for Weekend Missions).

Here’s the value of the Season Pass versus the $100 Gold bundle:

• 4-week Season Pass (with SP card): 12.2x
• 5-week Season Pass (with SP card): 12.4x
• 4-week Season Pass (without SP card): 2.3x
• 5-week Season Pass (without SP card): 2.5x

The Season Pass is still the best purchase in the game if you care about the Season Pass card. If you don’t, the Gold Pass is worth almost twice as much.

Finally, if we look at limited-time offers, only two bundles ever get close to the value of the Gold Pass.

There have only been two other bundles that get close to the 4.5x value of the Gold Pass:

• November 2023 Mystery 4: 5.0x
• December 2023 Ticket Time 1: 4.0x

The third-best would score 2.6x.

Note that my valuation here differs from Kirallas’s (which is used for Marvel Snap Zone’s bundle system). The key difference being that I’m using the $100 Gold bundle as a basis, and he uses the $10 one. By the way, his system would put the Gold Pass around 5.1x value.

How to Spend That Gold

1,800 Gold may not seem like much. Especially in a time where Gold bundles are scarce. On the other hand, let’s look at what a year (360 days) of Gold Pass Gold can buy you. That’s 21,600 Gold.

21,600 Gold could buy the Token Tuesday bundle 15 times. That’s enough Tokens for 2 ½ Series 5 cards.

21,600 Gold could let you refill your daily missions 181 times. You might think 180, but mission refill gives you a little season XP, and season caches can contain Gold. Those missions would be worth 27,607 Credits — worth 5.7 Spotlight Keys and 2,744 Tokens.

Some Final Gravity Charts

Let’s visit the gravity chart one more time. A final version for April 2024.

We’ve updated the gravity line to reflect an additional card each season.

We’ve accounted for a reduction in Direct-to-S4 cards. We’re still not really sure how many direct-to-S4 cards we’ll get. We’ll split this into three different charts to represent the most likely options.

And now, we’ll add lines for the Gold Pass. We’ll bring back pink to represent those options. Although we’re using pink again, these new pink lines have nothing to do with the old ones.

Let’s pull out the gravity percentages for a final comparison. Keep in mind that the gravity percentage is just part of the story. The total amount of S4/5 cards and the release rate of new cards both impact things like how many cards you’ll be missing and how many cards you’ll get each quarter.

We need a column for the direct-to–S4 release rate, since the future of that is unknown at this point.

Sweeping Changes

That table lets us make some quick, broad evaluations of how various economy changes affect the gravity percentage. Season Pass numbers in parentheses.

• New Spotlight-based economy: +22.5% (+22.5%, effectively +15%)
• 64-card year: -10.5% (-11.5%, effectively -4%)
• Reduce direct-to-S4 to never: -2.5% (-7.0%)
• Reduce direct-to-S4 to quarterly: -1.5% (-5.5%)
• Reduce direct-to-S4 to seasonally: 0.0% (-2.0%)
• Buy the Gold Pass: +2.5–3.5% (+2.0%)
• Buy the Season Pass: +13.5–20%

Is The Gold Pass Good or Bad?

I lean towards good. Besides the Season Pass (when you want the SP card), it’s essentially the best purchase in the game. At $5, it’s far more accessible than most high-value bundles. Additionally, the net impact is fairly small, so it ultimately feels optional.

It’s a no-brainer for players willing to spend money on cosmetics. And for players who care only about progression, the value is so high that it’s a good deal even if that Gold goes to Token Tuesday or mission refill. That is, if the trend of Gold bundles being pretty light on value continues.

The biggest downside is a growing gap between F2P and paying players. While a change like the reduction in direct-to-S4 cancels out the edge provided by the Gold Pass, the change to the 64-card year hit F2P a lot harder.

Defying Gravity

Optimization isn’t really the point of this article, but I thought I’d cover it briefly while we’re all here.

I covered the optimization of the Spotlight system pretty extensively in our Ultimate Guide to Spotlight Caches (link goes to the strategy section of that guide). Here’s a mini version of my suggested strategy:

Even with all the changes we’ve talked about today, the strategy is largely the same. The only change is on #5 — where Credits can now outvalue Tokens, due to the reduction of direct-to-S4 releases.

As mentioned much earlier in the article, there are a few other ways to beat the gravity charts.

Bundles

The gravity charts use predictable bundles to convert your Gold. Basically, Token Tuesday and mission refill. It’s pretty common for the best bundles to have even better rates. Gold bundles have been light lately, but maybe that’ll change. You can beat the gravity chart by spending your Gold more efficiently.

Additionally, the gravity charts don’t spend any money besides on the Season Pass (and now the Gold Pass, too). If you’re comfortable spending more money on the game, you will outperform the gravity chart. That is, as long as your extra spending goes towards progression and not just cosmetics.

Strategic Delay

The current gravity charts assume you’ve only got one target card whenever you spend Spotlight Keys. That leads to an average cost of 2.5 Keys per target card. The average cost can be reduced a lot when you can target multiple cards:

• 1 Target: 2.5
• 2 Targets: 3.33 (1.67 ea.)
• 3 Targets: 3.75 (1.25 ea.)

Pick skip weeks. Cards that you want, but can live without. The ones you can wait four or more months for. Then, plan to get those cards the next time they are featured in the Spotlight — at that time, there should be at least two cards for you to target (the card you skipped, and that week’s new release).

One upside of the 64-card year is that there is a new card every single week. The strategy of delaying used to run the risk that a card’s second appearance would be on a week without a new card.

My own strategy for this has been to pick an archetype or two that I’ll pass on when the cards are brand-new. I chose Move and Discard. So I skipped Hercules, Miek, Corvus, and Proxima — and saved roughly 10 Keys in the process.

They aren’t full skips, though. I’ll get them each on their second time being featured. A 2-target week is expected to cost 0.83 more Keys than a 1-target week. Multiply that by four skipped cards and they’ll cost me roughly 3.32 extra Keys. Total savings: 6.68 keys.

It only takes one or two intentional delays per quarter to make a huge difference in your efficiency! Of course, it can be a looong time to wait for a card to be featured again. 😫

Luck

It’s undeniable that luck plays a huge factor in how the Spotlight system works. Those Key costs in the previous sections are only averages. While most players will fall near the average (especially over a long stretch of time), a few will experience extreme luck.

Let’s look at some odds. Consider a bunch of players who are targeting a single Spotlight card each week.

Over one week:

• 1 Key every time (1 total): 1 in 4
• 4 Keys every time (4 total): 1 in 4

And scaled up over eight weeks:

• 1 Key every time (8 total): 1 in 65,536
• 4 Keys every time (32 total): 1 in 65,536

1 in 65,536 may sound very small (and it is), but there are millions of players. 1 in 65,536 is not so rare that it doesn’t actually happen to a handful of players.

I asked Stephen about those handful of very unlucky players, by the way. He wants to make Spotlights feel better, especially by adjusting the random card in the fourth prize slot.

The way the Spotlight system works, it’s easier to be unlucky than to be lucky. The two extremes over eight weeks have an equal 1 in 65,536 chance of happening, but the unlucky path is four times as expensive.

Think of it this way instead. What if both of our extreme players started with 32 Keys. They both ended up with eight cards. Our very lucky player still has 24 more Keys to spend. Our very unlucky player is fresh outta Keys.

Lucky Sim

I simulated what it would be like for 100,000 players to spend 65 Keys. That’s roughly a year’s worth; 1.25 Keys per week is pretty typical.

Here are the results, with the expected average highlighted in white:

The average number of Keys we expect each card to cost is 2.5. So, 26 new cards represents the average. 26 is the peak, representing 17.06% of our players. 95.19% of players fall within 4 cards of the average (22–30).

Here’s the proof that it’s easier to be unlucky than lucky: 46.53% of players were below the average and 36.41% were above.

Of course, there’s nothing you can do to make yourself luckier. I do think Second Dinner should do something about the worst luck, though. Leave the inner ~90% the same. Help out the edge cases. It feels terrible blowing four Keys in a week multiple weeks in a row.

Stephen’s answers gave me the impression they’d somehow strengthen the random card prize. If that’s the only change they make, they’ll have to make the random prize a lot better to balance how bad it feels to blow four Keys on a single target prize.

Conclusion

We looked at four recent economy changes today. Three of which make new cards more expensive than they were last year. The other one is the Gold Pass — which is a good deal, but can only help make cards more affordable if you were gonna spend that extra $5 each month anyway.

The 64-card year is the really big change. It causes players to miss more cards than before. F2P will be missing more cards than ever before. It also causes players to acquire more cards. I’d be really interested to hear what’s more important to you, between missing fewer cards and getting more cards. Do those of you who are free-to-play feel differently than those who pick up most of the Season Passes?

We need to keep a collective eye on how far Second Dinner “nerfs” the economy. We should demand that Spotlights actually mean “more cards for more players” (and so far, they do).

There’s a lot to look out for!

• How big will they let S4/5 get?
• How big will they let S3 get?
• How many cards will drop in future Series Drops?
• How often will we see a new card that releases directly to Series 4?

Let me know what you think! If you’ve got an idea for a cool analysis that can lean on data and/or math, I’d love to hear it! Please share it with me in the comments below or else on Twitter/𝕏! 💜