Marvel Snap Love It or Leave It – August 3, 2023: Roadmap and OTA Breakdown!

Hello everyone, and welcome to Marvel Snap Love It or Leave It, a new feature where we look at the happenings and trends of the game this week and decide whether we love it or would leave it. I’m Glazer of Snap Judgments, and I’ll be your guide through everything you need to know to keep up with this game we all love.

Last Chance: Giveaway – Love it

The Roadmap – Love it

There’s a lot to talk about here. Let’s go item by item, shall we?

Coming Soon

PC Launch is huge. A full launch opens the game up to a lot more people, and more people means a healthier game. Wherever you are now, this game is an amazingly strong opening experience and will hook more people. I’m personally pretty excited to be able to play on my PC and have everything… actually work.

Twitch Drops are apparently exclusives for watching Snap Streams on Twitch. A lot of my friends stream, so I’m very excited to get the benefit for supporting them. If you want some great lesser known streamers to follow, let me know in the comments.

Card Upgrade Improvements apparently means if you have the credits and boosters, you can just choose what level to upgrade a card to. That’s a nice quality of life change. I’m less impressed by the Gold for upgrades, but it’s a whale only feature, so whatever.

Seasonal Audio is amazing. I’ve kept my game muted for months after the umpteenth time that the main song got stuck in my head. Change, in this case, is very good.

Conquest Polish – This is largely getting rid of all the screens for losing. Yes, please. Those are obnoxious. We’re also getting WAY more Trophies for Silver in the OTA, and a few more for Gold and Infinity. Mute’s now stay muted here, too. I’m all about this. All good.

Infinite Rank Revamp – We don’t know what this means exactly, but if it’s a leaderboard, it’ll be another thing to drive top players – that’s always great for a game. It’s not for me (full-time job, family, content, mental health first), but I’ll enjoy spectating it!

Global Matchmaking Phase 1 – We don’t know what Phase 1 is, but this can only improve the experience of playing. We all have very different pocket metas, but even more so, we are largely facing too many bots. Global Matchmaking should basically solve the problem for as long as the game remains healthy.

In Development

Prestige Level – I’m not sure this is adequately explained. If you do enough of… something… you can turn rewards you don’t want like Pixels into those you do? This seems like a more complicated way of just doing achievements.

Collectible Emotes and Emojis – This isn’t for me, but it was shown off last week at San Diego Comic Con, and the community seemed excited. This basically guarantees we never get full auto-mute, but if this makes people that happy? Hey, I’m not yucking their yum.

Personalized Shop – Yeahhhhh, variants for cards I play a lot would be absolutely amazing. Gimme!

Smart Decks are where a deck autofills for you or suggests cards when you have a start. This… kind of seems like a waste of energy? We’re only talking 12-card decks here. Maybe it’ll be useful for newer players with the PC launch though.

New Infinite Splits and Split system improvements. I just want my cards to have a pretty gold background. If these improvements include that, I’m very much down for it. The system could use some tweaking – happy they’re looking into it.

Ultimate Variant Evolution is when these cards get their own special animations and VFX. I won’t buy these either way, but given their extreme cost, it’s hard to argue that they should absolutely do more.

In Concept

Guilds/Clans seem cool. I’m not sure what the benefit would be in game – likely cosmetic – but there’s no community in game – that all exists on Discord and (shudder) Twitter and (cringe) Reddit. Putting some of that in game seems beneficial.

Mythic Variants are being shouted down by those who buy Ultimate Variants. The features they’re talking about with custom lines and VFX surely seem like they should just go on the Ultimate Variants.

PC Controller Support seems good. It’ll let me play Snap better on the Steam Deck, at least. Let’s go.

New Game Modes are where it’s at. I want a draft and a team mode pretty badly. I hope this moves quickly and moves up the priority chart as soon as possible.

Season Journey Improvements would be great. Why isn’t there a little story that develops as you complete missions? It doesn’t have to be complicated, but it would add some flavor to the game and make players excited to complete the next missions as more than just in game progress.

The Collector’s Cache Change – Leave It

I hate this. Collector’s Caches now spit out 50 Tokens, which feels absolutely terrible. To fix that feeling, Second Dinner is having them split out either 100-Tokens or… a Gold Conquest ticket. That’s still 50 Tokens, just with extra steps.

The Gold Tickets are a clear way to encourage players to play Conquest, but if they want more people to play Conquest, they need to streamline the system AND offer rewards players actually want. Giving away Gold Tickets will get more people to play, but it won’t get them to try or care.

In fact, most players I’ve spoken to are either begrudgingly opening Caches because they need the currency or just hoarding like crazy and don’t plan to stop. This is a bad, borderline insulting fix.

New OTA Buffs – Love It

Hawkeye as a plus 3 is just a relevant card. It works great now with Adam Warlock or Bast. It’s got the same basic upside as Ant Man. AND it’s really nuts if you can Bounce it. This is an iconic character that I hope is now relevant.

Hulkbuster is a 3/5 now. I’ve already tested this and the difference is huge. On cards like Human Torch, it’s 2 extra power the first time he moves, then 4, then 8, etc. It’s only one extra on Multiple Man, but because you make so many, it’s often a 3-5 power difference by the end of the game. That’s great!

Vision is a 5/8 – he’s good, but this is the least impactful change. In fact, it’s main impact is going to be to remind people that Vision exists and was always underplayed.

Captain Marvel to a 4/5 is absolutely huge. You might not know this, but because of Zabu, 4-cost is a magic number in Snap. Marvel now goes into an absolutely crazy number of good stuff shells. The only downside to this at all is the sheer number of “Why didn’t she move?” questions we’re all going to be inundated with.

Absorbing Man to a 3/5 is absolutely great. The card just had too low power to be relevant in a lot of situations. Now, all that remains to be seen is where he’s best. Is it copying Shang-Chi and Rockslide? Being Toxic with Hazmat? Duplicating with Brood and Mister Sinister? There’s these options and so many more!

Want decks with these cards? Check out my huge video below with several brand new decks for each card!

More Trophies – Love It

This is a huge upgrade in how many Trophies we get, especially for Silver. That’s particularly good since they upgraded the cost of everything in the Trophy Shop this season, seemingly assuming everyone would just grind more. Well, apparently, everyone did not just grind more. This is a good course correction. Now, get some Collector’s Tokens in the Shop! Or better, even throw a Spotlight Cache in once per season!

Spotlight Caches Week 3 – Leave It (Unless You Need Thanos)

Mirage and Master Mold are both Series 4 cards – that means that since they are half the cost of a Series 5 cards when used by Tokens, if at all possible, you should really use Tokens for them, even if it means waiting a bit to have said Tokens.

Thanos, however, is must own. He’s constantly in and out of the meta, and when he’s in, he’s in the best decks. His value will also never depreciate, so getting him with Spotlight Caches is always a great deal.

I have a huge video breakdown of the Cache and its card right here:

Mirage Released: Leave It

Variants

Mirage

On Reveal: Copy the lowest-Cost card in your opponent’s hand into your hand. Give it +2 Power.

Series 4 Rare – Collection Level 486+ (Pool 4)

view card details Start a deck Decks with Mirage

Mirage is one of the better filler two drops in the game and has some homes where she’s more than that. In Devil Dinosaur decks, she’s obviously great – an extra card is more stats on Dino or more stats on board. She’s also quite good in recent Quinjet Moon Girl decks where the extra card with extra stats can be doubled to great effect.

So why is she a leave it (unless of course you’re at an end game point where you get everything or you just love this character)?

Even in those decks, Sentinel does most of the job that Mirage does. Spider-Ham is probably better even there. Heck, Jeff the Baby Landshark is a card. There’s just better cards in slot. In the Snap Judgments Podcast from this week, we go over 5 of them.

Conquerors Event Broadcast – Love It

The Stream itself was a huge success! A wild number of people watched accross a ton of different Twitch streams, the Marvel Snap official stream was excellent quality, and excitement and competition were extremely high throughout the community. Events like this should absolutely continue on a semi-regular basis, as the community could really use more of this positivity that took place during the event.

Conquerers Event – Everything Else – Leave It

The rules were ridiculously unclear to the point where several of the competitors seemed to either not know them or know more about them than Second Dinner did. The players invited were largely good, but there were some extremely notable omissions – Lamby and EducatedCollins to name just two. The event was to continue off stream hours too, but then no one ever really talked about that? Even the identity of the winner was confused:

300,000 people seemingly saw that Dera won, except he knew that, according to the rules, he didn’t. Eventually, the winner was revealed to be Bynx, a day later.

Thankfully, Second Dinner is giving the backers of both Dera and Bynx the rewards, but even so, this kind of thing is just frustrating and makes the game look bad.

Pro Bundle Mk 2 – Love It

$100 is a lot of money… like, probably too much to spend on a game like this. However, if you’re going to spend it, this is excellent value. 5000 Collector’s Tokens and 11,000 credits are essentially enough for a Series 5 and two Spotlight Caches (you’ll be a little short on tokens, pending luck).

That’s an awful lot of progression, especially if you’re still someone aiming at Series 4 cards, as we enter another month with no Series Drops (the patch is next week likely and they promised two weeks notice of any drops…). This bundle STILL isn’t as good as last month’s Black Panther bundle, but nothing on the horizon is. Go get this, if you’re looking to spend.

Kirallas has more on August 2023 bundles here:

Marvel Snap Zone and Community News

The Legendary Den Does Tier Lists

• Ranked Ladder Tier List
• Conquest Tier List

My thoughts on the Ranked Ladder Tier List:

Bohe’s Back with Deck Guides + More!

• Dan Hipp Guide!
• Pure Destroy Guide!

Snap Judgments Podcast

Check out the Newest Snap Judgments Podcast here featuing Paper and FaThorNewman:

Check back tomorrow for my Sleeper Decks of the Week, and if you found value, check out my YouTube and subscribe! See you all soon!