The Ultimate Guide to Boosters (And How to Target Them)

Welcome to The Ultimate Guide to Boosters. When I say Ultimate, I mean it! I’ll be covering all things Boosters. I acknowledge that may not seem very important or useful, especially to you seasoned players. However, I got the idea for this guide from long-term players all over Marvel Snap Twitter. I noticed that so many of them had no idea about the Booster-targeting system that was added to the game back in February. There should be something here for you regardless of how advanced of a player you are.

And… hey, y’all! It’s been a while. If you’re unfamiliar with my work, I like to look at Snap in novel ways. Most of the time, that involves math and diving into the data recorded by our Marvel Snap Tracker. This guide is a bit different from my normal coverage (although I also wrote The Ultimate Guide to Spotlight Caches). I’ll still be incorporating lots of math where possible!

This is meant to be a thorough and evergreen guide to Boosters. I encourage you to skip around to the sections that are most interesting to you!

I expect many of you will want to skip straight to Booster targeting.

Click here to do so!

Boosters 101

Essentially, Boosters are one of the many virtual currencies in Marvel Snap. Unlike other currencies, Boosters are single-purpose and character-specific. The only thing you can spend Boosters on is upgrading your cards. And then there is a different flavor of Booster for each card in the game. That is, you need Hulk Boosters to upgrade Hulk, and Iron Man Boosters to upgrade Iron Man.

Note that card upgrades require both Boosters and Credits. Besides making your cards look cooler (and getting Infinity Splits), card upgrades are the only way to earn Collection Level (CL). The table below shows the base cost of each level, as well as the cumulative cost, starting at Common.

Upgrades cost 50 Credits and 5 Boosters per CL. The only exception is the upgrade at Common, which provides a 50% discount on Credits. There is no such discount for Boosters.

Maxing out a single card costs a total of 1,525 Credits and 155 Boosters. You may have noticed that in-game bundles often come with 155 or 310 Boosters. Those might seem like unusual numbers at first glance, but they represent the exact number of Boosters needed to take either one or two cards from Common to Infinity. Data mines have shown that some bundles may even include 465 Boosters at once — another weird number, until you realize that’s the number to upgrade a card to Infinity three times!

Fun fact: Did you know Boosters didn’t always have different colors to match the character they’re for? That feature was added in the October 4, 2022 patch.

Ben Brode singlehandedly chose the Booster colors for every single character at that time (the task has since moved on to others)!

How to Get Boosters

There are a bunch of different ways to acquire Boosters. Humor me by guessing how many different ways there are (I hope you weren’t already spoiled by the Table of Contents!).

Expand to see the answer

There are nine different ways to acquire Boosters (and that’s a conservative count)!

Note that whenever random Boosters are rewarded in a group, the entire group gets assigned to a single card in the player’s collection.

Play Matches

You get one Booster for every turn you play the game. Turns are counted at the start of the turn. If one player retreats on Turn 6, both players will receive six Boosters.

You will not receive any Boosters for a game that times out before it starts (even though you will earn a Ranked cube or Conquest victory when this happens).

At the end of a match, every Booster you’ve earned will be assigned to a single card that started in your deck. This assignment is random, with a single exception. As long as Agatha Harkness started in your deck, she’ll claim every Booster you earn through gameplay.

In Conquest mode, Boosters are not rewarded until one player has been defeated. If your Conquest match lasts a full five rounds, you’ll earn thirty Boosters at once, and they’ll all go to a single card.

Extra turns from Limbo earn you additional Boosters. Extra turns from Kang do not earn you additional Boosters.

Fogwell’s Gym is a special location that gives both players two Boosters per turn. This effect only works if Fogwell’s Gym is still active when the game ends (it can be ruined if the location gets transformed or destroyed). This location is usually disabled, so that it has no chance of appearing. Every now and then, Second Dinner will set Fogwell’s as the Hot or Featured location for 24 hours, giving it a very high appearance rate. To date, this has only happened twice.

The number of Boosters you can earn through gameplay is limited to 1,000 per day. Boosters earned from other methods are not impacted by this limit, nor do they affect it. Stephen at Second Dinner has explained that this limit is intended to control farming. Note that the Season XP cap he mentions has already been implemented, and the cap is 4,000 XP.

Ranked Rewards

Every season, 40 random Boosters are awarded for reaching Rank 20 (Bronze).

Season Pass

On the way up to Season Pass level 50, all players will collect 85 random Boosters (broken down into four groups of 15, and one group of 25). Players with the Premium Season Pass also get 110 Boosters for the Season Pass card, as well as 60 Boosters for each of the other cards with exclusive variants in that Season Pass.

Season Cache

A Season Cache is rewarded for every Season Pass level reached above level 50. Season Caches have a 40% chance of containing random Boosters. That chance is broken down as follows:

• 25%: 10 Boosters
• 10%: 15 Boosters
• 5%: 20 Boosters

Conquest Rewards

Each season, a different card is featured in the Conquest. The Conquest Medal Shop lets you spend Medals on both random Boosters and Boosters specifically for the featured card. You get more Boosters-per-Medal when buying Boosters for the featured card.

The pricing in the Medal Shop has changed every season since the introduction of Conquest mode. It may settle down eventually, but it hasn’t yet! Even if it does, I suspect it will continue to vary based on the length of the season, at least (four weeks vs. five).

Psylocke was the featured card in the Conquest Medal Shop during the November 2023 season. These were the Boosters on offer then:

• 200 Medals: 75 Psylocke Boosters (one-time)
• 500 Medals: 155 Psylocke Boosters (one-time)
• 750 Medals: 65 random Boosters (unlimited)
• 1,000 Medals: 155 random Boosters (unlimited)
• 1,500 Medals: 310 Psylocke Boosters (unlimited)

When a season ends, any unspent Conquest Tickets and Medals are converted into random Boosters. This conversion rate is worse than anything offered in the Medal Shop, but it’s not completely atrocious if you favor random Boosters over Boosters for the featured card.

First, all leftover Tickets are converted into Medals. This is based on the Medals received before the first match starts (in other words, they’re worth the same as they’re worth when you are defeated by your first opponent):

• Silver Tickets → 20 Medals
• Gold Tickets → 75 Medals
• Infinity Tickets → 200 Medals

Then, all leftover Medals convert into Boosters at the rate of 20 Medals = 3 Boosters. Or, if you prefer, the Medals are multiplied by 0.15. The result is rounded. Every Booster received this way goes to a single random card in the player’s collection.

Collection Level Track

Starting at Collection Level (CL) 20, the CL track rewards random Boosters periodically. The rate of rewards from the CL track changes many times between CL 0 and 994. Early on, you’ll get 5 Boosters every 8 CL. The Booster rate becomes consistent starting at CL 762. At that point, you will receive 10 Boosters every 12 CL.

Bundles

Most bundles in the game include some Boosters as part of their offerings.

Side note: Kirallas, who does our bundle analysis, does not give any value to Boosters when evaluating bundles. More on that a little later.

Fast Upgrade

Every eight hours, the Fast Upgrade section of the Shop screen will show three cards from your collection that you do not have enough Boosters to upgrade. Using this method, you can buy any missing Boosters on the spot at the cost of 5 Credits per Booster.

To be clear, that is not a good price. This upgrade method should be reserved for players who are not price-sensitive.

Upgrade with Gold

Similar to the Fast Upgrade with Credits, if you try to upgrade a card from the Collection screen and are short on resources, you can buy any missing Credits or Boosters on the spot with Gold. The cost is 4 Gold for every 5 Credits and every single Booster you are short.

The number of Boosters you can acquire with this method is limited to 1,000 per day. Note this is a separate limit from the 1,000 you can earn via gameplay each day. The Upgrade-with-Gold limit does not apply during the purchase that would cause you to cross the 1,000-Booster mark. In other words, if you have already purchased 999 Boosters, you can still buy 155 more to take a card from Common to Infinity.

Just like with the Fast Upgrade with Credits, this upgrade method should be reserved for players who are not price-sensitive.

Booster Value

As I touched on, Kirallas does not value Boosters at all when evaluating bundles here at Marvel Snap Zone. I agree with his decision. For most players, Boosters should be seen as worthless. There are several reasons for that:

• Most players have effectively unlimited access to Boosters. Few will ever hit the daily limit of 1,000 Boosters (I’ve only ever hit it once myself, and I’ve been playing actively for nearly a year).
• The value of Boosters is subjective. Boosters for a card you don’t care about upgrading are useless!
• Most players will have their upgrades bottlenecked by Credits, not Boosters

To be more specific about that bottleneck, it’s easy for Boosters to be the bottleneck if you focus 100% of your upgrading on a single card. However, because the game rewards a variety of Boosters constantly, most players will spread out upgrades across several (or even many) cards at a time.

Are Boosters ever worth buying with Credits, Gold, or real money? Yes!— but only for a small set of players. If you’re playing or spending so much that Boosters are the only thing holding you back from the upgrades you want — go for it! The time savings might be very worth it to you.

Similarly, the Booster Pack bundles that we evaluate as having very poor value might be valuable to a select few. If you often find yourself spending Gold on Boosters, the Booster Packs give thirteen times as many Boosters versus the Upgrade with Gold feature. Of course, the tradeoff is that these are random Boosters.

Booster Targeting

We’ve arrived! Here’s the section that inspired this whole guide in the first place! 🥳

Did you know that you can make it more likely for certain cards to receive your end-of-match Boosters? You’ve been able to double the chance for certain cards since February 28th! The historicity of which is shown in this tweet by Stephen Jarret, Senior Director of Product and Strategy at Second Dinner.

Of course, that tweet sorta explains how Booster targeting works, but let’s get into it deeper!

Targeting Mechanics

At the end of a match, the card that receives Boosters is decided randomly. Allow me to establish an analogy I’ll be leaning on quite a bit. The random assignment is done like drawing names out of a hat. Each card in your deck gets to put its name in at least once. Some cards get to put their name in a second time!

Any card you don’t have enough Boosters to upgrade (based on its rarity) gets to put its name in twice. For this purpose, Infinity works just like Ultra — it gets the double treatment until you have 50 Boosters for that character. The game cares about the exact version of the card you’re using in your deck when determining this.

For example, I currently have 35 Valkyrie Boosters. If I put my Uncommon Rian Gonzales variant in my deck, Valkyrie will only put her name in the hat once because I already have enough Boosters to upgrade that particular card. If I ran my Legendary Peach Momoko variant instead, Valkyrie would put her name in the hat twice — I don’t quite have the 40 Boosters needed to upgrade that card.

The Impact of Booster Targeting

Anywhere from none to all of the cards in your deck could qualify to throw their name in the hat a second time. The extreme cases have the same odds. Every card getting two entries is effectively the same as every card having one entry. What about the in-between cases, though?

The base chance of a card being selected is 1 in 12, or 8.33%. That’s as low as it gets for a single card. The best we can do for a single card is to have it be the only card in the deck that gets to throw its name in twice. In that case, the chance of it being selected are 2 in 13, or 15.38%.

Is that 15.38% any good? Yes… and no. It’s a big improvement! Your card will be selected 1.85 times as often. But 15.38% is still quite a low chance. It equates to being selected 1 in every 6.5 games.

Targeting Optimization

You can raise the overall odds of getting Boosters you want by running several cards you’d like Boosters for. That might seem obvious, but hear me out! You can get that 15.38% up to 50% just by running four cards that you want Boosters for. Just make sure that only those 4 get to put two names in the hat!

The table below shows a full breakdown of the chances of your cards being selected for Boosters. “Targets” represents how many cards in the deck qualify for the double chance. The chances for a single card and a group of cards (e.g., all Target cards) are both listed. You can see that 50% I just mentioned by looking up the [Combined Chance] for [Targeted] cards when there are four [Targets].

Grinding for Boosters

We can use the statistics above to calculate the number of games we expect it to take to get the Boosters you want. Again, “Targets” refers to how many cards in the deck are throwing their name in the hat twice.

For the sake of keeping it simple, this table assumes that games last 6 turns each. Before making that assumption, I looked at the last week of Ranked and Conquest games recorded by our tracker. There were over 350,000 games with an average length of 5.8 turns. That was close enough to 6 for me.

The table below answers how long it will take to get so many Boosters for each of your targeted cards. It shows that it takes an average of 168 games to get 155 Boosters for a single targeted card. If you were running three targeted cards instead, it would take 194 games to get 155 Boosters for each of them. The triple-target strategy takes 26 more games to get a full 155 Boosters on two extra cards.

Remember that you’ll need to upgrade your target cards as you earn Boosters for them in order for them to keep their double-chance status.

By the way, you’d expect any non-targeted cards to get half as many Boosters. If you’re referencing the 155 column, the non-targeted cards should end up receiving around 77.5 Boosters each — although a decent amount of variance is expected!

How Many Cards Should You Target?

You may have noticed that having 12 targets (which is the same as having 0 targets) appears to be the most efficient option overall. Let’s be clear about that — it depends on what you’re looking for. 12 (0) targets is the most evenly distributed option. Do you have 12 cards you equally want to upgrade? Do they play nice together?

On the other extreme, having a single target is the fastest option. However, that speed comes at the cost of only applying to a single card. In other words, it reduces your Booster income for the other 11 cards in your deck.

You need to find the sweet spot that’s right for you. Your targeted cards all benefit equally — so they should be a group of cards that you want Boosters for in roughly equal measure.

Regardless of how many cards take up your top tier of desired Booster targets, that number is the sweet spot for you (y’know, unless your number is bigger than 12). What I mean is, if there are 2 cards you really want Boosters for, 2 is the optimal number of targets for you. If you really want Boosters for 5 cards, 5 is your optimal number of targets.

Personally, I don’t pay attention to Booster targeting all the time. Only when I’m playing one of my favorite decks (or perhaps a non-favorite deck that runs one of my favorite cards). For those, I keep the number of targets around three or four. That amount has seemed to match up pretty well with my Credit income. Balancing your Booster and Credit income will depend a lot on how much you play. After all, it’s a lot easier to max out your daily income of Credits than Boosters.

A Targeting Super Boost

There is one condition that dramatically increases the chance of a card being selected to receive Boosters at the end of a match. I waited this long to bring it up because it is extremely limited and basically out of your control.

When you have a brand new character (not just a new variant), it has a much higher chance of being selected for Boosters. That super boost lasts until you have received around 5–10 total Boosters for it. 

Our very own Kirallas has been recording a ton of his Booster acquisition since the new targeting system was implemented (at the end of February). He’s recorded a whopping 200 games where his deck included a new card (as well as a non-new targeted card)! 🤯 The new card was selected to receive Boosters for 66 of those games — that’s 33.00% versus the 14.29% you’d expect!

I couldn’t find any official information for exactly how this boost works or how much it’s worth. Based on Kirallas’ sample, it’s as if the new card put its name in the hat six times.

The Future of Booster Targeting

Currently, the double bonus for being short on Boosters and the super bonus for being a new character are the only forms of Booster targeting in the game. Stephen at Second Dinner has mentioned a few times that more methods are on the way!

Actual Booster Data

I mentioned that Kirallas has meticulously recorded tons of data about his Booster acquisition since late February. That data set includes 3,442 matches divided across many different scenarios (such as the 200 games recorded with a newly acquired character in the deck). He estimates he has put about 100 hours into collecting this data, which presumably includes the tracking system he built in Excel.

I just wanted to briefly acknowledge all that work. That data has been invaluable, as it is much more detailed and useful than anything I could possibly extract from our tracker data (specifically when it comes to Booster acquisition).

Kirallas and his data were both very useful in the writing of this guide. I bring this up now because the rest of this guide involves two sections that are heavily informed by his insight: booster farming, and a possible bug that affects booster targeting.

Booster Farming

Kirallas has done a lot of Booster farming to facilitate all the data he’s collected over the past nine months.

He had several tips to share with me for anybody interested in doing this.

Conquest is the Way

First of all, you are going to tank your matchmaking rating (MMR) if you’re Booster farming in earnest for some time. When it gets low enough, matchmaking takes much longer. Kirallas has seen his wait time climb beyond 10 minutes, but it seems like it’s usually closer to 5.

That’s the first advantage Conquest gives: you only have to do matchmaking once to play many games in a row (assuming your opponent does not Concede too early).

Second, the nature of Conquest means you have some time to demonstrate to the other player what you are doing. Sometimes, they will catch on and play along. Booster farming can go quite fast when both players are mashing the “End Turn” button without playing any cards! Nobody loses cubes when the game ends in a tie. Kirallas has extended Conquest matches to over 35 rounds on numerous occasions. That’s worth at least 210 Boosters!

Humorously, the game’s stability seems to waver after Round 35. If you push it too much further, the game will immediately end. Rewards will be given, but without any animation to show you which card got the Boosters. At this point, Kirallas concedes before Round 38 starts. I know that difference between 35 and 38 may seem like a typo, but it’s not — Round 35 is the earliest Kirallas has been ever kicked out (with Round 44 being the latest), but it rarely happens before Round 38.

When your Conquest run ends this way, the game throws an error message I’ve never seen before.

It’s worth noting that if you really commit to farming (and I don’t expect many of you to do so), your reduced MMR should increase how many other farmers you run into. Kirallas estimates about 25% of the players he encounters are farming in one form or another (and are willing to cooperate).

Keep it Snappy

There are several ways to skip animations to keep things moving along at top speed.

One such example is playing a card in Superflow when it shows up. This stops both you and your opponent from watching the animation of you receiving extra energy every turn.

Another skip is relevant to when you’re farming and the other player isn’t cooperating. If you retreat (using Retreat Now) as soon as the card animations start for Turn 5, the game ends immediately and you get credit for playing six turns. Kirallas called this “the most important skip”.

A Booster Acquisition Bug

Over the course of being so tuned in to Boosters for months, Kirallas has several times felt that the income for a certain card is much too low. Of course, that sort of feeling is anecdotal. And human brains are terrible at intuiting probability. But then — Kirallas has been able to record a decent chunk of data while the game is in this bugged state on two separate occasions.

The bug (or multiple bugs) in question seems to prevent a card from getting the doubled chance of receiving Boosters even when it qualifies. The suspicion is that sometimes the game doesn’t re-check a card’s eligibility for doubling when it gets upgraded. It may be even worse than that, suppressing the card’s odds of being selected to even less than the normal, non-targeted rate.

We’re venturing into tin foil hat territory here. To be clear, I’m not at all labeling Kirallas as a conspiracy theorist. His data set is impressively large for the self-recordings of a single player. Despite that, it’s not big enough to completely rule out edge cases. Furthermore, any amount of data generated by one player will inevitably be a mere drop compared to all the data generated by the entire player base. This isn’t to diminish his efforts, but to acknowledge that what might seem like unbelievably bad luck could be just that.

Kirallas acknowledges this, too. This bug’s existence is just a possibility. He hasn’t been able to collect enough data to definitively prove it.

The Data

Kirallas has records for two chains of games that possibly occurred under a bugged state. Here are the details for each:

1. 78 games, 1 targeted card, the targeted card only received Boosters 5 times.
2. 50 games, 1 targeted card, the targeted card never received Boosters.

How do we test how likely those scenarios are? We could maybe do probability math — but that gets really complicated, really fast. Instead, I used the Monte Carlo method. The Monte Carlo method is based on the idea that it is often much easier to simulate a probability problem than it is to solve it mathematically. Then, if you run the simulation tons of times, it should approach the correct answer. I used random number generation (RNG) in Excel to simulate each scenario 100,000 times.

For the first scenario, I tested how many times a single target card would be selected to receive Boosters 5 times or fewer over 78 games. That happened in 1,404 of the 100,000 simulations (1.404%, or 1 in 71.2). That makes it quite unlikely, but far from impossibly so.

The second scenario is more unusual — zero Boosters over 50 games! That only occurred 29 times in 100,000 simulations (0.029%, or 1 in 3,448.3). That’s about 48 times rarer than our first scenario, but still well within the realm of possibility.

Could the Bug Be Real?

Absolutely! I’m not sure how many times Kirallas has encountered such streaks of terrible luck — but the longer they last and more frequently they occur makes it decreasingly likely that these streaks can be explained by bad luck alone.

So far, he hasn’t found a reliable way to recreate the bug. That means it’s intermittent if it exists, and intermittent bugs are notoriously difficult to track down.

It’s notable that these bad streaks seem to occur only after a card has been upgraded. That’s where his theory of what’s happening comes from. A card gets enough Boosters to be upgraded (meaning its double-Booster benefits end). When you upgrade the card and end up short on Boosters again, it should requalify for the double benefit. Perhaps sometimes the game fails to turn the double benefit back on for a newly upgraded card?

Kirallas notes that it doesn’t seem to make a difference whether you upgrade the card directly on the post-match screen or on the Collection screen.

How to Fix the Bug

If you suspect you have encountered this bug, there are a few things that might help. Kirallas compares these to restarting your router or checking for Windows updates — they’re good steps to try, but it’s unclear whether or not they actually help.

• Restart the game
• Remove the card, play one game without it, then add the card back in
• Rebuild the deck using a new deck slot

What’s Next?

Kirallas still wants to generate more data to help determine whether or not this bug exists. If it does, it would be great to get it fixed! He is continuing to record his Booster acquisition, but specifically focused on the possible bug instead of recording everything.

We may update this section in the future with any new discoveries!

Conclusion

So, there it is. Everything there is to know about the most prevalent currency in Marvel Snap — Boosters. They’re everywhere to the point that I barely even register them. I think of them as worthless! That is, until I have too few to afford an upgrade I want. Most of all, I hope the information on Booster targeting comes in handy. I wish you good luck in pulling the Boosters you’re looking for!