A couple weeks ago, Second Dinner announced Spotlight Caches. They described the change as one of the biggest to Marvel Snap since its launch. And they were right — it’s huge. What better way to cover a huge change than with a huge guide?

Marvel Snap Spotlight Cache Schedule: Rise of the Phoenix (July 2023)

As of today, Spotlight Caches are right around the corner — they’re expected with the game’s next patch… tomorrow (Tuesday!). I’m cutting it really close; I know! 😅 I’ve been pouring my time into this since the announcement in order to make sure I can provide you with something thorough, accurate, and interesting.

Let’s get into it!

Premise

This guide is meant to cover everything we know about Spotlight Caches.

I’m keeping the section headings straightforward so it’s easy for you to skip around as you please. Especially as you come back to reference this again in the future!

There are a lot of different types of players. I mean everything from how often you play the game to whether you’ve ever bought a season pass. From how much you enjoy variants to how competitive you are. How full is your collection? Do you think it’s worth waiting for months if it means you’ll get a better deal?

I can’t possibly cover every combination. When choosing which few I’d cover, I aimed for wide enough variety that you’ll be able to find scenarios that are close enough to your own. If you get through the guide feeling like I’ve completely missed players like you and left you clueless about how to interact with the new economy, please let me know in the comments below or message me on Twitter!

A bunch of people helped make this guide possible (and I’ll mention them throughout!), but our very own economic analyst, Kirallas, most of all. Not only did he provide many of the graphics (it’ll be obvious which ones), but he played a massive role in helping make my models of both the old and new game economy as comprehensive and accurate as possible.

This guide will be a living document. At least over the next few weeks, I’ll be updating it as new information comes in. Especially with the flood that might come in once Spotlight Caches are live.

History

We knew before the big announcement that something was coming. The controversial introduction of flexible series drops came with an explanation that the change was just one part of upcoming improvements to card acquisition. Around that time, some content creators were dropping occasional hints that they had some insight into improvements coming soon.

In retrospect, flexible series drops totally make sense. The new Spotlight Cache system (more on that just ahead) requires a sizable pool of Series 4 (S4) and Series 5 (S5) cards to be sustainable.

We’ve seen other changes roll out that are all pieces of a new game economy:

• Cards can now be released directly to S4, and it should be about ⅓ of new cards that do so (see the answer to question #5 here)
• Series 3 (S3) cards were removed from the Token Shop — and then returned in the form of Mystery S3 cards at the cost of 1,000 Tokens each
• Weekend missions were introduced as a way to have clear playing goals every day of the week, as well as to be a new source for rewards such as Credits, Gold, Tokens, and Season Pass XP

If you’ve been playing Marvel Snap for some time, you’ve almost certainly observed players complaining about card acquisition. Maybe you’ve made those complaints yourself! Historically, card acquisition started fast, but rapidly slowed down as you completed S2 and started earning S3 from the Collection Level (CL) track. That shift happens around CL 500 — which turns out to be where Spotlight Caches will start appearing on the CL track!

Another common complaint I see leveled against the game is about its monetization. These complaints usually come hand-in-hand with complaints about card acquisition, as they stem from the fact that new cards are expensive. I’ve seen the game criticized as pay-to-win many times. While I do think it’s possible to succeed in the game with a small budget or even a small collection (we’ve seen both kinds of players — such as OceanMud and FionaShadeStories — do well in tournaments), it’s impossible to deny that having a big collection is advantageous. Most meta-topping decks feature 1 or 2 S5 cards.

And that’s where the Spotlight Caches come in. It’s the heart and cornerstone of a whole new game economy. What impact will it have? Can it possibly succeed at improving both card acquisition and monetization? Can it do so in a way that benefits all players?

Spotlight Cache

If you’ve already read the official announcement or either of our earlier (1) articles (2) covering Spotlight Caches, you’re probably good to skip to the next section. However!— stick around if you don’t want to miss anything. I’d be shocked if I don’t have several tidbits that’ll be new to you!

I’ve been reading everything I can about Spotlight Caches. I’ve read every answer in the #team-answers channel on the official Marvel Snap Discord. I’ve read Twitter threads containing answers to obscure questions. I even asked a handful of my own questions to Glenn Jones, Principal Game Designer at Second Dinner. He was kind enough to send back some answers (and during the studio’s summer break! 🤯).

Spotlight Caches are a new type of reward box that will appear on the CL track. In essence, they contain cards and variants. The cards are always from S4/S5. The variants can be Rare, Super Rare, or even new, time-exclusive Spotlight Variants.

Second Dinner has attached a hefty promise to the Spotlight Cache. “Spotlight Cache means more cards… for more players than ever before.” Sounds good, right? I don’t think anybody would be against that! Of course, the devil is in the details.

The Details

Starting around CL 500, Spotlight Caches will replace Collector’s Caches and Collector’s Reserves every 120 CL. That’s 1 in every 10–15 Collector’s Caches at CL 500–994, and 1 in every 10 Collector’s Reserves starting at CL 1,006.

The Spotlight Cache has its own independent pool of 4 rewards. Each reward starts a card, but will turn into a variant instead if you already own the card. Each time you open a Spotlight Cache, you get a random reward from the pool. The reward you get does not get replaced in the pool. In other words, the pool shrinks each time you draw from it. That means you can guarantee you’ll get every reward in a pool by drawing from it 4 times.

The pool of 4 rewards resets every week. Simple math shows you need to earn 40 Collector’s Reserves (or 480 CL) to have enough Spotlight Caches to obtain every reward from a single pool. That’s far more than most players acquire in a single week, so you’ll probably want to save up your Spotlight Caches for the reward pools that you’re most interested in. The team is planning to announce the Spotlight Cache reward pools at the start of each season to help us plan ahead (presumably, all of this season’s reward pools will be announced soon).

Featured Spotlight Cards

3 of the rewards each week will be specific S4/S5 cards hand-selected by the dev team. These will be the same for all players. On weeks where a brand-new card is entering S4/S5, that card will occupy 1 of the featured spots.

Note that this “auto-feature” excludes Season Pass cards that are entering S5 once their season ends (likely to avoid devaluing the Premium Season Pass). These cards will eventually be featured, just not as soon as they enter S5. I asked Glenn about this timing. His response was, “We don’t have a firm line. Probably within 6-12 weeks after the season ends.”

By the way, Big Bads (AKA cards that are permanent members of S5) will be featured in the Spotlight Cache sometimes.

The team has stated that every week’s Spotlight will have awesome enough rewards that you won’t want to hoard your Spotlight Caches. Glenn told me, “Our goal is to keep the appeal of caches approximately balanced from week to week, including the week starting the Season Pass (where we have to compensate for no new card).” That makes me think those weeks will be the most likely to feature Big Bads, popular cards (like Jeff the Baby Land Shark), and powerful cards (like Darkhawk).

That last quote from Glenn is actually part of the answer he gave when I asked if the featured positions will favor S4 cards over S5 cards. He said there will likely be more S4 cards in Spotlight Caches overall. I imagine there are several reasons for this. One such reason can be deduced by the fact his whole answer included the goal of consistent Spotlight appeal. That is, a baseline of featuring more S4 cards than S5 cards helps the team balance the allure of each week’s Spotlight Cache.

This reminds me of the dials for card balance that Glenn has talked about before. Magneto has lots of dials to adjust his overall power. How many cards does he pull? What types of cards does he pull? Neither changing his power to 11 or 13 would make a massive difference. Wasp doesn’t have dials like that. There’s just not space to change Wasp — 2 power steps on Yellowjacket’s territory and 0 power would be a very harsh nerf. Having the Spotlight feature more S4 cards provides more dials and more space to adjust its overall excitement.

So, cards are being manually selected in order to make sure each week’s lineup is exciting. Because it’s a manual process, it is possible that the rotation of cards will not be even. On Discord, Glenn said, “Yes, a card could theoretically appear twice before another appeared once… I’m not sure if it will happen; that depends on the card and circumstances.”

Spotlight Variants

The Spotlight reward pool will always start with 4 rewards. So what happens if you already have one of the featured cards?

Well, any featured card you already have will be replaced with a variant of the same card (e.g., Knull will be replaced with a Knull variant). These replacement variants will be a brand-new type — the Spotlight Variant. These feature killer artwork (many were originally planned to be Ultimate Variants) and will be exclusive to the Spotlight Cache for at least 6 months.

You might be wondering how you’re supposed to pick up a Spotlight Variant when you don’t have its card yet. There are a couple ways!

First, if you acquire one of the currently featured cards using a non-Spotlight method (like the Token Shop), the card in your Spotlight reward pool will instantly be replaced with its associated Spotlight Variant.

Second, if you empty an entire reward pool, it will refill back to 4 rewards again. The 3 featured cards will remain the same. Of course, at this point you will definitely already own all 3 cards — so they’ll be swapped out for their Spotlight Variants. If you already have the Spotlight Variant (because you got it in the first reward pool), it will be replaced with a Premium Mystery Variant (more on those in a couple sections).

If you empty a second entire reward pool in a week, it will refill back to 4 rewards again. At that point, all 3 featured spots will be occupied by Premium Mystery Variants. You could keep emptying the reward pool as many times as you wanted, but the value proposition goes way down once you’ve collected all the Spotlight Variants.

What happens if you miss a Spotlight Variant that you really wanted? Well, they’re all timed exclusives in the Spotlight Cache. On Discord, Second Dinner team member Tucker said, “We might rarely re-run them in a Spotlight Cache at some point and we might (after at least 6 months, most likely more) release them into another system such as Ultimate Variants.”

I asked Glenn if all Spotlight Variants will eventually be available in other ways. He answered, “It’s our intent for all Spotlight Variants to eventually become available in other ways, but it could be a very long time before a specific variant sees that secondary release. We’re exploring all of the options for secondary release, including Ultimates.”

Random S4/S5 Card

We’ve covered that Spotlight reward pools start with 4 rewards in them. 3 are featured cards. The 4th is a Random S4/S5 Card. When you receive this, it can randomly be any card currently in S4/S5.

The chance of the random card being from S5 is lower, but definitely less extreme than before (when S5 was 10 times more rare than S4). As far as I know, the only place this has been mentioned by a Second Dinner employee is in the private Discord channel for members of the MARVEL SNAP Creator Program. My application into the program has not yet been accepted, so this is second-hand information. The chances were said to be 66% for S4 and 33% for S5. My understanding is that these percentages came with the caveat that they were to the best of the employee’s memory.

I meant it when I said the randomly selected card can be any S4/S5 card! It could be one of the featured Spotlight cards, last season’s Season Pass card, Galactus, or even… any of the S4/S5 cards that you already own. That’s right, in what I believe is a first for Marvel Snap, this random pull does not have protection against duplicates.

In the event that the randomly selected card is one you already own, you’ll instead receive a Premium Mystery Variant (covered in the next section).

In the #ask-the-team channel on Discord, TrueTitan14 asked why not have duplicate protection for the Random S4/S5 Card.

Tucker’s answer was really interesting:

I’mma get downvoted but I’m going for it anyways

We wanted the ability for a Spotlight Cache to contain *anything*, so we originally tossed in Mystery S4/S5 (with no dupes). But the math didn’t work; it led to a scenario where players who already own almost all of the S4/S5s had a 50% chance of getting the newest card after 1 pull (since Mystery S4/S5 would also give them the newest card). Felt too P2W to us.

So we were at a crossroads, we could either replace Mystery S4/S5 with a 4th featured card or preserve the ‘any card is obtainable’ vibe by downgrading Mystery S4/S5 to Random S4/S5. Really wanted to preserve ‘any card is obtainable’, so went down that path.

Tucker – What’s the purpose of removing dupe protection from random series 4/5 cards?

I’ve seen some cynical takes from players regarding the lack of dupe protection. I’d rather take Tucker’s answer at face value. At the very least, I agree that a 50% chance to maintain a complete collection with a single Spotlight Cache each week would be too good.

Tucker makes an interesting distinction between “Mystery S4/S5” and “Random S4/S5”. It seems like duplicate protection is part of what “Mystery” means in-game. That’s why this reward isn’t called a “Mystery S4/S5 Card”.

I previously thought an alternative solution to the problem Tucker described would be to add duplicate protection and prevent the random card from being one of the featured Spotlight cards. That was before I’d done much math on the new system, though. By now, I think that fix would make the system too generous for players with nearly-complete collections. You might think that sounds ridiculous now, but maybe you’ll agree by the end of this guide! 😉

Premium Mystery Variant

I’ve already mentioned both ways to acquire Premium Mystery Variants from Spotlight Caches. They’re the main fallback reward — they occupy featured spots when you already have the Spotlight Variant and you’ll get one whenever the Random S4/5 Card picks a card you already own.

Premium Mystery Variants are just like Mystery Variants except that they can contain Super Rare variants and do not contain any Pixel variants. In case you didn’t know, Super Rare variants are the ones that go for 1,200 Gold in the shop. You can filter our variants database by rarity if you wanna check out which ones are Super Rare!

Premium Mystery Variants are being introduced with Spotlight Caches, but Tucker has informed us via Discord that, “You can expect Premium Mystery Variants to show up in some other places in the game at some point as well.” We don’t have any further details, but I’d pick bundles and the Premium Season Pass as the most likely other places.

Just to be super clear, Premium Mystery Variants are completely separate from Spotlight Variants. Additionally, the random variant you get from a Premium Mystery Variant will not be a Spotlight Variant.

Having Every Variant

This section is going to apply to very few players, but I thought it was worth including for the sake of being comprehensive. Plus, it’s interesting!

If Premium Mystery Variants are the main fallback reward, what happens if you already have every variant in the Premium Mystery Variant pool?

SiX1SE7EN is one such player. He’s a great follow if you want to keep up with which new variants are made available in-game, and then to see what they look like animated!

He pointed me to an answer he got on Twitter from Second Dinner game designer Rada. If you get a Premium Mystery Variant, but it has no variant to give you, it “…will go down multiple fallback tracks all the way down to random avatars, and then boosters if you own all the avatars.”

Rada glossed over fallback rewards before avatars. I’m not sure what these are. Perhaps a Premium Mystery Variant could give you a Pixel variant if you had every Rare and Super Rare but not every Pixel?

Can you imagine opening a Spotlight Cache and getting boosters?! 😆 I’m really curious how many boosters that would be, even though it’s relevant to almost nobody!

Changes to Collector’s Caches and Collector’s Reserves

There are other changes coming to Collector’s Caches and Collector’s Reserves (the blue and orange reward boxes on the CL track) on top of the fact that one will be replaced with a Spotlight Cache every 120 CL.

They function the same as before, but the rewards they contain are changing significantly. The easiest way to explain these changes is just to drop some lovely infographics by our very own Kirallas. I’ll include text with the same information in case you prefer that.

The infographics include information about Season Caches and the Token Shop. As far as we know, those two systems are staying the same for now (so I’ll be skipping them in the tables).

Old System

Collector’s Cache

CL 506–994

Gives rewards in groups of 4.
The order of rewards within a group is random.

2 × Card Cache
100% S3 Card

1 × Token Cache
20% 200 Tokens
20% 300 Tokens
20% 400 Tokens
20% 500 Tokens
20% 600 Tokens
—
Totals 4,000 Tokens in a group of 10 Token Caches.
The order of rewards within a group is random.

1 × Currency Cache
40% 150 Gold
40% 200 Credits
20% 350 Credit

Collector’s Reserve

CL 1,006+

Gives rewards in groups of 4.
The order of rewards within a group is random.

1 × Card Reserve
90% S3 Card
10% S4 Card
—
Totals 9 S3 and 1 S4 in a group of 10 Card Reserves.
The order of rewards within a group is random.
Each S3 card has an independent 1% chance to be a S5 card instead.
S3 Cards are replaced by 100 Tokens if you are S3 complete.
S4 Cards are replaced by 100 Tokens if you are S4 complete.

1 × Token Reserve
20% 200 Tokens
20% 300 Tokens
20% 400 Tokens
20% 500 Tokens
20% 600 Tokens
—
Totals 4,000 Tokens in a group of 10 Token Caches.
The order of rewards within a group is random.

1 × Currency Reserve
40% 200 Gold
40% 300 Credits
20% 400 Credits

1 × Cosmetic Reserve
40% Mystery Variant
40% Avatar
30% Title

New System

Collector’s Cache

CL 506–994

Gives rewards in groups of 4.
The order of rewards within a group is random.

2 × Card Cache
100% S3 Card

1 × Token Cache
100% 100 Tokens

1 × Credits Cache
80% 150 Credits
20% 200 Credits

Collector’s Reserve

CL 1,006+

Gives rewards in groups of 9.
The order of rewards within a group is random.

2 × Card Reserve
100% S3 Card
—
S3 Cards are replaced by 50 Tokens if you are S3 complete.

1 × Token Reserve
100% 100 Tokens

3 × Credits Reserve
50% 150 Credits
50% 200 Credits

3 × Cosmetic Reserve
40% Mystery Variant
40% Avatar
30% Title

An Example

Here’s an example of what the rewards from a stretch of 30 Collector’s Reserves (with 3 being replaced by Spotlight Caches) might look like.

The Difference

A comparison between the two systems is trickier than you might expect. You could compare the rewards received from 40 Reserves (and the Spotlight Caches that replace 4 of them), but the new system rewards more Credits overall, which means you climb the CL track and unlock Reserves faster. That means comparing 40 Reserves is not an apples-to-apples comparison.

There are some glaring changes, though! Tokens are severely reduced and gold is gone from the CL track completely. I’ve seen tons of concerns about those two changes specifically. Fear that a reduction in Tokens means less player choice when it comes to card acquisition. Fear that the removal of Gold severely hurts F2P players.

I totally get those concerns. Change is scary, and especially at first glance! As I already mentioned, an apples-to-apples comparison between the old and new system isn’t simple. That makes it really hard to tell if the upsides of the new economy (Spotlight Caches, weekend missions, etc.) outweigh its downsides. Both Tokens and Gold ultimately get spent to acquire more cards and cosmetics. As such, there should be some amount of additional cards and cosmetics that would make up for the reduced Tokens and Gold.

Does the new system add enough rewards to justify the rewards it is taking away? Well, solving that tricky problem is the main reason this guide has taken so long to produce. In order to get as close as we can to an apples-to-apples comparison, Kirallas and I built models of both systems. We’ll get into that soon!

The Purpose

Besides the previously stated straightforward goal of more cards for more players, Spotlight Caches are meant to totally shake up the card acquisition system. The CL track was previously the primary source of new cards until you completed your S3 collection. It will now be the primary source of new cards for all players. The Token Shop is intentionally being demoted to a secondary source of cards.

If you open every Spotlight Cache you earn as soon as you open it, then yeah — you’re going to have severely reduced control over which cards you acquire. Saving up Spotlight Caches and being selective about which weeks you open them is the solution. That’s all it takes for Spotlight Caches to represent lots of agency over your card acquisition.

The team has promised a good UI for the Spotlight system. One that’ll make it easy to tell at any time exactly what rewards are left in your Spotlight Cache reward pool.

Some people feel like the new system is at odds with Second Dinner’s known goal of reducing resource hoarding. I totally disagree.

Previously, it was best to hoard all Collector’s Reserves once you were S4 complete. That was because any Reserve could be the 1-in-40 that would reward a S4 card (unless you knew where your sets of 40 started and ended, in which case you could safely clear a set of 40 that you had already drawn a S4 card from). Now, you’ll only benefit from saving up Spotlight Caches. Having no reason to hoard Collector’s Reserves is already a 90% reduction in hoarding on the CL track.

You won’t need to hoard as many Spotlight Caches either. It only takes 4 to guarantee you can get a specific featured card. Or 8, if you want to also guarantee getting the Spotlight Variant for a featured card you don’t own yet. You’ll never need more than 8 in the same week. Admittedly, you might save up more so that you can pull new releases from back-to-back weeks, for example. There’s so much less benefit from saving up 50 Spotlight Caches in the new system than there was for saving up 50 Collector’s Reserves in the old system.

The new system also makes Token hoarding less valuable. We’re about to go deep on optimizing the new system, but for now — consider that S4 and S5 cards are equally attainable when they’re featured in the Spotlight Cache. Their cost is identical within that context, whereas S4 cards will still be half the price of S5 cards in the Token Shop. That means you don’t need to save your Tokens for series drops. You can acquire new S5 cards with Spotlight Caches and as a little bonus every now and then, you’ll have enough Tokens to buy a brand-new direct-to-Series-4 release in the Token Shop.

I do think there’s still the chance that Second Dinner will make more changes to discourage hoarding from getting out of control. They’re anti-hoarding both because it can hurt monetization and because it’s less fun. But we’re totally safe for now. As I’ve just presented, I actually think hoarding is one of the problems this shakeup to the game’s economy solves.

Does it successfully solve card acquisition and monetization? In short, yes. That is, as long as the game is able to earn enough money after shifting the monetization balance towards cosmetics.

Card acquisition is much improved, especially for players with smaller collections. The new system has much stronger rubberbanding to pull your collection completion to a certain percentage. Say the game’s systems collectively pull you towards 80% collection completion. Rubberbanding means the further you are from 80%, the more the game tries to pull you to 80%. That works in both directions: card acquisition is much faster when you’re at 25% completion than 35%, and much slower when you’re at 95% completion than 85%.

Think about it! If you open all 4 Spotlight Caches in a week as a player with a very small collection, it’s likely all 3 featured cards and the Random S4/S5 Card will be new to you. Contrast that with a player whose collection is nearly complete — it’s likely the brand-new release for that week will be the only new card they draw.

It’s also worth mentioning how much better acquisition is for newer and rarer cards. It’s evident with S5 cards, especially. Making new releases more accessible helps make each one more exciting and impactful, too.

Monetization is improved, too. The biggest critiques being that new cards are expensive (which I already addressed with card acquisition) and that the game is pay-to-win. Spotlight Caches as a whole shift more of the game’s monetization to cosmetics (through Spotlight Variants). New cards are easier for everybody to acquire, and there will now be 3 top-tier variants added to the game every single week. As long as enough players are willing to throw money at cosmetics, this should be a win for everybody. F2P players get bigger (and more intentional) collections. Players with disposable incomes who love this game’s killer art get more of it to collect and show off.

The Transition

What We Know Now That the Update is Out

The first Spotlight Cache appears at CL 490. They’ll continue to appear every 120 CL after that.

The following table shows the CL where Spotlight Caches appear. If you haven’t updated your game yet, you can safely open every Collector’s Cache and Collector’s Reserve that doesn’t appear in the table (or wouldn’t appear if it continued counting by 120 beyond 30,370). You can then update your game and any you left unopened at the CL shown in the table will be unopened Spotlight Caches.

What We Knew Before the Update Released

When the Token Shop was introduced, players were given some Tokens to help them get started with the Token Shop right away. Glenn confirmed on Twitter that there won’t be a similar gift coming with Spotlight Caches.

No, we won’t be doing that. Unlike tokens, these are replacing existing rewards that players can already redeem for known content.

In the announcement for Spotlight Caches, Second Dinner said any saved up Collector’s Caches and Collector’s Reserves will transform into Spotlight Caches “at the appropriate rate once the new system is live.”

They intentionally haven’t given any more details. I asked Glenn about it and he responded, “We’re not releasing any information that would encourage any amount of trying to game the transition, sorry.”

The thing is, if we knew exactly how the transition worked, then it’s likely the best move would be to open every hoarded Collector’s Cache and Collector’s Reserve except those that will become Spotlight Caches. That would provide the best of both worlds — both a nice final burst of Gold and Tokens and better access to S4/S5 cards with Spotlight Caches.

I personally think the most likely transition method will be that unopened Collector’s Caches and Collector’s Reserves at specific CL number will switch over. On top of that, I think the specific CL numbers will be the same for all players. That solution is the simplest and neatest. However, it could be something completely different. What if instead they just converted 10% of what you haven’t opened? In that case there’d be no way to game the system (but there’d be no harm in telling us how the transition will work if it couldn’t be gamed 🤔).

With help from roguelike developer Andrew Doull, I guessed which CL would convert.

We’ve got 3 hints to work with:

1. Spotlight Caches start at CL 500
2. Spotlight Caches appear every 120 CL
3. Spotlight Caches replace Collector’s Caches and Collector’s Reserves

This table shows every Collector’s Cache from CL 498 to CL 610, and then adds 120 CL to them, 7 times each. Only 5 of the 15 columns contain exclusively numbers that are Collector’s Caches or Collector’s Reserves.

Now we look at only those 5 columns and consider where Spotlight Caches are most likely to start. It’s unlikely to start at exactly CL 500 or 620 (500 + 120) because neither of those are associated with a Collector’s Cache.

514 is the closest to 500. 610 and 634 are the closest to 620. That leads us to this table.

In my opinion, you are very safe to open any Cache or Reserve that doesn’t appear in any of these columns (or wouldn’t, if you continued extending them by 120 CL at a time).

It’s not a gamble I’m taking personally, but if you want a shot at gaming the system, I think this provides a really good chance. On top of catching some numbers I’d missed, Andrew noticed that all Reserves on the left side of the CL track happen to land on a safe number.

You can choose your level of risk here. For the following risk levels, “column” includes numbers above 3,610 that would appear if you continued each column by 120 CL at a time.

• Safest: Don’t open any Caches or Reserves
• Very Safe: Don’t open any Caches or Reserves that appear in a column on the above table
• Safe: Don’t open any Caches or Reserves that appear in a green or blue column on the above table (columns starting 514, 586, and 610)
• A Bit Risky: Don’t open any Caches or Reserves that appear in a blue column on the above table (columns starting 514 and 610)

In response to these tables, @HighScoreZAP offered an alternative solution that might be the best play if you want to take advantage of the transition. He pointed out that because Spotlight Caches require the game to be patched, you could delay updating your own game, and learn from early updaters exactly how the conversion will work.

I asked Twitter for anecdotes that could either support or deny the possibility of this strategy working. I received mixed reports, some even seemed to contradict each other! After synthesizing those responses, this is my best understanding:

• The PC client forces you to update
• If you log in to an updated version of the game, you won’t be able to play on other platforms until they are updated, too
• It should be possible to open Collector’s Caches and Collector’s Reserves on an older version on mobile
• The sooner the better — it’s more likely to be possible if you do it before the update is even available on your mobile platform, and you will eventually be forced to update in order to play (this usually takes a few days)

So, there’s no guarantee this approach will work, but it doesn’t require any guesswork about which rewards will convert to Spotlight Caches. If you’d like to take this path, remember not to open the PC version after it updates. You may be able to use this method on PC by having the game open before the update hits and then leaving it open. Alternatively, you could just use a mobile version of the game (in which case, be sure to disable automatic updates on your device). Patches for the PC version usually land around 3 PM GMT on Tuesday. You may want to give yourself extra time just in case!

If you’re wondering what I’ll be doing personally, I’ll be trying to benefit from early updaters (99% of my play is on iOS, anyway). I feel good about the CL predictions in the above tables, but if I have to lose something, I’d rather lose Gold and Tokens than Spotlight Caches.

The New Economy and You

The in-game economy will be more flexible after the introduction of Spotlight Caches. By flexibility, I mean how much you can bend the economy to yield different rewards based on how you interact with it. The old system had some flexibility — for example, it was wiser to spend your tokens on S5 cards than S4 cards, because only S4 cards had a guaranteed drop rate on the CL track. The new system is more sensitive to both luck and player interaction.

We’re getting to the fun part — the analysis! We’ll be comparing the old system and the new (using our models to get as close to apples-to-apples as we can). We’ll be covering ways you can optimize the system. We’ll compare different strategies, too. It turns out there’s no universal best strategy. The strategy that will be best for you depends on how full your collection is, what kind of spender you are, and what rewards you value most.

Why You Should Optimize

I already mentioned how the rubberbanding on your collection completion percentage will be stronger in the new system than it was before. In case that was in a section you skipped, rubberbanding refers to the game systems pulling you towards a certain outcome. A classic example is Mario Kart, where being further behind means you receive more powerful items from item boxes.

It might be a complicated way to start, but I want to show a really cool chart that shows what ownership percentage of S4/S5 cards (combined) each system and strategy rubberbands us toward. I think it’s a worthwhile starting point because it lets us do a quick comparison of many different factors AND it helps prove the benefit of employing some of the optimization strategies I’ll be sharing with you.

The Gravity Line

A couple weeks ago, Equinox reached out to have me consult on a project she was working on — an early version of this chart. I know from personal experience that it’s a bit intimidating at first, but it’s a really elegant solution once it clicks. 🤩

The horizontal axis on the chart represents the percentage of S4/S5 cards that you owned right before the start of the 3-season period. The vertical axis represents how many cards you will add to your collection during the 13-week period — these can be cards that existed before the 13-week period started, or any of the cards added during it.

Look at any of the “system” lines to see how many cards you can expect to acquire with that method. You’ll see the old system is really flat. In the old system, card acquisition is consistent regardless of how full your collection already is; it only dips towards the end because you eventually start running out of S4 cards to get from the CL track (at which point you would either hoard Reserves or have your S4 draws fallback to 100 Tokens).

Looking at the lines for the new system reveals how much the new system boosts card acquisition when you don’t have many of the S4/S5 cards. It’s because hardly any of the featured Spotlight cards or Random S4/S5 Cards would be duplicates. This boost fades away as you approach 100% collection completion, but you’ll see the new system still outperforms the old system — even if you open every Spotlight Cache as soon as you earn it!

The chart’s already cool if you leave it at that, but it gets better! The key to unlocking it is the “gravity line”. It represents how many cards you would need to acquire in the 13-week period to stay at the same completion level you had before the 13-week period. You need all 13 new cards to maintain 100%, 6.5 of them (50% of 13) to maintain 50%, and none of them to maintain 0%.

Now, pick a line and look for where it crosses the gravity line. This intersection marks the completion percentage of S4/S5 that that combination of factors will pull you towards. See why Equinox named it the gravity line? 😉 It’s the point your collection will be rubberbanded towards.

Let’s look at some examples. First, the F2P line for the old system (dotted pink). It crosses the gravity line at around 64% ownership of S4/S5. Compare that to the lowest F2P line for the new system (dotted green), which crosses the gravity line at around 73% ownership. That’s a big improvement! With the current size of S4/S5, that’s 2.25 more cards! Now check out the highest F2P line for the new system (dotted white). It crosses the gravity line at around 83% ownership! That’s a huge improvement. It puts F2P players in the new system at very nearly the same level of S4/S5 ownership as Season Pass (SP) purchasers in the old system.

Anything higher than 100% on the horizontal axis represents an impossible situation, but I extended the chart in order to show where the top-performing lines would intersect with the gravity line. Even with an intersection over 100%, you can’t have higher than 100% completion. It remains true, though, that the further you are from where the game is trying to rubberband you, the stronger the force of the rubberbanding. In that sense, an intersection at 105% is pulling you up harder than an intersection at 100%. One way to look at that is that the higher percentage allows more wiggle room for mistakes, bad luck, or missing some missions. Another way to look at it is that you’ll hit 100% and still have resources left over. Look at how many cards the top line is earning in 13 weeks when is starts at 100% S4/S5 ownership — a little over 14! In actuality, the most cards a player starting at 100% could acquire in 13 weeks is 13 (y’know, as long as Marvel Snap continues to release exactly 1 card per week). That means the combination of factors represented by the solid white line will lead you to acquiring every card in the game and have resources leftover to spend on Spotlight/Ultimate Variants or to carry into the next season.

Chart Details

You only need to read this section if you want a deeper look into the math and decisions that went into making the chart with the gravity line.

The math in the chart assumes S3 completion. There are many players who aren’t there yet, but any player who plays semi-actively will get there. S3 acquisition is slightly better in the old system (9 vs. 8 within 40 Reserves, but the new system lets you climb CL faster). S3 acquisition is pretty inflexible. Unlike S4/S5 acquisition, there’s not much you can do to speed it up.

The chart is based on 3 consecutive seasons of the game. This is because some seasons are 4 weeks long and others are 5. There’s no consistent pattern of which season is the 5-weeker, but it’s always 1 in a set of 3. I assume the 5-weeker gets moved as needed to control how seasons align with things like updates, OTAs, and studio-wide breaks. Note how groups of 13 weeks means12seasons last almost a full year (52 weeks, 364 days). As an example of the problem with looking at only 4 weeks at a time, it would make it look like there were12Season Pass cards over 48 weeks.

Here’s a breakdown on what the different factors mean:

• Old System: Based on the version of the economy in mid-May
• New System: Based on the economy after the imminent addition of Spotlight Caches
• F2P: Spending no money
• SP: Buying the Premium Season Pass (but spending no other money)
• Gold to Credits: Converting your Gold to Credits by refilling your missions
• Gold to Tokens: Converting your Gold to Tokens by using Token Tuesday bundles
• Spotlight — Strategic: I’m about to cover this, but it’s essentially saving your Spotlight Caches in order to target specific Spotlight weeks
• Spotlight — Open ASAP: Open every Spotlight Cache as soon as you earn it

If you read over the different combinations of systems and strategies, you might notice that I excluded the combination of the old system with converting your Gold to Tokens (using Token Tuesdays). This is because the benefit over converting your Gold to Credits (using is incredibly small — only yielding about 0.2 extra S4/S5 cards over 13 weeks.

The Best $ Deal in the Game

The SP factor in our model represents buying the Premium Season Pass and nothing else. In case you didn’t really notice, I wanna specifically call it out — the new economy makes it possible to maintain a complete card collection by buying only the Premium Season Pass.

That’s really good! Vastly improved card acquisition for all players means the game will be less pay-to-win than ever before. Of course, $10 per month still isn’t free, but it’s a fraction of what it used to cost to maintain a 100% complete card collection.

The Premium Season Pass has always been the best real-money deal in Marvel Snap. Spotlight Caches will let you stretch it further than ever. Weekend missions make it even more valuable (as the Premium Season Pass opens up weekend missions as another source of Gold).

The game will still be very playable (and card acquisition very improved!) if you aren’t a spender. In case you are, the Premium Season Pass is definitely the place to start.

Our Models

Ultimately, the main purpose of our models was to support direct comparisons between different combinations of factors. The old system vs. the new. F2P vs. Premium Season Pass. Converting your Gold to Credits vs. Tokens. It also lets us see the impact of optimizations — mostly to make sure they’re actually optimizations. Secondarily, to see how big of an impact each optimization has. We have some with minimal impact and others with dramatic impact.

We tried to make the models as comprehensive as possible, but they’re imperfect. They should still be really good tools for approximating numbers as well as comparing different factors — with all else being equal.

I’d like to cover some of the assumptions we made. This is another place where you can skip the rest of this section if you’re not interested — but I know some of you will be (and those are my people 😌).

There are some basic assumptions. Like, that things will basically keep working the same way they are currently working unless we have specifically been told otherwise. That covers things like:

• 1 card is released each week
• Token Tuesday bundles will continue to be available
• 1 in 3 seasons is 5 weeks long
• Season XP acquisition and Season Cache rewards are not changing

Other assumptions are smaller optimizations we decided not to show the with vs. without for. It would get out of hand if we showed comparisons for every single meaningful factor. That covers things like:

• Tokens are spent optimally (on S5 cards in the old system and S4 cards in the new system)
• You want to upgrade your cards (this matters because we count every new card and variant acquired as a 25-Credit discount — representative of the discount you get when upgrading a card from Common to Uncommon)

Some assumptions were necessary due to a lack of information from Second Dinner. For instance, before this weekend, we had no idea what Weekend Missions were gonna look like for the first week of each season. I picked a conservative assumption that Weekend Missions would offer an average of 300 Tokens per week, except to offer no tokens at all on the first weekend of a season.

We made assumptions about how actively you play. I assumed most players interested in optimizing that game are fairly active players. Our models assume you’ll get 15 Season Caches in 4-week seasons and 26 in 5-week seasons.

Those were educated assumptions. I considered that every daily + weekly mission adds up to 54,300 XP in a 4-week season or 62,875 in a 5-week season (thanks to Jahel Anael for tracking and sharing that).

Our models assume perfectly average luck. The new economic system makes luck a fairly large factor. It’s possible you’ll have a really bad streak where getting the card you want takes 4 Spotlight Caches multiple weeks in a row. In general though, your luck should migrate closer to the average over time.

The old system is based on mid-May because that’s around the time that the first pieces of the new system started rolling out. That may be controversial, but I don’t think it makes sense to count flexible series drops, direct-to-S4 card releases, or weekend missions as part of the old system, even if they had some overlap. Those newer features were all implemented with the knowledge that Spotlight Caches were coming. They were never meant to be permanent fixtures of the old system. 

When converting Gold to Credits, the models use mission refill (120 Gold for 2 new daily missions).

When converting Gold to Tokens, the models use Token Tuesday bundles. The old system uses the average pricing of past Token Tuesday bundles. The new system uses the new Token Tuesday pricing (1,4000 Gold for 1,000 Tokens).

Player Types

I mentioned earlier that I tried to pick a few specific types of players that could overall be close to representing most players. Here’s what I went with and a little bit of the reasoning.

A
S3 Incomplete
S4/S5 Incomplete (Old) / 50% (New)

50% as the lowest value for S4/S5 completion may seem high, but if you look back at the chart with the gravity line, you’ll see that each other line crosses the gravity line well above 50%. The new system vastly improves S4/S5 acquisition for players who are still working on S3. If you’re not already at 50% S4/S5 completion, you will be soon.

B
S3 Complete
S4/S5 Incomplete (Old) / 50% (New)

This one is straightforward and requires little explanation. Everybody who plays somewhat actively will reach S3 completion. It takes a while to get there, but once you do, it’s really easy to maintain (especially right now when the rate of series drops into S3 are super low). This represents most players who have been playing for a longer time.

C
S3 Complete
S4/S5 Complete

I know 100% completion isn’t very common. I chose it because it’s a valuable data point even if you’re not there yet (or don’t anticipate ever being there). In the new system, your card acquisition rate gets lower and lower as you approach 100% collection completion. This means that the 100% mark represents the worst possible card acquisition rate.

Getting Strategic with Spotlight Caches

This is what you’re here for, right?

There are a handful of ways to stretch your Spotlight Caches the furthest. They’re pretty straightforward, but… I’ve done the math to back them up!

Let’s start with the least impactful and ramp up.

#1) Save on Spotlight Variants

If there’s a Spotlight Variant you really want, and it’s for a card you don’t have yet (maybe it’s the brand-new release that week), it’s gonna cost you a lot of Spotlight Caches to claim it as your own.

First you’d have to open 4 Spotlight Caches just to acquire the card and force the Spotlight reward pool to refill. Then you’ve got an equal chance of the Spotlight Variant you want taking 1, 2, 3, or 4 additional Spotlight Caches. The average of that is 2.5 Spotlight Caches on top of the 4 you had to open first. So you’re looking at 5–8 Spotlight Caches just to get the Spotlight Variants you’re pining for, with an average of 6.5.

Or, you could acquire the card a different way first. This will be an important use of tokens for anybody who loves variants. If you buy the missing card with tokens before opening any Spotlight Caches, then the card will be swapped out for its Spotlight Variant in the first reward pool.

You’re still looking at an average 2.5 Spotlight Caches to get your target, saving you 4.

Artgerm Jean Grey, anyone?

4 Spotlight Caches at the cost of 3,000 or 6,000 tokens is a great savings, but I’m ranking this as low impact because it’s only helpful if you’re targeting a Spotlight Variant.

#2) Double Your Token Value

Within the 3 featured Spotlight slots, S4 and S5 cards have equal cost.

In the Token Shop, a S4 card costs 3,000 Tokens where a S5 card costs 6,000.

Brand-new card releases (except for Season Pass cards) are guaranteed a featured position in the Spotlight on the week they release. And ~⅓ of new cards will be releasing directly into S4.

Put that all together, and as long as there’s both an S4 and an S5 card that you want, it’s cheaper if you spend your Tokens on the S4 card than the S5 card.

Think about it! We already know from the previous optimization that targeting a single prize in a Spotlight reward pool requires 2.5 Spotlight Caches on average.

So, if you get a S4 card with tokens and a S5 card with Spotlight Caches, you’re down 3,000 Tokens and 2.5 Spotlight Caches. Vice versa, and you’re down 6,000 Tokens and 2.5 Spotlight Caches.

This optimization is far more meaningful if buying a card with tokens will let you completely skip opening Spotlight Caches for the week. If you’re able to skip a week of Spotlight Caches by buying a card you want with tokens instead, then buying a S5 card with tokens saves you 2.5 Spotlight Caches at the cost of 6,000 tokens. Buying a S4 card with tokens saves you the same 2.5 Spotlight Caches at the cost of 3,000 tokens.

#3) Targeting Spotlight Weeks

This is the main optimization with Spotlight Caches. Don’t open them as soon as you unlock them. Instead, plan ahead and save your Spotlight Caches. Pick which weeks contain the rewards you’re most interested in.

Once your target week has arrived, only start opening Spotlight Caches if you could open 4 in a row. This guarantees you’ll end up with the reward you want. However, Spotlight Caches are precious! As soon as you get the card you want, stop opening Spotlight Caches. Start saving up to 4+ again for another week that has rewards you want.

This is the method used in the model that lets the new system hit 100% collection completion with buying only the Premium Season Pass. This strategy lets you get every single new card the week it comes out. You don’t open any Spotlight Caches on weeks where the new card is a Season Pass card you can buy with $10 or on weeks where the new card is released directly to S4 and you’ve got the 3,000 Tokens to buy it.

Go back to the gravity line chart and compare the card acquisition rates between opening Spotlight Caches ASAP and opening them strategically. Or I can save you some time — the difference is about 2 new cards every 3 months. That’s a very big difference. The difference comes from the fact that drawing from the same Spotlight in the same week lets you guarantee you’ll get what you want.

This strategy is exactly how you maintain agency in what cards you acquire. In the infographic below, you can see the difference between opening caches as you go and opening them in one week, which is optimal. In the end, opening caches as you get them gives you fewer cards but more variants, which is predictable

#4) Intentional Delay

While targeting specific weeks (#2) is probably the most important Spotlight Cache strategy overall, this one may have the biggest impact.

You can save yourself a lot of Spotlight Caches by opening them on weeks where there are multiple featured rewards that you want.

Here are the average number of Spotlight Caches you’ll need to open to get every featured reward you want, depending on how many you want. Note that which reward you want doesn’t change these averages. Your 2 rewards could be 2 cards, 2 Spotlight Variants, or 1 of each.

1 Reward: 2.5
2 Rewards: 3.33 (1.67 ea.)
3 Rewards: 3.75 (1.25 ea.)

The savings become apparent when you consider how many Spotlight Caches it takes per targeted reward.

Let’s just say for example that you’ve bought every Season Pass card in a year. That’s 12, leaving 40 for you to acquire with Spotlight Caches.

If you acquired all of them in weeks where you needed only a single card from the Spotlight reward pool, it’d require 100 Spotlight Caches on average.

If you acquired all of them in weeks where you needed two cards from the Spotlight reward pool, it’d require only 66.67 Spotlight Caches on average.

That’s a massive savings at the cost of not getting to play with every new toy while it’s shiny and new.

Of course, it’s unlikely that you’d be able to get the perfect weekly lineup to acquire every one of 40 cards on weeks where 2 of them were featured. Let’s redo the math to something more realistic — where you’d acquire half of the cards on weeks where you need 1 card from the Spotlight reward pool, and the other half on weeks where you need 2. That’d be 83.33 — still way cheaper than 100.

That’s far more likely, especially if your collection completion percentage is pretty low. Even if it’s not, you just skip a card you’re not super excited about every now and then. As soon as it gets its second run as a featured Spotlight card, there’s a good chance there will be a brand-new card featured that same week. Et voilà! A Spotlight reward pool where you need 2 of the cards. The exception to this, of course, is if the second run happens on the first week of a new season.

Here’s the ol’ gravity line chart except I took out most of the lines. The darker blue pair is the same blue pair as before. The lighter pair represent the difference it makes to be able to target 2 cards in the Spotlight reward pool for half of the cards you acquire through Spotlight Caches (the other half still coming from Spotlight reward pools where you’re only targeting 1 card). That’s a big, big change! It gives a bigger benefit than you’d get by spending your Gold on Token Tuesdays instead of on refilling daily missions.

This difference is clearly shown in the charts below. Yes, at first glance the difference isn’t very big at 0.37 cards for season pass holders. But within a few seasons this difference will lead to a big loss in the number of cards. So don’t convert Gold into Credits, it’s better to spend it to buy Token Tuesdays or other profitable bundles.

Final Comparisons

And now, some more lovely infographics by Kirallas, using data from our models to compare the systems over the time of a 4-week season.

New vs. Old

For all three of these, no gold or tokens are spent. Credits are spent. Each image covers a different type of player based on how complete a player’s collection is (check out the “Conditions” in the top-left corner of the table to distinguish between them).

A Few Predictions

Based on the time I’ve spent analyzing Spotlight Caches and the new in-game economy it introduces, I’ve got several guesses of things to come. Entirely speculation on my part.

#1: Series Drops Ramp Back Up

I don’t think this is gonna happen right away, but once the pool of S4/S5 cards has been sufficiently inflated to sustain the new Spotlight Cache system, I think we’ll see a higher rate of series drops again. That’s both S5 cards dropping to S4 and S4 cards dropping to S3 (and I guess possibly S5 cards dropping to S3, which Second Dinner has said is something that might happen as a part of flexible series drops). It won’t ever ramp up to its original levels. I think they want S4/S5 to represent a certain percentage of all cards. That means there needs to be a little more S4/S5 cards being added than dropping out. I’m thinking it’ll be 2–3 a month dropping to S3.

#2: Direct-to-S4 Releases Stop

This might be 6–12 months away, but I just… I dunno, I think the new Spotlight system is really generous. If it turns out that premium cosmetics like Spotlight Variants can’t drive enough revenue, Second Dinner will need to tighten the screws a little. Getting rid of direct-to-S4 new releases is a really easy way to start that process. It wouldn’t be very disruptive and it would affect collection complete players far more than anybody else. That’s because collection complete players are trying to keep up with every single new release. Losing the ability to skip a week of Spotlight Variants with 3,000 Tokens would do a good job of making it a bit harder to maintain a full collection.

#3: Ultimate Variants Price Slashed

Mythic Variants have been on the development roadmap for some time. We haven’t heard much about these, but they would be rarer than Ultimate Variants and would feature special VFX (or even unique audio? I’m fuzzy on that point).

Tokens are becoming much more scarce.

If many/all Spotlight Variants are eventually being added to the pool of Ultimate Variants, that pool will suddenly be growing much larger and faster than it ever has before.

If you combine all those things, it seems to me that Ultimate Variants will be made cheaper — maybe 3,000 Tokens? Even within the old economy, it seems hardly anybody is buying the Ultimates (I almost never see them in my opponent’s decks).

Conclusion

Y’all, I’m really excited for Spotlight Caches. The whole new in-game economy they come with seems like it will be very successful. Somehow, the team has managed to invent a system that addresses multiple of the game’s problems AND in a way that benefits every player.

My only serious concern is if the change will hurt the game’s revenue too much. Second Dinner is a company, after all. To be clear, my concern is for us, the players. If Second Dinner ends up dissatisfied with the impact that Spotlight Caches have on the game’s income, it’s a safe bet that monetization will be shifted back further in the direction of P2W. This push towards monetizing cosmetics further may turn out to be effective (would they even risk it if there wasn’t a chance?)! We all know how incredible this game’s art is, and Spotlight Variants look awesome. It’ll be fun to see which ones are added every week.

At the end of the day, I think my last piece of advice is to only optimize the game as much as is fun for you. If worrying about saving your Spotlight Caches is stressing you out, go ahead and open them as they come. Sure, you’ll wind up with more variants and less new cards — but maybe you really enjoy the excitement of a random reward.

I wish you good luck in all your Spotlight draws. 😌💜