Top 5 Things To Know About the New Post-Infinite Rankings

Hello everyone, and welcome to Top 5! I’m Glazer of Snap Judgments: The Official Marvel Snap Zone Podcast, and every week, we’ll be counting down a different Top 5 things you need to know in, around, and about Marvel Snap! Sometimes this will be silly in nature, but we’ll always have some pearls of wisdom to help make you the best (and best adjusted!) Marvel Snap player you can be! This week? The Top 5 Things to Know About the New Post-Infinite Rankings!

5. Pay More Attention To Snap Points Than Rank

Rank seems like an important number, right? How good you are compared to everyone else looks like it should be extremely important. As our friend SafetyBlade explained, from the moment you get Infinite, you have blown the roof off of expectations. Let’s say your rank is 50,000. Well, 8 million people play Snap. For that season, you are at least in the top 0.6% of all Marvel Snap players. Now, the cubes are cumulative in the time you play the game (we’ll talk more about that later), but, given that you hit Infinite this season and some percentage of players didn’t, you’re close enough. I mean, how many of us are in the Top 0.5% of anything in the world with that many players? And, even if these numbers are off a bit, it’s likely you’re still in the top 1% – 3% of players in the game. Rank is silly.

So, why do we care more about Snap Points? Well, what we should care about once we hit this level is improvement. We all want to be better, right? This time we’re looking to someone slightly less personally important to me than SafetyBlade. Ernest Hemmingway reminds us, “There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.” Improve your Snap Points. As you get better, you’ll also improve your rank by accident, and gaining Snap Points is a pretty good motivator to do better than past you.

4. It’s Way More Than Just a Measure of Skill

I’ve been playing since the global launch, and I’ve hit Infinite every season except the truncated first one (when I honestly didn’t even really understand what Infinite was). I’ve never cared about post-Infinite play at all. I usually topped out at, I think, 115, and I played basically memes and tested like crazy to find new decks for content. I started at rank 3,200 (I’m still doing my usual fooling around Infinite, so I’m in the low 4,000s now). I’m good at the game, but, look, I’m ranked that high as a result of the number of games played almost entirely.

The game did not reset everyone at the onset of this new system. Months of cumulative effort went into your cubes and ranking. Took a month off? Well, that didn’t make you worse, but your numbers suffered. Had a weird period where you had to make Spectrum work? Same thing. Got into Series 3 early and opened new cards in the wrong order? None of that makes you a worse Snap player, but it makes you seem worse.

Again, compete against yourself here in terms of the number.

3. Opponent Rank Matters A Lot!

You get way more for beating higher-ranked opponents and lose way more against lower-ranked opponents. But we don’t have real global matchmaking yet, and, even if we did, I’m reasonably sure from talking to everyone that you just get ranked against whoever is available anyway. So, you can’t really control who you play or your match ups. If you play a deck that has any kind of a hard counter, you just sort of… lose to that counter, even with a lower-ranked player. Then you can say goodbye to your cubes!

This creates some weird incentives. If you know the meta, you are incentivized to play the best good-stuff list around into it. Something that beats the meta but has high variance in other matches can really tank your numbers and undo hours of work in mere moments. So, you need to play decks like Darkhawk Good Stuff, Silky Smooth, or the very best Loki. That way, you avoid huge losses, which matter because…

2. Snapping and Retreating is More Important Than Ever

This system cares not one bit for wins except as a vehicle to get more cubes. The rankings seem to be based on cubes as a function of your opponent’s MMR. The problem with this is that opponents with high MMR can really protect their cubes and ranking by being super conservative with their Snaps. They can make sure they’re Snapping and staying in when they’re favored because they are starting from so far ahead. This is one of the biggest problems with this new system, by the way. It weighs games in favor of the player who’s already ahead. They can walk away for one and only hurt their rank a bit, giving up next to no ground and favoring low-risk, low-reward plays.

Can you take advantage of lower MMR/ranked players for easy cubes? It’s risky. Remember, the number being low doesn’t at all mean low skill. The high number almost guarantees high-skill, but the low number? Drawing conclusions from that seems like a trap. Again, measure against yourself.

With the limited information we have, it’s essentially all that’s reasonable.

1. Please, Chill Out – Don’t Judge Everyone (Anyone?) Based On Their Rank

I’ve heard from a lot of streamer friends that viewers are rank-shaming, and, seriously, are you kidding me? I say this extremely seriously (and if you spam emotes, hey, I’m talking to you, too).

The people who play this game with you are real human beings. The streamers who stream start without an audience to try and entertain people and, in Marvel Snap, almost universally are kind and helpful to both their audience and other creators. Want to beat your opponent? Great, it’s a competitive game, but they also have a life with their own problems and concerns. Don’t take your stuff out on them. Let people live their lives without making it worse. If you can, make it better. Treat people like they’re real and they matter. Because they do. And so do you, regardless of your rank or theirs.

Conclusion

Did you enjoy this dive into some nuances of Marvel Snap Strategy? If so, check out the Marvel Snap Zone YouTube where a subject similar to this is in the next episode of the Snap Judgments Podcast (releasing Thursday). That’s also where den does regular coaching videos. Also releasing soon on my YouTube will be tips from most of the best players in Marvel Snap that I’ve been collecting for a while now.

What are your Marvel Snap Tips and Misconceptions? Let us know in the comments!