MARVEL SNAP

Card Battle games are one of my favorite genres, and I really love most of them. Hearthstone is an all-time favorite, but also MTG: Arena, Gwent, Elder Scrolls Legends, Faeria... really all excellent games. So Marvel Snap being the most acclaimed game in the genre in quite some time makes this a guaranteed banger for me? To my regret: not quite.

Marvel Snap really strips down the genre to a tiny format: 12 card decks and 6 turns. While this is a good for a quick mobile game while taking a dump, it's perhaps not the deep strategy experience with long grindy games you would expect in the genre. The game isn't really a "battle" anyway as the superheroes are not really battling each other but plays a little bit more like a board game where you need to accumulate more points to win. 3 locations on the board and you just drop your cards and the player that has more points wins the game. So the strategy here is mostly just bluffing and outsmarting the opponent and hoping the final turn gives you the winning board.

There's no mulligans, and no resource management outside of your energy (aka mana) and hoping to curve out well so you can land at least a card every turn... so it's a very simple game to play and learn. There's some RNG with the locations having random effects every game, so you need to adapt your strategy based around those and they will screw you occasionally. At this point the game only has a basic mode and the conquest mode, the latter which isn't very interesting and pretty much like basic mode but just with more rounds against the same opponent.

All in all it's an ok game and I don't mind playing it a little bit here and there, but it's not really exciting to me to the point of getting really deep into a card game and deck construction and all that. The F2P model seems fine and perhaps a game easier to return to than something greedy like Hearthstone with its multiple expansions per year, but that's not so relevant when it's not giving me the satisfaction that I crave for in the genre. Worth trying as it's fairly quick learn/play and could be your jam, but not really a top recommendation from me.