I was optimistic about the series drop but this is just showing Second dinner is only doing bare minimum. Bad series drop and little to no improvement to Deadpool’s diner. Card acquisition system is busted. I’ve been skipping cards because keys and tokens are hard to come by. A way to disconnect players is when they find themselves without cards for a meta deck and just stop playing. Second dinner has proven time and time again they don’t want to give things to players at a cheap / good rate
The fact that they still promise “better drops in the future” like there is something that forbids them do just drop like 30-40 cards right now. They just don’t want, they could have dropped whatever they want and they decided to do what they did. I won’t hold any hopes of anything getting better unfortunately.
Doesn't really make a difference to me as I don't expect to have every card in the game, this game was never intended for people to have every card in the game. I think I'd be fine with them just boosting the rates at which we get Collector's Tokens somehow. I find it funny that Jeff still hasn't dropped to series 4, but I also don't really care. I'm at about 9K CL and I'm happy with the cards I have, and I'm saving keys for what's coming.
I think you are wrong about the players can't build meta decks, the destroy didn't changed for almost a year, I think everyone can play destroy and destroy always in top 10 decks. So you don't even need to spend keys/tokens on new card, I think destroy deck wouldn't have any change in next 2 years as well.
@@demontferrat So you guys acknowledge the new player grind is terrible, and returning player grind is also bad . So you want to continue to further bloat pool 3, and exaggerate that issue by dropping 30-40 cards😐. That's stupid. It just seems like most of the people complaining Can't correctly identify the issues or want to put in the effort to earn the cards.
@@impkiller5932 I've been playing destroy deck since I completed the deck a year ago. And let me tell you, it's so boring to play 1 SINGLE FREAKING DECK EVERYDAY. Hence, why I quit playing this game a month ago. The copium from players like you are so satisfying to see. And the backlash snap is having right now is super sweet ngl. :)
Not to mention that only Kitty is the really good card there since she's a key card in bounce decks and new players also own the like of Angela and Bishop meaning that KP is a great inclusion and an incentive to play bounce. Snowguard is a lot weaker after Loki's change and Jean Grey has a pretty niche use in ongoing decks but she's replaceble there as well. Not dropping cards such as Knull and Darkhawk is just absurd to me, especially with how f2p their decks are.
A big part of my slowly dying interest is the fear that I can't pause the grind, because if I do, there's no way back. It's sapping the fun out for me personally. You describe a fix well with both suggestions of larger drops per quarter and returning player packs.
This was my problem as well, but in January I was able to overcome this fear and abandon the game completely. I really like watching the game, but playing it is a nightmare so I will never play this again. Try finding other games to play so it can get easier to stop playing Snap
What is the point of dropping a card from 5 to 4 if they keep putting series 4 cards on the spotlight caches? And tokens are so rare for the average players plus we can no longer get series 4 cards from the collector reserves, remember when we could get one series 4 card every 40 reserves with a very small chance of getting a series 5 card, and we used to get up to 6000k tokens per season back then
I don’t have any idea on a real fix, I’ll leave that to developers. However I can’t stress enough that part where you said “that gap to get it right is closing”. I’ve been playing snap since beta and I never thought I’d miss a season and I completely took this season off because I’m so worn out. It feels less like a game and more like a chore. Playing the game in their “fixed” ways for missions so I don’t fall behind on free resources. I was really looking forward to this series drop jump starting some interest, but to come back and play Deadpool’s dinner and then this news really breaks my spirits that they will not get this game right in time. Appreciate the content as always Jeff!
I'm currently at CL~10 k, but decided to stop playing after this recent announcement about the Series Drop. Recently, I kept playing mainly to not fall behind too far. I think that once I stop playing it will be impossible to catch up if I want to return at a later date, which is why I was so reluctant to take a break to begin with. The developers don't seem to have a long-term plan for the game, but are trying to make as much money as quickly as possible. Therefore, I don't expect any real improvements to the card acquisition to ever be implemented, so there is no reason to stick around in the hopes that things may get better one day.
It's real scummy that they hyped up this series drop, just to hype up another one down the road. They're dragging this out to hold on to players with anticipation
So a few questions: how exactly did they hype it up? They made a single post on discord about it recently, and that post was just saying the date when they would be announced. There was no expectations from the post laid out, you can look it up yourself. All the expectations came completely from the community building it up into something SD never said. And this is the root of the problem with this community - they build stuff up way beyond what SD actually says and then get mad when their inflated, unrealistic expectations aren't met. Second question: are we really complaining that they announced when they are planning a future drop now? When the previous one happened, people complained that we didn't know when the next one would happen, now that they told us when they thought the next one would happen, you're still complaining about it? How exactly are they supposed to make you happy here when regardless of what they do you're going to bitch about it? Reactions like this are the reason so many game companies are just choosing not to engage with their communities at all anymore, because they cannot win, it is never a positive or valuable relationship for them.
I'm a dolphin. I have put enough into the game that I have around a dozen keys and 27k tokens saved up. I buy some higher value credit bundles to allow myself to get gold splits faster and I (until recently) kept my gold pass recurring so I could slowly get premium borders for my favorites. I'm done with the game for now after these announcements. If they fix it later, I might use my current resources to make a meta deck and come back. But the continuous ballooning of Series 5 while tossing scraps to 3 and continuous use of series 4 to dilute certain spotlights has made worn me down to the point that I know I will have more fun elsewhere. Can't wait to see more of your content on the Pocket side of things, Jeff.
They seem to be falling into the "perfect is the enemy of good" trap. They say they want to get things perfect and are working on it, but they have to do something NOW. I stopped playing 3 months ago but still watch Marvel Snap content on YT, but I don't know how much more that'll last. It's ridiculous to think that Knull is still a series 4 card. How crazy is that?!?!?!
They really felt burned by the player response to the spotlight cache system introduction. By the metrics it was more generous, but players reacted primarily to the reduction in tokens that happened at the same time, and got very angry--so their takeaway was "any change will be seen initially as bad, so let's make as few changes as possible." Which I don't agree with, but I understand how they got there.
@Yesnomu, because it has been factually proven to be bad since launch and has repeatedly been getting worse based on people's calculations. Remember during the launch test when content creators like Cozy noticed that there was no reward for getting duplicate S4 or S5 cards? Cozy had to plead with SD to give tokens for them if you don't believe go watch his first video about it, It's been established that the math is skewed in favor of S4 cards for the s4 card about 70%, and things have only gotten worse over time with multiple cards returning more than five times, and some even coming back six times. Keep in mind this is within two years. Plus, we still haven't seen any cards from beyond the Eternal season make a return besides Thena. Not to mention, aside from one card, all the caches for next month are just repeats. They also took away player choice by making tokens nearly vanish at launch since they initially weren't going to include tokens for random S4 or S5 duplicates or in the regular caches. Even now, you can only get a maximum of 100 tokens from caches, and 1,000 tokens from the s4/5 random drop if they get a dupe and since keys cost around $27.75. This means that, at the very least, a free-to-play player would need to invest about $55.50 in resources just to get 1,000 tokens. With the 100 tokens from caches, a player can earn around 1,000 to 1,200 tokens a month through all rewards. Since a free-to-play player typically earns about four keys a month, it would take roughly three months to get a single S5 card if they grind as efficiently as possible.
I genuinely think ever since the "hey we technically never said we'd stick to a consistent schedule even though up until this exact moment with darkhawk and knull we have" the series drops have gotten consistently worse
Another pain point not directly mentioned is the extremely poor quality of the Spotlight Cache's themselves. Many cards have been repeated in Spotlight caches while others have yet to see their *first* cache. Some of those cards are being dropped, and it comes off as tone deaf. This game has limited resources in terms of card acquisition. I see a cache with 2 cards I already have or series 4 cards and I'm incentivized to skip. Then, if the card I skipped becomes meta/buffed I have no reasonable way to obtain it besides waiting a full 2 months for the tokens.
A huge issue with the spotlights is you can still get duplicates for cards wasting your spotlight key. Duplicates shouldn’t be a thing and only getting 1,000 tokens when every series 5 card cost 6,000 is ridiculous. Card acquisition sucks and it’s to force people to spend money.
X-23 and Sasquatch are both in December spotlights during this time. Dec 3 and Dec 10 week. Nice the news came out before any reviews for December spotlights cause I would think the ratings would change specially since now it looks to be a new card and two series 4 cards for both of those weeks.
As a player who has left Marvel Snap and thinks about returning ... The idea that it could be a year (or more) until a particular card that I missed appears in a Spotlight cache is disheartening
Unfortunately they haven’t earned the goodwill with the playerbase for us to believe them when they say “we’re working on it”, “we hear you” or “wait for the next drop”. I can’t support this game anymore until they get back on track.
I am a person who quit the season of Loki and just came back the season of agent venom. It’s AWFUL. I’m missing 90% cards, the decks I used to play that were meta are now a joke, and there truly is no way for me to catch up. I ended up buying arishem and that’s the only reason my 3000 CL can stand against all these 20k+ people
I also believe that duplicates out of spotlight caches should give a larger amount of tokens based on the relative series. If giving 50% of the series value is too much I’d much rather have something more than what they give now.
I have been managing both a F2P as well as a doplhin account. With how badly SD handled DPD and this card drop, I am done for now I think. They seem hell bent on milking they're remaining playerbase for every cent they can. Will still keep an eye on whats happening as I might return some day (have enough tokens and keys saved up on both accounts). Its been fun snapping with you all!
Cersi Sebastian Shaw Namora Cannonball Hydra Bob Cull Obsidian Black Swan Blink Elsa Bloodstone Caiera Black Knight Ms Marvel none of these cards are good or impactful enough to warrant being series 5 cards, why not drop them? its mind boggling
I had no idea Sebastian Shaw was still a series 5. I quit for pretty close to 6 months and I came back with barely any series changes and a pile of cards I can't get until SD decides to stick them in a cache.
Add Baron Zemo, easily clogged Sersi, Shaw, Namora, CannonBall, Cull, Blink, Caiera are fine for s5 because some of them are new and best for certain deck, just need spotlight more! Rest need to down to s3
Ive returned from around a year of not playing last season (just enough to get agony). And have been having some fun. Sure coming back to a good enough CL. But In this one/two months, I havent reached close to the 3k I need to buy a mediocre season 4 card. I even bought the season pass, and ive spent a few keys for past cards I didnt get, but the only thing ive gotten from the token shop are the free series 3 cards (like Howard and or echo). Personally, I just feel like the this web of currency always felt a bit... mean. Credits, gold, keys, tokens, oh and boosters and or tickets?? Play games for boosters and missions. Complete missions to get credits. Get credits to upgrade cards. Upcrade cards to get boosters and credits again. Get a bunch of fun cards early on. 1/3rd of the time, maybe just maybe get 100 tokens. (You need to hit that chance 29 more times for a series 4 card). Sometimes you just get a few words, or an avatar of a card you dont even have. Maybe get gold to get more missions/credits/variants? It's a headache honestly. I know making things confusing is a money tactic, but SD has a genuinely fun game here, sucks they keep ruining it somehow.
I know they've talked about moving stuff lower than series 3 before, but there's some reasonable tech cards (Beast, Goose, NTW, etc.) that feel really bad to not consistently be able to access when thrown into the deep end of series 3. When series 2 is as small as it is and series 3 is so massive, i think it needs an injection to not have people stalling out in the "tutorial" series'.
Apart from the low quantity of series drops, there's also a problem with the quality (in my opinion). Jean Grey sees play very rarely, and I can't even remember the last time I saw someone actively put Snowguard in their deck. It's similar with the 5 -> 4 drops, where cards like Iron Lad, Sasquatch, Valentina, and Grand Master rarely seem like the best card in their slot. An argument can be made that BRB, Phastos, Pixie, and Super Giant enable their own specific archetypes, but in reality those archetypes are rarely top performers. A card like Phastos isn't worth 6k tokens, and I doubt he's worth 3k tokens either, unless you really enjoy his type of gameplay. Most of these cards are fine if they are included in a big batch of drops, but if these are the only cards dropped it feels very underwhelming.
Yeah, to me this is a bigger issue. Every time they do a series drop, I look at what’s coming down and it’s like maybe one or two of the drops are cards I would want to play. In my opinion, the drops should be on a fixed schedule based on release order only, similar to how it worked initially. New cards should spend some fixed amount of time in series 5/4 and then drop to 3 on a regular schedule. Soon Darkhawk and Knull will still be series 4 cards two years after their release. When they consistently choose the weaker non-meta cards to drop and leave the “better” card releases in the expensive/more difficult to acquire category for years, that sends a pretty clear message to me on what the priorities are. If series drops are instead regularly scheduled, there’s transparency and players can decide how best to spend their limited resources on the cards they’re most interested in playing.
Jean Grey is trash, but Snowguard was top meta card for a while there in Loki's season pass month, Loki+Collector deck and a few others. She's still fun to combo the Hawk with Magik to rugpull your opponent
@@jaktracy I mean, there is a reason they stopped having a set schedule. A very large part of the player base just stopped getting the new cards, instead electing to wait a few months to pick it up cheaper. Unpredictable series drops are fine, and having popular cards stay harder to get makes sense from a business perspective. Increasing the frequency of drops would be a better fix than having them on a regular schedule. SD just needs to find a better balance between their business goals and player satisfaction.
I’ve really enjoyed playing Marvel Snap over time, and I’ve supported the game regularly by buying the season pass, bundles, and the 30-day gold offer. This month, I bought bundles, season pass and the gold offer again, and there are still over 20 days left to gather resources from it-but I’ve decided to stop playing the game entirely, leaving those unclaimed resources behind. It just doesn’t feel rewarding anymore. Instead of fun, I’m feeling more and more frustrated-sometimes even angry. There are a few reasons why: First, the whole situation with Darkhawk and Knull staying in Series 4 really stuck with me, even though it was a while back. I get why some cards need to stay in higher tiers, but the way it was communicated was pretty bad. And honestly, with how many new cards are constantly being added, it’s still hard to understand why that move was necessary. Then there’s card acquisition-it’s awful. I feel like I have to play every day just to keep up and not miss out. At first, that grind was exciting, but it’s turned into a chore. Eventually, I realized I wasn’t even having fun anymore. I just got burnt out. The Spotlight Cache system is a mess. It’s tough to get caches, the rewards are random, and if you’re only missing one card, it feels even worse. You might get a random card you don’t need, and if you pull a duplicate, you only get 1,000 tokens-not even close to what the card costs in the shop. The variants available in the spotlight caches often feel underwhelming, especially when compared to the “super rare” variants featured in the shop. Tokens are really hard to earn (I mostly get them from bundles). Getting just 100 tokens randomly from a cache feels underwhelming, especially when progress already feels so slow. It would go a long way if there were more reliable ways to earn them or if the rewards were a bit more substantial. Lastly, the way cards get nerfed is sometimes just disheartening. I know balancing is necessary, and some cards are way too strong (e.g. Loki), but when you save up or spend money to get a card, and then it gets nerfed into the ground a week later, it’s just a gut punch. I’m sad because I loved this game. The core gameplay is awesome, but it feels like Second Dinner doesn’t really value the players who keep coming back. Big thanks to you, Jeff, for all the great content over the years. I’m super excited to see what you’ll do with Pokémon Pocket!
increasing the series 3 pool will be a massively disadvantage for newer players tho, the worst parts of card acquisition right now are either when you are almost collection complete and spotlight cache's quality diminishes drastically so that you're forced to use tokens to get the last dozen of cards, or when you are starting series 3, since the pool is already so massive but you have no agency in what cards you get, my take is that if they're to ever increase pool 3 drastically they need to rework new cards appearance rates in normal collectors and have a way to select the free card you get each month without waiting 8 hours
I’ve been playing since launch, and I remember “series 3 is too big” was a thing then. It’s only grown. I agree that throwing stuff into series 3 is not ideal either. They really should have thought about how to add a proper series 4 after series 3 instead of this rare/mythic rare system they have with series 4 and 5. But that boat has long since sailed. Honestly that should have been investigated starting during the beta. Probably couldn’t find a good way to monetize a version like that.
1- they're droping cards that most of the people already have cuz they already been in a lot of caches 2- droping cards that no one uses 3- i'm done with this game
I feel like if you are a paying member there should be a 100% rate to acquire every card in the game. Feels weird as a company saying if you pay us every month to play our game and you still can’t have every card.
They've made a game out of building your collection, maybe you can't have every card but they at least allow you to more or less choose what you want to play over time.
@@thomasmartin1514 there is not a single successful digital card game out there giving players every game piece on release for a price point that low no.
@thomasmartin1514 You can certainly argue that a player spending that much deserves every card, but Jeff is just pointing out that Second Diner has already made it clear that it isn't their goal for players to get every card for just the cost of a season pass, so there's no point having that as a goal.
Worth noting, Kitty Pride dropping to series 3 isn't a full drop. She was given away for free when she was brought back into the game after being disabled last year.
I feel like the lack of series drops could mean an eventual introduction of a series 6, and moving the current series 4 back to the collection track. Otherwise series 3 just keeps getting more and more bloated. New cards enter as series 6, drop to series 5, eventually S5 becomes part of the track, intro S7, rinse, repeat.
@@impkiller5932 That's really a bad take IMO. If you think she is bad then so be it, but it is a fact that she is a series 5 card and is available in recent spotlight cache There are decks that work with her, someone might just using keys because they want to be effective with it (getting series 5 cards), which can change depends on if they more open with the series drop schedule.
A few things that could help: 1- improvement to the Token Shop. With the long stretch of time between repeats in Caches, seeing more cards in the shop at least reduces the burden of “when will I see the card that I need.” The fact that you only see one card per 8 hours is kind of absurd. It doesn’t fix the math of the economy, but making it easier for a person who wants to spend resources to acquire cards to do so is a QOL improvement. 2- fixing that 4th cache. There appears to be a weight towards S4 cards, perhaps even 2 out of 3, but S4 is smaller, so folks become S4 complete with a lot of S5 to go. And that means you’re going to have at least a 67% chance of a duplicate, even if you’re missing half the cards. I know there won’t be full duplicate protection, but the status quo is re reverse of that: functionally a bias towards duplication. That really should change.
Absolutely agree with number 2. The s4 bias in the 4th cache is real scummy. For endgame players, that bias changes "a random s4/5 card" into "a feelsbad moment and 1000 tokens"
All of my fourth caches have either been a duplicate or the season pass card for the past 6 months. It leaves a sour taste getting to the 4th cache repeatedly.
@@ZandoFoxI got 2 series 5 cards from that thing and I already had them, I didn't had almost any series 5 cards, so it was very strange tbh. Like the game looked at my collection and decided to give me series 5 card that I already had just for fun. Great 2000 tokens at least.
Good take about drops to S3 and returning player experience, but I have to say it feels like there's a danger of S3 bloat impacting the new player experience, e.g. never being able to find key cards in the shop. I think they should probably also do drops to S2, but continue to give access to spotlight keys fairly early on.
When they announced higher series cards and the aspect of the cards to drop in tiers, i always had the thought that there'd be a set amount of series 4 and 5, and cards dropping regularly as more cards are added. Seeing the current state of series pools, it really shows my thinking truly was wishful.
@@BrioHikari the thing Is, this was the case, for like half a year cards would spend a set amount of time in 5 then drop to 4 spend another while on 4 and drop again
When in the announcement of a series drop, they are talking about the next drops being bigger, it tells you everything about the current drops. Very disappointing both for the low number and the choice of cards. Valentina had just been in a cache and now they drop her. GrandMaster, X-23 and Sasquatch are going to be in the next 2 months and they drop them too. I'll keep playing until one day I run out of resources and get left behind, but I don't expect anything from SD anymore. I agree that if 15 new cards come out every 3 months, they should be dropping at least 15 cards every 3 months. Less than that is not acceptable
They need something like Rental Decks or acquisition/starter packs. Get new players the discard or destroy archetypes way faster. Those staple meta decks deserve to be series 3
If snap zone is to be trusted, 28 Series 4 to 72 Series 5. That balance is crazy! Really shows how under used series 4 is. The series situation currently does not work with the amount of cards in the game. As a new player, there are too many cards in series 3. You get 1 random cards every 4 caches or something and 1 'chosen card' every season pass. Out of the over 100 cards it's almost impossible to aim for specific cards. It feels like series 4 are easier to acquire. And as you show, this just worsen as they add more and more cards. I'm not sure what the solution is, but bloating out series 3 is just going to make the newer players feel in less control of the decks they can play.
Yeah, sadly this is the first month I didn't buy the season pass . On kinda a different note I think could help releasing cards in batches instead of one per week
Just wanted to mention I got an ad in the middle of your sentence at 4:17. I know you’re usually much better at timing your breaks appropriately, so maybe look into what happened.
I'm beyond disappointed but I can understand their potential reluctance to dump tons of cards into series 3 just from the "new player experience" perspective. I think at some point they'll need to reconfigure the Series system, perhaps actually elevate a lot of Series 3 cards to Series 4 while keeping archetype staples in S3. Then, once you reach ~3,000 CL or so, you start unlocking S4 cards in caches like normal. S5 would be the only series that is limited to spotlights and tokens. They're practically doing this anyway since until Agony and Eitri, no cards were being added directly to Series 4.
I think the reason why Pocket has resonated so well with me is that it is incredibly casual friendly. All Snap needs is a means for players to get ANY card at ANY time. I actually wouldn't mind a 'casual' mode where you could play against a bot on purpose with no time limits per turn. I think i'd come back for those things.
You didn’t even mention how Supergiant and Valentina were literally just in Spotlght caches like last week I believe. Even more salt on the wound from Second Dinner…
In my opinion, we should be able to get a pity system depending on how many keys you have spent. For example for every 20 keys you spent, you are able to choose any card you want. A system like that would benefit returning players as well as new players. The spotlight system is just not good enough, and giving us one card we want after spending a certain amount of keys would make it feel more rewarding.
At this point the series 1-3 cards should all be given to you for free after a reworked tutorial. Series 3 cards are no longer a cool thing to get. They are the cores of decks. You can't even begin to make a truly competitive deck without them. The fact of the matter is the rate they add cards makes it too hard to keep up, even as a frequent player spending money. Its absolutely impossible to recommend the game to a friend at this point. There is no way for them to catch up to feel competitive. Which makes people not want to play and I don't blame them. What's the point of playing every match with a damn handy cap? A perfect example of this is my brother. He comes and goes when it comes to snap. I have played every season since the global launch. He won't even play me because he feels like he's so far behind that he doesn't even stand a chance. While we all know that's necessarily true. He's not wrong either. I have a fairly complete collection only missing a handful of cards. So the decks I build are more optimized than something he has access to. The biggest thing holding him back has always been acquisition. He gets frustrated with the battle pass cost, it being an absolute must buy to remain even relevant, and how bad it feels spending keys to not get the card you wanted. I totally get it. You're excited to get a new card when it comes out and you get some lame ass skin or a card you weren't even interested in. It makes people feel like they have completely wasted there time even trying to get the card in the first place.
I hope every content creator just lets Second dinner have it. This is a spit in the face. They need to get rid of series 5 altogether and move all current series 4 cards down to series 3.
I feel like the smart way to approach series drops is to come up with a realistic and reasonable number for the series 5 cards. Once that number is reached Second Dinner drops to series 4. That same idea should be applied to series 4 so then series 3 drops can occur with the idea that this should be a quarterly event.
I hate people who say things like "but how does this benefit me?" But this series drop is so narrow that the 11 cards I don't own aren't any of these. I miss when the drops were predictable, but then Knull had to be up next and SD went "noooo. Nuh uh. Not happening."
Yeah way too hard to collect cards. At least in Pokémon pocket I can get like 2-3 packs a day. Granted theirs not much to it. Not playing has left me so behind it’s hard to get keys without grinding I also don’t have a fun deck anymore to grind with so I’m just falling more and more behind and it sucks
It would be adding another system, but targeted openings via grouping would be cool. Oh you like destroy? Here's a grouping with X-23, LDS, Knull, etc. Every x amount of reserves you open gets you one of those cards. Series drops being more frequent would be great too, maybe capping the number of series 4/5 cards so you know cards will drop when that threshold is reached or something. I'm not as out on this game as the rest of the comments seem to be, but SD really needs to cater to those people more than me lol
I spent a lot of money on this game when it first launched. Once they stopped making series drops a regular occurance I entirely stopped playing and spending. I just started up again recently and I am not spending anything. I can not build decks that I want to play. I think I will put the game down again for a while and see if they figure this out. The series drops are so bad. I will spend money if they stop infinitely adding cards to the higher series.
Drops based on a schedule makes the most sense. You can highlight some “big bads” but for the most part a 12-18 month old card should at least be series 4 if not 3. Because the thing that adds to the sloth like pace of series drops is the very evident power creep. By the time a lot of the cards drop they’d be far from their pre-nerfed versions anyway.
Drops on a schedule make it optimal for f2p to wait for every card to be s3 before getting it. Optimizes the fun out of the game for most people and isn't a good system.
@@HooglandiaSnapRealistically, do most people play for optimal card acquisition? Speaking personally, I've spent tokens and spotlight keys on variants. And I regularly see complaints that "I only had 2 keys this week and didn't pull the card I want!" despite it being optimal to only open spotlights when you have 4+ keys. You'd still have plenty of people getting cards at release. Especially with the perhaps unfair impression people have that "new cards get nerfed", folks will want to play with them "before the inevitable nerf."
It's a tough position they put themselves in, they obviously cannot "just give more" cards in the spotlights (if they are to have card economy based on pieces being expensive), and I guess the early token system shown us that even saying "cards become free after a year or two" just delays the "nobody spends tokens because cards will be free eventually" problem. I thing a possible solution would be having 4 or even 6 cards return each week, but players can simply pick which are the 2 that they go for in their set of 4 keys, and then maybe even allow replacing spotlight art in the 5-8 key set with remaining cards. My personal problem, my tracker says even after two months of not playing, I own 60% of S5 cards, but there are only 8(!) returning cards throughout November, December and January, that I don't own. Which is funny to consider, I barely ever owned 5% of HS legendaries and didn't quit for "bad acquisition". Maybe it was just Draft mode? Knowing I can use every card "potentially" regardless of owning it?
My first thought is "What is a reasonable amount of time after which it is reasonable for a new card to hit S3?" People used to be able wait 6 months to get a new card for free, was that too quick? Idk, but I feel like there should be a more or less balanced number they could find to use and target. To me, over a year feels too long. But they do need to improve that S3 acquisition stage if they're going to keep adding to it as well or they'll drive of newer players. It's a tough job, I'm hopeful they can do it, but even that doesn't imply alot of confidence, I used to believe they could do it, and before that I used to think they could do it.
That drop wasn't about the length, it was about predicability. Knowing you could wait a set time meant most people just waited and never engaged with new cards on release.
@HooglandiaSnap But that was also under the collector token acquisition model, where the card would be reliably available in S4 on demand after 2 months. I think that lead to most of the avoidance of immediate card acquisition. Who can't wait 2 months for half price? That's barely longer than it takes to know if a card has some staying power. To me S4 could just be the bargain bin where replacement level or homeless cards go after they rerun in a cache and wait to be made free, and not every new card would even need to go through it. I don't think we'd see the same aversion to immediate acquisition, if new cards were guaranteed as a spotlight repeat about 4 months after release (I say about so they can balance the spotlights) and after some delay they occasionally drop to S4, but after 1 year every new card is automatically S3. The worst kind of negative behavior here I could see this incentivising is people trying to wait 4 months to get the cards on a rerun, but I'm not sure how likely that is or if it'd be any kind of optimal and don't have the desire to think on it further atm.
I will be honest, when this game came out I spent a lot of money for about 4-7 months and I fizzled out when the spotlight caches came out. Pokemon Pocket made me want to try it out again but realizing I literally can't play meta decks because of the brutal accusation for the cards. Hope they can figure it out sometime soon. Id love to hop back in and play with some reduced spending this time.
Instead they should guarantee roughly when they'll hit spotlight caches. The problem isn't the system but the fact they recycle the same cards which makes the system useless. That and just having regular drops which Jeff highlighted. This announcement I feel means more ppl playing pocket as the new cards aren't as exciting in Snap either compared to some of those that I missed that will never see in spotlight caches
How much of a difference do you think it would make if the random third spotlight card was guaranteed to pull a random card you don't currently own? I feel like that change alone with not only make using keys feel a lot less scammy and disappointing but would also inject immediate interest in that entire mechanic which has largely fallen off as a "save them until they are worth using" mantra which is terrible for any sort of sustainable economy.
The fact that we’re discussing 1/2 of the video on future series drops ON THE DAY of a current series drop is digusting. They’re trying to stretch it as far as possible. I'm out. I don’t pay for future features. I also don’t care whether 'they want to get it right' next time.
The answer is twofold: First, I understand that they couldn't continue the direct 1:1 revolving door like they used to have, especially for chase cards that people spent money on. But they DO need to keep the same number of cards degrading to lower series that they are introducing. So, when a new card comes in, another card has to step down. Secondly, there needs to be a way for players to target cards that they want or need. A "wishlist" of around 12 cards would be appropriate, and you randomly get one of those wishlisted cards pop up each day in your shop. Also, this is something that can/should be done for cosmetics. There are so many cards that I want variants for and would buy, but I have no control over if/when I can get them, and may never get them.
An idea that just came to mind would be to have extra series "drops" be in the season pass, such that they pick a series 4 card and put it in the season pass and then all the series series 4 cards that were in a season pass the last 3 seasons then drop to series 3 It would give an extra good feeling to the people who regularly buy season passes
My hope is that they just get to a number they feel comfortable with in Series 5 and Series 4. Like say they want there to be 70 Series 5 cards and 40 series 4 cards. then it grows for a quarter and they drop X amount from 5 to 4 and X amount from 4 to 3 every drop to return back to those numbers. My numbers are probably wrong, but if they are adding 1 card a week in spotlights (52), plus 1 per season pass (12) and 1 per special event (5? a year) thats almost 70 cards a year. For the sake of keeping it simple, lets assume they are all series 5, and they are going to do quarterly drops, then they need to drop 17-18 cards from series 5 to series 4 and 17-18 cards from series 4 to series 3 every quarter just to stop the bloat of series 5. It doesnt have to be a set schedule like it used to be where people are planning what cards to buy and what cards to wait on months in advance, but it would be really good for returning players to have basically 20 new cards to collect each quarter to get back into things.
I played from the beginning until Loki season, spending hundreds over this time period. At that point it had been mostly FOMO keeping me returning and I felt liberated once I stopped. I really missed the excellent gameplay, so I returned in the middle of the Symbiote Spiderman season. I can confirm that coming back to this game after being gone for a while feels AWFUL. I was assuming after around a year I'd be getting a ton of new cards in series 3, and to my shock it was a trickle of old pack-filler cards I've barely used. Nearly every meta deck I see showcased by content creators has multiple series 5 cards that I'm missing. The main way of acquiring cards - the spotlight caches - feels very bad to me. I honestly despise it, and the fear that it would lead to the situation we're currently in is actually one of the things that had led me to quit last time. I don't feel like playing a card game where I have to wait an unknowable amount of time that could be even longer than a year to be granted the privilege of spending my resources on a single card. I understand their entire shop system and spotlight cache system is built around FOMO so that people spend all of their resources during the short window of time they have, but it just feels so miserable if you're returning to the game and are now being punished so HARD for not being there when they were available. I was a week late returning to the game to get mockingbird in the spotlight cache, now I'll have to wait a year+ probably. And the tokens are so hard to replace, that I don't want to spend them. If I use up the tokens I had saved before quitting to build a single meta deck, I won't be able to do that again. One more thing, I know a lot of people were complaining about Hela dominating the meta when I returned, and the simplicity of piloting it was the reason I heard for this, but let me tell you as a returning player, Hela was the only meta deck that I could even build. If it wasn't such a slog to acquire new cards, I would have played something else that didn't result in my opponent flipping me off after every game. I bought Arishem because I could just throw my random series 1-3 tech cards into it, and get to play with all these other cards I don't own, which I assume is one of the main driving factors behind why this deck is seeing so much play (at least it seems to me like I'm running into it a lot), and I'm hearing calls to nerf this card now too. I understand why it's also an unappealing card to have dominating the meta, but it's the only thing making playing this game with a limited collection fun for me at this point. I'm sure I'm going to quit snap again soon and likely will never come back this time, unless they make a HUGE economy overhaul. But I honestly don't have faith, after all this time, that SD will make a non-predatory user-friendly overhaul, even if it costs them their entire userbase. Would love to be proven wrong. Would gladly come back and spend my time and money on this game again if they made it feel worth doing again.
I was an endgame player who left around when high evo came out. I knew I was gonna be behind, but I thought I would have a bunch of series 3 cards to play with at least. I was shocked at how few there were. It’s been a few weeks and I don’t know if I’m going to stick with it, I can’t even watch marvel snap content because I’m missing multiple cards in every deck and no realistic way to get them even spending money.
Significant, quarterly drops to S4/S3, improved Premium Season Pass (with meaningful card acquisition improvements) and either duplicate protection when using Spotlights or up tokens to 3k is really what I think is reasonable. You have a massive pool of S4/S5 cards and most people don’t get excited when they drop-rather they are scrutinizing whether each new card is worth the heavy demand on your resources. Even as a SP and daily gold purchasers I am way behind because I had the audacity to take a break for 5 months. Oof. Love SNAP, but it feels like an unhealthy relationship. Thanks Jeff!
I haven't played in about 3 months now, and the only cards dropping that I don't already have are Beta Ray Bill and Supergiant. I still wouldn't be able to click the free series 3 button till the next drop, if even then. The last time I can confirm I was able to do that was January.
I wanna be optimistic but its just frustrating that SD keeps saying changes are on the way or that card acquisition will be improved and there is nothing to show for it
i'd say dropping more cards to S3 and make the chance for a series 3 to show up every so often in the collector's track higher/more frequent if even for only a single less cache. i think that'd be a good starting point and then they have to do a lot more in order to get people to come back in. as you rightfully pointed out in another video, returning or new coming players can't really relate to streamers because everyone that isn't collection complete is at a different point in the game.
This series drop would be more palatable if they announced another series drop in Feb and a return to a routine schedule. Without that, there's no real guarantee that card acquisition will improve. My other problem is this is based on card value and not age. Series drops used to be near unilaterally just age of card with certain "big bads" being the exception. This is no longer the case so there's no way to know if or when a card will drop. My biggest hope is that they change up card acquisition next year as I feel spotlight cache just doesn't work that well, especially when it's seemingly limited by artwork commission. Having said that, there's only 2 cards I care about in the next two months and card acquisition is less of a problem for me. It's a bigger problem for low cl or new players trying to complete decks. They should be focusing on enabling people to flesh out decks with key cards.
I'm finishing this season pass and, after buying all but 2 of them since launch I'll take a break. It's better to hoard resources/caches, take a long break to play other games and come back to caches that will actually have more than one card you want.
Well said Jeff! I think your proposed solution is spot on, and yes, I wish SD as more amenable in a shorter term fix while they iterate on their longer term solution. Any thoughts on adding some sort of dupe protection on the 4th spotlight slot would help? 1k for a duplicate card feels especially bad now given the size of series 5/4 vs when the system was first unveiled. It always felt bad but it's only grown worse.
I hate to play devils advocate but what's the solution? We've seen what happen to games like Legend of Runterra when they have little to no monetization. The completely free to play aspect killed the game and PvP was left behind. I agree SD is not doing enough for new players to get into snap and no keep Vets excited but what do we do in a game like this, what's the solution?
I agree completely!!!Jeff I am following you from the mtg arena time and if second dinner should listen to someone is you my friend !! I also believe because I also love marvel snap and I’ve been grinding endlessly for 2 years now , that they must bring back in the 500 collectors tokens to the caches system so for someone who’s grinding a lot should have the opportunity of buying the new card !!! This 100 collectors tokens that we have now as a reward is like : buy more stuff from the shop ,spend more money 😢
You're right, at the rate the game is going I won't be surprised to see it coming to an end as players leave for other games by competitors. In retrospect, it could end up like the Marvel Alliance game once very popular in Facebook years back...
I hope the spotlight caches are just for series 5 and in the regular caches you get the series 4 cards (for example if series 3 is 2 in 9 caches series 4 1 in 12 caches)
2 year player who quit during symbiote season. When quitting I decided it was going to be for good because trying to play again would just be a grinding drag to catch up. A couple of weeks of finding it not very fun and having another game catch my interest (Riichi Mahjong - thanks, Yakuza series) I cut loose and uninstalled. I really can't see myself going back. I wouldn't pay money to catch up just for trying again (I assume it would be at least $100 based on bundles) and I can't imagine they're just going to hand me the cards. 2 years is pretty good for me for one of these. More than Hearthstone and a little less than my longest-played mobile game (FFBE about 3 years). I had a good time but I crave new experiences and Snap isn't providing enough of them.
I think it's ok for cards like Knull and Darkhawk to stay away from Series 3. But it's surprisingly how cards like Sebastian Shaw still on Series 5 and how they dropped only 3 cards to S3 and one is fu*king Kitty Pryde 😭. I rly don't see the real deal with a card dropping from S5 to S4, aside from tokens, they are almost equally hard to get. I think they should go back to the tine where you had a little chance to get a S4 card from the normal caches.
Really? That few drops from 5-> 4 and 4 -> 3? I'm not even upset that most of the cards dropping are cards I already own, but dang, the oldest card to drop there is Jean Grey, right? No Cannonball dropping to 4? Hitmonkey? Legion dropping to 3? There's a lot of really bad cards clogging Series 4 right now.
I’m one of those players that has been burned out of the game as a former end game player at CL 14,000 and its hard for me to get back on track with the new releases and its been difficult to even get back on the daily grind when new cards seem harder to get, it in turn really just tunes me out of the content as well with me knowing I’m not really in a place to get back on. Series drops would IMMENSELY help getting back in, and any update to the to collectors token or spotlight would be highly appreciative. Anything sooner rather than later, a huge slew of newer games and existing backlog is going to make Marvel Snap harder to come back and I’m even enjoying some aspects of TCG Pocket that have taken up my daily driver slot.
>"If they dropped 20 cards to series 3 every quarter do you think that would be a good step in the right direction?" For returning and existing players, yes, absolutely. For new players, for whom series 3 is already quite massive and who have virtually no agency in which s3 cards they unlock, it would maybe not be so great. For players in series 3, my idea has always been "draw 3 cards, pick one to unlock". 3x the chance with each draw to pull that card you're targeting. Hell, maybe it could even let you pin the other cards for your next pull, if you get a God pull with 3 cards you want.
Marvel Snap's card acquisition has been flawed since the beginning, the fact that you have no way to target and guarantee getting a specific card you want (even by paying real money) in a card game is insane.
It was easier early on the game with caches giving cards, 500 CT and gold. It was very easy to save gold as a f2p/dolphin player and it went downhill when they nerfed the caches because of economy reasons, also known as we need more money
For me, a better solution would be not to retire series but to create new ones, allowing players to obtain cards from two series prior on their CL ladder. For example, if we are currently in Series 5, players could get cards from Series 3. Once there is a sufficient number of cards in Series 5-let’s say around 50-Series 6 would be created, and cards like Galactus, Thanos, and others would move from Series 5 to Series 6. Then, as new cards are released in Series 6, players would start receiving cards from Series 4, and the cycle would continue.
Im collection complete, so I personally don't really care about the SeriesDrops. However, this game has several card-acquisition problems. - S3 just takes way too long now to complete for newer players. It takes about a year now, while it was only a couple of months when we started out. And bigger S3 Drops only increase this problem. Fix? Just have the Collectors Caches (those Silver ones) until CL3000 or something. That will massively increase the opportunities to get new cards. They should integrate these caches with Tokens/Spotlight Keys. - I do think the 1 key per week is a good average. Want more? Spend more. Thats how CCGs work. However, I do think that they should find a release-pattern that will kind of guarantee that a new card will return in 3/4 months. When Spotlights released, it was possible to skip on a new card, as it would return 2/3 months later. This made Key-planning so much easier. Now we have to wait 5/6 months for it to return and older cards rarely reappear anymore. I also think they could reintroduce skipweeks on weeks with events (like they did with Cassandra Nova), or 1st week of the season, like they used to do. - Skip the weighed 66/33 odds for the mystery spotlight. No it shouldn't be a card you don't own. Also increase the tokens a bit, both on the CL-track, and for the spotlight. If they want to drop more cards to S4, they should give more tokens (25-50%) as well. As it is economically most optimal to spend tokens on S4-cards, they also have the highest diminishing value when they eventually get dropped to S4.
So I'm going from missing 1 series 4 card, Snowguard, to missing 1 series 4 card, Phastos. That is not the outcome I wanted. Also, I'm a little frustrated that for the past few weeks I have gotten at least 3 offers to buy Snowguard in a package. I'm basically F2P, but if I spent $99 on the card only to have it drop to Series 3 less than a month later, I would have been super salty. I get that it's a business, but that feels shady even for a business that has a predatory revenue generation model. It's been several weeks since there has been a spotlight cache that includes an older card that I have needed, so I have to be really mindful of when I use my caches. I knew I wanted Fenris Wolf so I slipped out on Anti Venom and Malekith weeks to guarantee drawing FW. If there was a guarantee that there would be one other card I didn't own in the draw, it would be nice. Maybe weekly release, unowned card, and two token grabs. I think 1k tokens is light, but if you said you could spend 12 keys and get three card and 4 unowned cards, that seems ok.
As disappointing as these series drops are, a part of me is glad that not many cards that I own are getting dropped. Especially not cards that I bought with tokens. But still, i would've much rather preferred more cards dropping. Also isn't Daken rumoured to be in a season pass soon? Why is daken still series 4?
I was optimistic about the series drop but this is just showing Second dinner is only doing bare minimum. Bad series drop and little to no improvement to Deadpool’s diner. Card acquisition system is busted. I’ve been skipping cards because keys and tokens are hard to come by. A way to disconnect players is when they find themselves without cards for a meta deck and just stop playing.
Second dinner has proven time and time again they don’t want to give things to players at a cheap / good rate
The fact that they still promise “better drops in the future” like there is something that forbids them do just drop like 30-40 cards right now.
They just don’t want, they could have dropped whatever they want and they decided to do what they did.
I won’t hold any hopes of anything getting better unfortunately.
Doesn't really make a difference to me as I don't expect to have every card in the game, this game was never intended for people to have every card in the game. I think I'd be fine with them just boosting the rates at which we get Collector's Tokens somehow. I find it funny that Jeff still hasn't dropped to series 4, but I also don't really care. I'm at about 9K CL and I'm happy with the cards I have, and I'm saving keys for what's coming.
I think you are wrong about the players can't build meta decks, the destroy didn't changed for almost a year, I think everyone can play destroy and destroy always in top 10 decks. So you don't even need to spend keys/tokens on new card, I think destroy deck wouldn't have any change in next 2 years as well.
@@demontferrat
So you guys acknowledge the new player grind is terrible, and returning player grind is also bad .
So you want to continue to further bloat pool 3, and exaggerate that issue by dropping 30-40 cards😐.
That's stupid.
It just seems like most of the people complaining
Can't correctly identify the issues or want to put in the effort to earn the cards.
@@impkiller5932 I've been playing destroy deck since I completed the deck a year ago. And let me tell you, it's so boring to play 1 SINGLE FREAKING DECK EVERYDAY. Hence, why I quit playing this game a month ago. The copium from players like you are so satisfying to see. And the backlash snap is having right now is super sweet ngl. :)
3 Drops only to S3? That is very dissapointing...
Not to mention that only Kitty is the really good card there since she's a key card in bounce decks and new players also own the like of Angela and Bishop meaning that KP is a great inclusion and an incentive to play bounce. Snowguard is a lot weaker after Loki's change and Jean Grey has a pretty niche use in ongoing decks but she's replaceble there as well.
Not dropping cards such as Knull and Darkhawk is just absurd to me, especially with how f2p their decks are.
@shai310 and they gave kitty free years ago
@@kiya894exactly
I think you meant "disgusting".
A big part of my slowly dying interest is the fear that I can't pause the grind, because if I do, there's no way back. It's sapping the fun out for me personally.
You describe a fix well with both suggestions of larger drops per quarter and returning player packs.
This was my problem as well, but in January I was able to overcome this fear and abandon the game completely. I really like watching the game, but playing it is a nightmare so I will never play this again. Try finding other games to play so it can get easier to stop playing Snap
this DPD and that series drop really burned out my interest in snap, so i probably quit after getting all season reward
@gbsmuller i just quit last week. It felt like a job.
@@tihonyurajust quit now then
Why get all the rewards if you're quitting
@@eannane8712 i want things to be completed when i end
What is the point of dropping a card from 5 to 4 if they keep putting series 4 cards on the spotlight caches? And tokens are so rare for the average players plus we can no longer get series 4 cards from the collector reserves, remember when we could get one series 4 card every 40 reserves with a very small chance of getting a series 5 card, and we used to get up to 6000k tokens per season back then
Ill tell you the point $$$$$$$$$$$$$
The good old days
I don’t have any idea on a real fix, I’ll leave that to developers. However I can’t stress enough that part where you said “that gap to get it right is closing”. I’ve been playing snap since beta and I never thought I’d miss a season and I completely took this season off because I’m so worn out. It feels less like a game and more like a chore. Playing the game in their “fixed” ways for missions so I don’t fall behind on free resources. I was really looking forward to this series drop jump starting some interest, but to come back and play Deadpool’s dinner and then this news really breaks my spirits that they will not get this game right in time. Appreciate the content as always Jeff!
at least do proper series drop. they do series drop per year. it should be per month. so other player can catchup
I'm currently at CL~10 k, but decided to stop playing after this recent announcement about the Series Drop. Recently, I kept playing mainly to not fall behind too far. I think that once I stop playing it will be impossible to catch up if I want to return at a later date, which is why I was so reluctant to take a break to begin with.
The developers don't seem to have a long-term plan for the game, but are trying to make as much money as quickly as possible. Therefore, I don't expect any real improvements to the card acquisition to ever be implemented, so there is no reason to stick around in the hopes that things may get better one day.
This is the best Thanksgiving gift ever-nice work, SD!
They’ve made me realize I should spend my time on something more meaningful.
It's real scummy that they hyped up this series drop, just to hype up another one down the road. They're dragging this out to hold on to players with anticipation
So a few questions: how exactly did they hype it up? They made a single post on discord about it recently, and that post was just saying the date when they would be announced. There was no expectations from the post laid out, you can look it up yourself. All the expectations came completely from the community building it up into something SD never said. And this is the root of the problem with this community - they build stuff up way beyond what SD actually says and then get mad when their inflated, unrealistic expectations aren't met.
Second question: are we really complaining that they announced when they are planning a future drop now? When the previous one happened, people complained that we didn't know when the next one would happen, now that they told us when they thought the next one would happen, you're still complaining about it? How exactly are they supposed to make you happy here when regardless of what they do you're going to bitch about it? Reactions like this are the reason so many game companies are just choosing not to engage with their communities at all anymore, because they cannot win, it is never a positive or valuable relationship for them.
They didn't hype it up whatsoever
"no incentive for returning players to come back" -- this is honestly too generous. Returning players are actively disincentivized from coming back
I'm a dolphin. I have put enough into the game that I have around a dozen keys and 27k tokens saved up. I buy some higher value credit bundles to allow myself to get gold splits faster and I (until recently) kept my gold pass recurring so I could slowly get premium borders for my favorites. I'm done with the game for now after these announcements. If they fix it later, I might use my current resources to make a meta deck and come back. But the continuous ballooning of Series 5 while tossing scraps to 3 and continuous use of series 4 to dilute certain spotlights has made worn me down to the point that I know I will have more fun elsewhere. Can't wait to see more of your content on the Pocket side of things, Jeff.
They seem to be falling into the "perfect is the enemy of good" trap. They say they want to get things perfect and are working on it, but they have to do something NOW. I stopped playing 3 months ago but still watch Marvel Snap content on YT, but I don't know how much more that'll last. It's ridiculous to think that Knull is still a series 4 card. How crazy is that?!?!?!
If Thanos, Kang and High Evo are the Big Bads then Knull and Darkhawk may as well be called the Little Bads at this point
Right? They want a perfect solution that solves all their problems but they need emergency first aid.
They really felt burned by the player response to the spotlight cache system introduction. By the metrics it was more generous, but players reacted primarily to the reduction in tokens that happened at the same time, and got very angry--so their takeaway was "any change will be seen initially as bad, so let's make as few changes as possible." Which I don't agree with, but I understand how they got there.
@Yesnomu, because it has been factually proven to be bad since launch and has repeatedly been getting worse based on people's calculations. Remember during the launch test when content creators like Cozy noticed that there was no reward for getting duplicate S4 or S5 cards? Cozy had to plead with SD to give tokens for them if you don't believe go watch his first video about it, It's been established that the math is skewed in favor of S4 cards for the s4 card about 70%, and things have only gotten worse over time with multiple cards returning more than five times, and some even coming back six times. Keep in mind this is within two years. Plus, we still haven't seen any cards from beyond the Eternal season make a return besides Thena. Not to mention, aside from one card, all the caches for next month are just repeats. They also took away player choice by making tokens nearly vanish at launch since they initially weren't going to include tokens for random S4 or S5 duplicates or in the regular caches. Even now, you can only get a maximum of 100 tokens from caches, and 1,000 tokens from the s4/5 random drop if they get a dupe and since keys cost around $27.75. This means that, at the very least, a free-to-play player would need to invest about $55.50 in resources just to get 1,000 tokens. With the 100 tokens from caches, a player can earn around 1,000 to 1,200 tokens a month through all rewards. Since a free-to-play player typically earns about four keys a month, it would take roughly three months to get a single S5 card if they grind as efficiently as possible.
@@thebumpercar1344I’m bleeding, but I won’t stop the bleeding until I have a perfect way to make a surgery, I won’t even try to stop it.
I genuinely think ever since the "hey we technically never said we'd stick to a consistent schedule even though up until this exact moment with darkhawk and knull we have" the series drops have gotten consistently worse
@@kyejohnson55 that right there was the point things started to go bad
Another pain point not directly mentioned is the extremely poor quality of the Spotlight Cache's themselves. Many cards have been repeated in Spotlight caches while others have yet to see their *first* cache. Some of those cards are being dropped, and it comes off as tone deaf. This game has limited resources in terms of card acquisition. I see a cache with 2 cards I already have or series 4 cards and I'm incentivized to skip. Then, if the card I skipped becomes meta/buffed I have no reasonable way to obtain it besides waiting a full 2 months for the tokens.
A huge issue with the spotlights is you can still get duplicates for cards wasting your spotlight key. Duplicates shouldn’t be a thing and only getting 1,000 tokens when every series 5 card cost 6,000 is ridiculous. Card acquisition sucks and it’s to force people to spend money.
You will never be able to get every card at once for snap in free is pretty clear at this point
While scorn did just come out; was super surprised to not see Proxima drop to series 4 or like any discard component drop.
X-23 and Sasquatch are both in December spotlights during this time. Dec 3 and Dec 10 week. Nice the news came out before any reviews for December spotlights cause I would think the ratings would change specially since now it looks to be a new card and two series 4 cards for both of those weeks.
As a player who has left Marvel Snap and thinks about returning ... The idea that it could be a year (or more) until a particular card that I missed appears in a Spotlight cache is disheartening
Save yourself! I've returned and just quit after a while. It's too painful. The greed of this company is just unbearable.
Deadass thought Kitty was already series 3
I thought she was series 5 card for some reason lol
Unfortunately they haven’t earned the goodwill with the playerbase for us to believe them when they say “we’re working on it”, “we hear you” or “wait for the next drop”.
I can’t support this game anymore until they get back on track.
Yeah I’m quitting after Diner
I am a person who quit the season of Loki and just came back the season of agent venom. It’s AWFUL. I’m missing 90% cards, the decks I used to play that were meta are now a joke, and there truly is no way for me to catch up. I ended up buying arishem and that’s the only reason my 3000 CL can stand against all these 20k+ people
I also believe that duplicates out of spotlight caches should give a larger amount of tokens based on the relative series. If giving 50% of the series value is too much I’d much rather have something more than what they give now.
I have been managing both a F2P as well as a doplhin account. With how badly SD handled DPD and this card drop, I am done for now I think. They seem hell bent on milking they're remaining playerbase for every cent they can. Will still keep an eye on whats happening as I might return some day (have enough tokens and keys saved up on both accounts). Its been fun snapping with you all!
Cersi
Sebastian Shaw
Namora
Cannonball
Hydra Bob
Cull Obsidian
Black Swan
Blink
Elsa Bloodstone
Caiera
Black Knight
Ms Marvel
none of these cards are good or impactful enough to warrant being series 5 cards, why not drop them? its mind boggling
I guess I'm going to play more pocket
I had no idea Sebastian Shaw was still a series 5. I quit for pretty close to 6 months and I came back with barely any series changes and a pile of cards I can't get until SD decides to stick them in a cache.
@fouzwerg yeah been playing pocket daily and just opens snap today cause of this video but I guess the drop isn't out yet. So back to Pocket
Add Baron Zemo, easily clogged
Sersi, Shaw, Namora, CannonBall, Cull, Blink, Caiera are fine for s5 because some of them are new and best for certain deck, just need spotlight more!
Rest need to down to s3
Ive returned from around a year of not playing last season (just enough to get agony). And have been having some fun. Sure coming back to a good enough CL. But In this one/two months, I havent reached close to the 3k I need to buy a mediocre season 4 card. I even bought the season pass, and ive spent a few keys for past cards I didnt get, but the only thing ive gotten from the token shop are the free series 3 cards (like Howard and or echo). Personally, I just feel like the this web of currency always felt a bit... mean.
Credits, gold, keys, tokens, oh and boosters and or tickets??
Play games for boosters and missions. Complete missions to get credits. Get credits to upgrade cards. Upcrade cards to get boosters and credits again. Get a bunch of fun cards early on. 1/3rd of the time, maybe just maybe get 100 tokens. (You need to hit that chance 29 more times for a series 4 card). Sometimes you just get a few words, or an avatar of a card you dont even have. Maybe get gold to get more missions/credits/variants?
It's a headache honestly. I know making things confusing is a money tactic, but SD has a genuinely fun game here, sucks they keep ruining it somehow.
I know they've talked about moving stuff lower than series 3 before, but there's some reasonable tech cards (Beast, Goose, NTW, etc.) that feel really bad to not consistently be able to access when thrown into the deep end of series 3. When series 2 is as small as it is and series 3 is so massive, i think it needs an injection to not have people stalling out in the "tutorial" series'.
THIS
Apart from the low quantity of series drops, there's also a problem with the quality (in my opinion). Jean Grey sees play very rarely, and I can't even remember the last time I saw someone actively put Snowguard in their deck. It's similar with the 5 -> 4 drops, where cards like Iron Lad, Sasquatch, Valentina, and Grand Master rarely seem like the best card in their slot.
An argument can be made that BRB, Phastos, Pixie, and Super Giant enable their own specific archetypes, but in reality those archetypes are rarely top performers. A card like Phastos isn't worth 6k tokens, and I doubt he's worth 3k tokens either, unless you really enjoy his type of gameplay.
Most of these cards are fine if they are included in a big batch of drops, but if these are the only cards dropped it feels very underwhelming.
I don't play jean grey cause the card is bugged and doesn't work as intended. Been broken for months
Yeah, to me this is a bigger issue. Every time they do a series drop, I look at what’s coming down and it’s like maybe one or two of the drops are cards I would want to play. In my opinion, the drops should be on a fixed schedule based on release order only, similar to how it worked initially. New cards should spend some fixed amount of time in series 5/4 and then drop to 3 on a regular schedule. Soon Darkhawk and Knull will still be series 4 cards two years after their release.
When they consistently choose the weaker non-meta cards to drop and leave the “better” card releases in the expensive/more difficult to acquire category for years, that sends a pretty clear message to me on what the priorities are.
If series drops are instead regularly scheduled, there’s transparency and players can decide how best to spend their limited resources on the cards they’re most interested in playing.
Jean Grey is trash, but Snowguard was top meta card for a while there in Loki's season pass month, Loki+Collector deck and a few others. She's still fun to combo the Hawk with Magik to rugpull your opponent
@@jaktracy I mean, there is a reason they stopped having a set schedule. A very large part of the player base just stopped getting the new cards, instead electing to wait a few months to pick it up cheaper.
Unpredictable series drops are fine, and having popular cards stay harder to get makes sense from a business perspective. Increasing the frequency of drops would be a better fix than having them on a regular schedule. SD just needs to find a better balance between their business goals and player satisfaction.
I’ve really enjoyed playing Marvel Snap over time, and I’ve supported the game regularly by buying the season pass, bundles, and the 30-day gold offer. This month, I bought bundles, season pass and the gold offer again, and there are still over 20 days left to gather resources from it-but I’ve decided to stop playing the game entirely, leaving those unclaimed resources behind.
It just doesn’t feel rewarding anymore. Instead of fun, I’m feeling more and more frustrated-sometimes even angry. There are a few reasons why:
First, the whole situation with Darkhawk and Knull staying in Series 4 really stuck with me, even though it was a while back. I get why some cards need to stay in higher tiers, but the way it was communicated was pretty bad. And honestly, with how many new cards are constantly being added, it’s still hard to understand why that move was necessary.
Then there’s card acquisition-it’s awful. I feel like I have to play every day just to keep up and not miss out. At first, that grind was exciting, but it’s turned into a chore. Eventually, I realized I wasn’t even having fun anymore. I just got burnt out.
The Spotlight Cache system is a mess. It’s tough to get caches, the rewards are random, and if you’re only missing one card, it feels even worse. You might get a random card you don’t need, and if you pull a duplicate, you only get 1,000 tokens-not even close to what the card costs in the shop. The variants available in the spotlight caches often feel underwhelming, especially when compared to the “super rare” variants featured in the shop.
Tokens are really hard to earn (I mostly get them from bundles). Getting just 100 tokens randomly from a cache feels underwhelming, especially when progress already feels so slow. It would go a long way if there were more reliable ways to earn them or if the rewards were a bit more substantial.
Lastly, the way cards get nerfed is sometimes just disheartening. I know balancing is necessary, and some cards are way too strong (e.g. Loki), but when you save up or spend money to get a card, and then it gets nerfed into the ground a week later, it’s just a gut punch.
I’m sad because I loved this game. The core gameplay is awesome, but it feels like Second Dinner doesn’t really value the players who keep coming back.
Big thanks to you, Jeff, for all the great content over the years. I’m super excited to see what you’ll do with Pokémon Pocket!
Sunk cost fallacy. Learning to let go of something you have sunk money into is hard. I'm done with snap
Damn... the image screenshot was posted on reddit and I thought it was fake. I guess not.
Thought it was a piss take?
increasing the series 3 pool will be a massively disadvantage for newer players tho, the worst parts of card acquisition right now are either when you are almost collection complete and spotlight cache's quality diminishes drastically so that you're forced to use tokens to get the last dozen of cards, or when you are starting series 3, since the pool is already so massive but you have no agency in what cards you get, my take is that if they're to ever increase pool 3 drastically they need to rework new cards appearance rates in normal collectors and have a way to select the free card you get each month without waiting 8 hours
I’ve been playing since launch, and I remember “series 3 is too big” was a thing then. It’s only grown. I agree that throwing stuff into series 3 is not ideal either. They really should have thought about how to add a proper series 4 after series 3 instead of this rare/mythic rare system they have with series 4 and 5. But that boat has long since sailed. Honestly that should have been investigated starting during the beta. Probably couldn’t find a good way to monetize a version like that.
FYI during the beta series 3 was actually considerably slower.
This drop is really hyping me up for Pocket's upcoming miniset.
1- they're droping cards that most of the people already have cuz they already been in a lot of caches
2- droping cards that no one uses
3- i'm done with this game
I feel like if you are a paying member there should be a 100% rate to acquire every card in the game. Feels weird as a company saying if you pay us every month to play our game and you still can’t have every card.
They've made it pretty clear they don't want you getting every card on launch for $10. You shouldn't ever expect that to happen
They've made a game out of building your collection, maybe you can't have every card but they at least allow you to more or less choose what you want to play over time.
@@HooglandiaSnap a player spending $120 on a game annually deserves every card no?
@@thomasmartin1514 there is not a single successful digital card game out there giving players every game piece on release for a price point that low no.
@thomasmartin1514 You can certainly argue that a player spending that much deserves every card, but Jeff is just pointing out that Second Diner has already made it clear that it isn't their goal for players to get every card for just the cost of a season pass, so there's no point having that as a goal.
Worth noting, Kitty Pride dropping to series 3 isn't a full drop. She was given away for free when she was brought back into the game after being disabled last year.
I feel like the lack of series drops could mean an eventual introduction of a series 6, and moving the current series 4 back to the collection track. Otherwise series 3 just keeps getting more and more bloated. New cards enter as series 6, drop to series 5, eventually S5 becomes part of the track, intro S7, rinse, repeat.
Valentina drops just after her spotlight cache is very scummy move
I don't think that anyone was keying her, so that doesn't matter a bit, she is trash in any case. You would be disappointed to get her any way.
@@impkiller5932 That's really a bad take IMO. If you think she is bad then so be it, but it is a fact that she is a series 5 card and is available in recent spotlight cache
There are decks that work with her, someone might just using keys because they want to be effective with it (getting series 5 cards), which can change depends on if they more open with the series drop schedule.
RIP anyone who bought the expensive Jean Grey bundles in the shop.
They've been trying to sell me her for $30 for like a month now. Feels really sleazy, but fortunately I would never do that.
I've been almost acquire my Jean Grey for a year. Feels good that my apathy has paid off.
Anyone that spends money on Jean grey is RIP anyway….sorry but that’s the way it is.
Guess who spent some spotlight key hoping to get the new card only to get JEAN GREY ON THE FIRST PULL
A few things that could help:
1- improvement to the Token Shop. With the long stretch of time between repeats in Caches, seeing more cards in the shop at least reduces the burden of “when will I see the card that I need.” The fact that you only see one card per 8 hours is kind of absurd. It doesn’t fix the math of the economy, but making it easier for a person who wants to spend resources to acquire cards to do so is a QOL improvement.
2- fixing that 4th cache. There appears to be a weight towards S4 cards, perhaps even 2 out of 3, but S4 is smaller, so folks become S4 complete with a lot of S5 to go. And that means you’re going to have at least a 67% chance of a duplicate, even if you’re missing half the cards. I know there won’t be full duplicate protection, but the status quo is re reverse of that: functionally a bias towards duplication. That really should change.
Absolutely agree with number 2. The s4 bias in the 4th cache is real scummy. For endgame players, that bias changes "a random s4/5 card" into "a feelsbad moment and 1000 tokens"
All of my fourth caches have either been a duplicate or the season pass card for the past 6 months. It leaves a sour taste getting to the 4th cache repeatedly.
@@ZandoFoxI got 2 series 5 cards from that thing and I already had them, I didn't had almost any series 5 cards, so it was very strange tbh. Like the game looked at my collection and decided to give me series 5 card that I already had just for fun. Great 2000 tokens at least.
Good take about drops to S3 and returning player experience, but I have to say it feels like there's a danger of S3 bloat impacting the new player experience, e.g. never being able to find key cards in the shop. I think they should probably also do drops to S2, but continue to give access to spotlight keys fairly early on.
Additionally with how spotlight caches weight the 4th card, series 5 is unjustifiably bloated. I think series 5 should never be bigger than series 4.
When they announced higher series cards and the aspect of the cards to drop in tiers, i always had the thought that there'd be a set amount of series 4 and 5, and cards dropping regularly as more cards are added.
Seeing the current state of series pools, it really shows my thinking truly was wishful.
@@BrioHikari the thing Is, this was the case, for like half a year cards would spend a set amount of time in 5 then drop to 4 spend another while on 4 and drop again
When in the announcement of a series drop, they are talking about the next drops being bigger, it tells you everything about the current drops.
Very disappointing both for the low number and the choice of cards. Valentina had just been in a cache and now they drop her. GrandMaster, X-23 and Sasquatch are going to be in the next 2 months and they drop them too.
I'll keep playing until one day I run out of resources and get left behind, but I don't expect anything from SD anymore.
I agree that if 15 new cards come out every 3 months, they should be dropping at least 15 cards every 3 months. Less than that is not acceptable
They need something like Rental Decks or acquisition/starter packs.
Get new players the discard or destroy archetypes way faster. Those staple meta decks deserve to be series 3
That makes low sense, like I think that almost 60% of players already play discard/destroy, so what the point? New cards are useless.
If snap zone is to be trusted, 28 Series 4 to 72 Series 5. That balance is crazy! Really shows how under used series 4 is.
The series situation currently does not work with the amount of cards in the game. As a new player, there are too many cards in series 3. You get 1 random cards every 4 caches or something and 1 'chosen card' every season pass. Out of the over 100 cards it's almost impossible to aim for specific cards. It feels like series 4 are easier to acquire.
And as you show, this just worsen as they add more and more cards. I'm not sure what the solution is, but bloating out series 3 is just going to make the newer players feel in less control of the decks they can play.
“address in the longterm” sounds incredibly grim. like they’ll work in the economy somewhere between 1y and never.
Yeah, sadly this is the first month I didn't buy the season pass . On kinda a different note I think could help releasing cards in batches instead of one per week
Just wanted to mention I got an ad in the middle of your sentence at 4:17. I know you’re usually much better at timing your breaks appropriately, so maybe look into what happened.
This platform sucks and I've given up on manually placing them. It is more work for something that makes me less money.
Already quit but I am just curious. How is the optimization going:))
They need to release one card less per month AND make half of the cards start as series 4 cards so we can get them for 3000 tokens. 😢
I'm beyond disappointed but I can understand their potential reluctance to dump tons of cards into series 3 just from the "new player experience" perspective. I think at some point they'll need to reconfigure the Series system, perhaps actually elevate a lot of Series 3 cards to Series 4 while keeping archetype staples in S3. Then, once you reach ~3,000 CL or so, you start unlocking S4 cards in caches like normal. S5 would be the only series that is limited to spotlights and tokens. They're practically doing this anyway since until Agony and Eitri, no cards were being added directly to Series 4.
I think the reason why Pocket has resonated so well with me is that it is incredibly casual friendly. All Snap needs is a means for players to get ANY card at ANY time. I actually wouldn't mind a 'casual' mode where you could play against a bot on purpose with no time limits per turn. I think i'd come back for those things.
You didn’t even mention how Supergiant and Valentina were literally just in Spotlght caches like last week I believe. Even more salt on the wound from Second Dinner…
In my opinion, we should be able to get a pity system depending on how many keys you have spent. For example for every 20 keys you spent, you are able to choose any card you want. A system like that would benefit returning players as well as new players. The spotlight system is just not good enough, and giving us one card we want after spending a certain amount of keys would make it feel more rewarding.
At this point the series 1-3 cards should all be given to you for free after a reworked tutorial. Series 3 cards are no longer a cool thing to get. They are the cores of decks. You can't even begin to make a truly competitive deck without them. The fact of the matter is the rate they add cards makes it too hard to keep up, even as a frequent player spending money. Its absolutely impossible to recommend the game to a friend at this point. There is no way for them to catch up to feel competitive. Which makes people not want to play and I don't blame them. What's the point of playing every match with a damn handy cap?
A perfect example of this is my brother. He comes and goes when it comes to snap. I have played every season since the global launch. He won't even play me because he feels like he's so far behind that he doesn't even stand a chance. While we all know that's necessarily true. He's not wrong either. I have a fairly complete collection only missing a handful of cards. So the decks I build are more optimized than something he has access to. The biggest thing holding him back has always been acquisition. He gets frustrated with the battle pass cost, it being an absolute must buy to remain even relevant, and how bad it feels spending keys to not get the card you wanted. I totally get it. You're excited to get a new card when it comes out and you get some lame ass skin or a card you weren't even interested in. It makes people feel like they have completely wasted there time even trying to get the card in the first place.
I hope every content creator just lets Second dinner have it. This is a spit in the face. They need to get rid of series 5 altogether and move all current series 4 cards down to series 3.
I feel like the smart way to approach series drops is to come up with a realistic and reasonable number for the series 5 cards. Once that number is reached Second Dinner drops to series 4. That same idea should be applied to series 4 so then series 3 drops can occur with the idea that this should be a quarterly event.
That’s me done with this game, no chance of catching up & im not giving them any more money, although I only bought the monthly pass
I hate people who say things like "but how does this benefit me?" But this series drop is so narrow that the 11 cards I don't own aren't any of these. I miss when the drops were predictable, but then Knull had to be up next and SD went "noooo. Nuh uh. Not happening."
Yeah way too hard to collect cards. At least in Pokémon pocket I can get like 2-3 packs a day. Granted theirs not much to it. Not playing has left me so behind it’s hard to get keys without grinding I also don’t have a fun deck anymore to grind with so I’m just falling more and more behind and it sucks
It would be adding another system, but targeted openings via grouping would be cool. Oh you like destroy? Here's a grouping with X-23, LDS, Knull, etc. Every x amount of reserves you open gets you one of those cards. Series drops being more frequent would be great too, maybe capping the number of series 4/5 cards so you know cards will drop when that threshold is reached or something. I'm not as out on this game as the rest of the comments seem to be, but SD really needs to cater to those people more than me lol
I spent a lot of money on this game when it first launched. Once they stopped making series drops a regular occurance I entirely stopped playing and spending. I just started up again recently and I am not spending anything. I can not build decks that I want to play. I think I will put the game down again for a while and see if they figure this out. The series drops are so bad. I will spend money if they stop infinitely adding cards to the higher series.
Drops based on a schedule makes the most sense. You can highlight some “big bads” but for the most part a 12-18 month old card should at least be series 4 if not 3.
Because the thing that adds to the sloth like pace of series drops is the very evident power creep. By the time a lot of the cards drop they’d be far from their pre-nerfed versions anyway.
Drops on a schedule make it optimal for f2p to wait for every card to be s3 before getting it. Optimizes the fun out of the game for most people and isn't a good system.
@@HooglandiaSnapRealistically, do most people play for optimal card acquisition? Speaking personally, I've spent tokens and spotlight keys on variants. And I regularly see complaints that "I only had 2 keys this week and didn't pull the card I want!" despite it being optimal to only open spotlights when you have 4+ keys.
You'd still have plenty of people getting cards at release. Especially with the perhaps unfair impression people have that "new cards get nerfed", folks will want to play with them "before the inevitable nerf."
It's a tough position they put themselves in, they obviously cannot "just give more" cards in the spotlights (if they are to have card economy based on pieces being expensive), and I guess the early token system shown us that even saying "cards become free after a year or two" just delays the "nobody spends tokens because cards will be free eventually" problem.
I thing a possible solution would be having 4 or even 6 cards return each week, but players can simply pick which are the 2 that they go for in their set of 4 keys, and then maybe even allow replacing spotlight art in the 5-8 key set with remaining cards.
My personal problem, my tracker says even after two months of not playing, I own 60% of S5 cards, but there are only 8(!) returning cards throughout November, December and January, that I don't own. Which is funny to consider, I barely ever owned 5% of HS legendaries and didn't quit for "bad acquisition". Maybe it was just Draft mode? Knowing I can use every card "potentially" regardless of owning it?
Great insights - I cannot see how Second Dinner lose out with more cards dropping to series 3.
My first thought is "What is a reasonable amount of time after which it is reasonable for a new card to hit S3?"
People used to be able wait 6 months to get a new card for free, was that too quick? Idk, but I feel like there should be a more or less balanced number they could find to use and target. To me, over a year feels too long.
But they do need to improve that S3 acquisition stage if they're going to keep adding to it as well or they'll drive of newer players.
It's a tough job, I'm hopeful they can do it, but even that doesn't imply alot of confidence, I used to believe they could do it, and before that I used to think they could do it.
That drop wasn't about the length, it was about predicability. Knowing you could wait a set time meant most people just waited and never engaged with new cards on release.
@HooglandiaSnap But that was also under the collector token acquisition model, where the card would be reliably available in S4 on demand after 2 months. I think that lead to most of the avoidance of immediate card acquisition. Who can't wait 2 months for half price? That's barely longer than it takes to know if a card has some staying power.
To me S4 could just be the bargain bin where replacement level or homeless cards go after they rerun in a cache and wait to be made free, and not every new card would even need to go through it.
I don't think we'd see the same aversion to immediate acquisition, if new cards were guaranteed as a spotlight repeat about 4 months after release (I say about so they can balance the spotlights) and after some delay they occasionally drop to S4, but after 1 year every new card is automatically S3.
The worst kind of negative behavior here I could see this incentivising is people trying to wait 4 months to get the cards on a rerun, but I'm not sure how likely that is or if it'd be any kind of optimal and don't have the desire to think on it further atm.
I will be honest, when this game came out I spent a lot of money for about 4-7 months and I fizzled out when the spotlight caches came out.
Pokemon Pocket made me want to try it out again but realizing I literally can't play meta decks because of the brutal accusation for the cards.
Hope they can figure it out sometime soon. Id love to hop back in and play with some reduced spending this time.
They could announce thats cards automatically drop after a certain time
And/Or get rid of the series cards and have individual prices
They did this at launch. It is awful and means most people wait six months or whatever the timer is to hit series 3 skipping them on release.
Instead they should guarantee roughly when they'll hit spotlight caches. The problem isn't the system but the fact they recycle the same cards which makes the system useless.
That and just having regular drops which Jeff highlighted.
This announcement I feel means more ppl playing pocket as the new cards aren't as exciting in Snap either compared to some of those that I missed that will never see in spotlight caches
How much of a difference do you think it would make if the random third spotlight card was guaranteed to pull a random card you don't currently own? I feel like that change alone with not only make using keys feel a lot less scammy and disappointing but would also inject immediate interest in that entire mechanic which has largely fallen off as a "save them until they are worth using" mantra which is terrible for any sort of sustainable economy.
The fact that we’re discussing 1/2 of the video on future series drops ON THE DAY of a current series drop is digusting. They’re trying to stretch it as far as possible. I'm out. I don’t pay for future features. I also don’t care whether 'they want to get it right' next time.
The answer is twofold:
First, I understand that they couldn't continue the direct 1:1 revolving door like they used to have, especially for chase cards that people spent money on.
But they DO need to keep the same number of cards degrading to lower series that they are introducing. So, when a new card comes in, another card has to step down.
Secondly, there needs to be a way for players to target cards that they want or need. A "wishlist" of around 12 cards would be appropriate, and you randomly get one of those wishlisted cards pop up each day in your shop. Also, this is something that can/should be done for cosmetics. There are so many cards that I want variants for and would buy, but I have no control over if/when I can get them, and may never get them.
An idea that just came to mind would be to have extra series "drops" be in the season pass, such that they pick a series 4 card and put it in the season pass and then all the series series 4 cards that were in a season pass the last 3 seasons then drop to series 3
It would give an extra good feeling to the people who regularly buy season passes
Of course they have to get the card acquisition perfekt, because god forbid they accidentally show an inch of generosity towards their playerbase
My hope is that they just get to a number they feel comfortable with in Series 5 and Series 4. Like say they want there to be 70 Series 5 cards and 40 series 4 cards. then it grows for a quarter and they drop X amount from 5 to 4 and X amount from 4 to 3 every drop to return back to those numbers.
My numbers are probably wrong, but if they are adding 1 card a week in spotlights (52), plus 1 per season pass (12) and 1 per special event (5? a year) thats almost 70 cards a year. For the sake of keeping it simple, lets assume they are all series 5, and they are going to do quarterly drops, then they need to drop 17-18 cards from series 5 to series 4 and 17-18 cards from series 4 to series 3 every quarter just to stop the bloat of series 5. It doesnt have to be a set schedule like it used to be where people are planning what cards to buy and what cards to wait on months in advance, but it would be really good for returning players to have basically 20 new cards to collect each quarter to get back into things.
After this i deleted the app, they have no respect for players . I will continue with pokemon :)
Nothing but a big change away from the key system would bring me back to this game.
I played from the beginning until Loki season, spending hundreds over this time period. At that point it had been mostly FOMO keeping me returning and I felt liberated once I stopped.
I really missed the excellent gameplay, so I returned in the middle of the Symbiote Spiderman season. I can confirm that coming back to this game after being gone for a while feels AWFUL.
I was assuming after around a year I'd be getting a ton of new cards in series 3, and to my shock it was a trickle of old pack-filler cards I've barely used.
Nearly every meta deck I see showcased by content creators has multiple series 5 cards that I'm missing.
The main way of acquiring cards - the spotlight caches - feels very bad to me. I honestly despise it, and the fear that it would lead to the situation we're currently in is actually one of the things that had led me to quit last time. I don't feel like playing a card game where I have to wait an unknowable amount of time that could be even longer than a year to be granted the privilege of spending my resources on a single card. I understand their entire shop system and spotlight cache system is built around FOMO so that people spend all of their resources during the short window of time they have, but it just feels so miserable if you're returning to the game and are now being punished so HARD for not being there when they were available. I was a week late returning to the game to get mockingbird in the spotlight cache, now I'll have to wait a year+ probably.
And the tokens are so hard to replace, that I don't want to spend them. If I use up the tokens I had saved before quitting to build a single meta deck, I won't be able to do that again.
One more thing, I know a lot of people were complaining about Hela dominating the meta when I returned, and the simplicity of piloting it was the reason I heard for this, but let me tell you as a returning player, Hela was the only meta deck that I could even build. If it wasn't such a slog to acquire new cards, I would have played something else that didn't result in my opponent flipping me off after every game.
I bought Arishem because I could just throw my random series 1-3 tech cards into it, and get to play with all these other cards I don't own, which I assume is one of the main driving factors behind why this deck is seeing so much play (at least it seems to me like I'm running into it a lot), and I'm hearing calls to nerf this card now too. I understand why it's also an unappealing card to have dominating the meta, but it's the only thing making playing this game with a limited collection fun for me at this point.
I'm sure I'm going to quit snap again soon and likely will never come back this time, unless they make a HUGE economy overhaul. But I honestly don't have faith, after all this time, that SD will make a non-predatory user-friendly overhaul, even if it costs them their entire userbase. Would love to be proven wrong. Would gladly come back and spend my time and money on this game again if they made it feel worth doing again.
I was an endgame player who left around when high evo came out. I knew I was gonna be behind, but I thought I would have a bunch of series 3 cards to play with at least. I was shocked at how few there were. It’s been a few weeks and I don’t know if I’m going to stick with it, I can’t even watch marvel snap content because I’m missing multiple cards in every deck and no realistic way to get them even spending money.
Significant, quarterly drops to S4/S3, improved Premium Season Pass (with meaningful card acquisition improvements) and either duplicate protection when using Spotlights or up tokens to 3k is really what I think is reasonable. You have a massive pool of S4/S5 cards and most people don’t get excited when they drop-rather they are scrutinizing whether each new card is worth the heavy demand on your resources. Even as a SP and daily gold purchasers I am way behind because I had the audacity to take a break for 5 months. Oof. Love SNAP, but it feels like an unhealthy relationship.
Thanks Jeff!
I haven't played in about 3 months now, and the only cards dropping that I don't already have are Beta Ray Bill and Supergiant. I still wouldn't be able to click the free series 3 button till the next drop, if even then. The last time I can confirm I was able to do that was January.
I wanna be optimistic but its just frustrating that SD keeps saying changes are on the way or that card acquisition will be improved and there is nothing to show for it
God these are so ASS. Just drop all the mid cards no one was gonna buy. What a joke
One thing we have seen as a pattern now is that SD has trouble maintaining at the end of the year.
i'd say dropping more cards to S3 and make the chance for a series 3 to show up every so often in the collector's track higher/more frequent if even for only a single less cache. i think that'd be a good starting point and then they have to do a lot more in order to get people to come back in. as you rightfully pointed out in another video, returning or new coming players can't really relate to streamers because everyone that isn't collection complete is at a different point in the game.
This series drop would be more palatable if they announced another series drop in Feb and a return to a routine schedule. Without that, there's no real guarantee that card acquisition will improve.
My other problem is this is based on card value and not age. Series drops used to be near unilaterally just age of card with certain "big bads" being the exception.
This is no longer the case so there's no way to know if or when a card will drop.
My biggest hope is that they change up card acquisition next year as I feel spotlight cache just doesn't work that well, especially when it's seemingly limited by artwork commission.
Having said that, there's only 2 cards I care about in the next two months and card acquisition is less of a problem for me. It's a bigger problem for low cl or new players trying to complete decks.
They should be focusing on enabling people to flesh out decks with key cards.
I'm finishing this season pass and, after buying all but 2 of them since launch I'll take a break. It's better to hoard resources/caches, take a long break to play other games and come back to caches that will actually have more than one card you want.
Well said Jeff! I think your proposed solution is spot on, and yes, I wish SD as more amenable in a shorter term fix while they iterate on their longer term solution. Any thoughts on adding some sort of dupe protection on the 4th spotlight slot would help? 1k for a duplicate card feels especially bad now given the size of series 5/4 vs when the system was first unveiled. It always felt bad but it's only grown worse.
I hate to play devils advocate but what's the solution? We've seen what happen to games like Legend of Runterra when they have little to no monetization. The completely free to play aspect killed the game and PvP was left behind. I agree SD is not doing enough for new players to get into snap and no keep Vets excited but what do we do in a game like this, what's the solution?
I agree completely!!!Jeff I am following you from the mtg arena time and if second dinner should listen to someone is you my friend !! I also believe because I also love marvel snap and I’ve been grinding endlessly for 2 years now , that they must bring back in the 500 collectors tokens to the caches system so for someone who’s grinding a lot should have the opportunity of buying the new card !!! This 100 collectors tokens that we have now as a reward is like : buy more stuff from the shop ,spend more money 😢
You're right, at the rate the game is going I won't be surprised to see it coming to an end as players leave for other games by competitors. In retrospect, it could end up like the Marvel Alliance game once very popular in Facebook years back...
I hope the spotlight caches are just for series 5 and in the regular caches you get the series 4 cards (for example if series 3 is 2 in 9 caches series 4 1 in 12 caches)
2 year player who quit during symbiote season. When quitting I decided it was going to be for good because trying to play again would just be a grinding drag to catch up. A couple of weeks of finding it not very fun and having another game catch my interest (Riichi Mahjong - thanks, Yakuza series) I cut loose and uninstalled. I really can't see myself going back. I wouldn't pay money to catch up just for trying again (I assume it would be at least $100 based on bundles) and I can't imagine they're just going to hand me the cards.
2 years is pretty good for me for one of these. More than Hearthstone and a little less than my longest-played mobile game (FFBE about 3 years). I had a good time but I crave new experiences and Snap isn't providing enough of them.
I think it's ok for cards like Knull and Darkhawk to stay away from Series 3. But it's surprisingly how cards like Sebastian Shaw still on Series 5 and how they dropped only 3 cards to S3 and one is fu*king Kitty Pryde 😭. I rly don't see the real deal with a card dropping from S5 to S4, aside from tokens, they are almost equally hard to get. I think they should go back to the tine where you had a little chance to get a S4 card from the normal caches.
Really? That few drops from 5-> 4 and 4 -> 3? I'm not even upset that most of the cards dropping are cards I already own, but dang, the oldest card to drop there is Jean Grey, right? No Cannonball dropping to 4? Hitmonkey? Legion dropping to 3? There's a lot of really bad cards clogging Series 4 right now.
I’m one of those players that has been burned out of the game as a former end game player at CL 14,000 and its hard for me to get back on track with the new releases and its been difficult to even get back on the daily grind when new cards seem harder to get, it in turn really just tunes me out of the content as well with me knowing I’m not really in a place to get back on.
Series drops would IMMENSELY help getting back in, and any update to the to collectors token or spotlight would be highly appreciative. Anything sooner rather than later, a huge slew of newer games and existing backlog is going to make Marvel Snap harder to come back and I’m even enjoying some aspects of TCG Pocket that have taken up my daily driver slot.
>"If they dropped 20 cards to series 3 every quarter do you think that would be a good step in the right direction?"
For returning and existing players, yes, absolutely. For new players, for whom series 3 is already quite massive and who have virtually no agency in which s3 cards they unlock, it would maybe not be so great.
For players in series 3, my idea has always been "draw 3 cards, pick one to unlock". 3x the chance with each draw to pull that card you're targeting. Hell, maybe it could even let you pin the other cards for your next pull, if you get a God pull with 3 cards you want.
Marvel Snap's card acquisition has been flawed since the beginning, the fact that you have no way to target and guarantee getting a specific card you want (even by paying real money) in a card game is insane.
It was easier early on the game with caches giving cards, 500 CT and gold. It was very easy to save gold as a f2p/dolphin player and it went downhill when they nerfed the caches because of economy reasons, also known as we need more money
For me, a better solution would be not to retire series but to create new ones, allowing players to obtain cards from two series prior on their CL ladder. For example, if we are currently in Series 5, players could get cards from Series 3. Once there is a sufficient number of cards in Series 5-let’s say around 50-Series 6 would be created, and cards like Galactus, Thanos, and others would move from Series 5 to Series 6. Then, as new cards are released in Series 6, players would start receiving cards from Series 4, and the cycle would continue.
They should just bite the bullet, and drop everything on series 4 to series 3, and half of what is in series 5 to 4,
Im collection complete, so I personally don't really care about the SeriesDrops. However, this game has several card-acquisition problems.
- S3 just takes way too long now to complete for newer players. It takes about a year now, while it was only a couple of months when we started out. And bigger S3 Drops only increase this problem. Fix? Just have the Collectors Caches (those Silver ones) until CL3000 or something. That will massively increase the opportunities to get new cards. They should integrate these caches with Tokens/Spotlight Keys.
- I do think the 1 key per week is a good average. Want more? Spend more. Thats how CCGs work. However, I do think that they should find a release-pattern that will kind of guarantee that a new card will return in 3/4 months. When Spotlights released, it was possible to skip on a new card, as it would return 2/3 months later. This made Key-planning so much easier. Now we have to wait 5/6 months for it to return and older cards rarely reappear anymore. I also think they could reintroduce skipweeks on weeks with events (like they did with Cassandra Nova), or 1st week of the season, like they used to do.
- Skip the weighed 66/33 odds for the mystery spotlight. No it shouldn't be a card you don't own. Also increase the tokens a bit, both on the CL-track, and for the spotlight. If they want to drop more cards to S4, they should give more tokens (25-50%) as well. As it is economically most optimal to spend tokens on S4-cards, they also have the highest diminishing value when they eventually get dropped to S4.
So I'm going from missing 1 series 4 card, Snowguard, to missing 1 series 4 card, Phastos. That is not the outcome I wanted.
Also, I'm a little frustrated that for the past few weeks I have gotten at least 3 offers to buy Snowguard in a package. I'm basically F2P, but if I spent $99 on the card only to have it drop to Series 3 less than a month later, I would have been super salty. I get that it's a business, but that feels shady even for a business that has a predatory revenue generation model.
It's been several weeks since there has been a spotlight cache that includes an older card that I have needed, so I have to be really mindful of when I use my caches. I knew I wanted Fenris Wolf so I slipped out on Anti Venom and Malekith weeks to guarantee drawing FW. If there was a guarantee that there would be one other card I didn't own in the draw, it would be nice. Maybe weekly release, unowned card, and two token grabs. I think 1k tokens is light, but if you said you could spend 12 keys and get three card and 4 unowned cards, that seems ok.
As disappointing as these series drops are, a part of me is glad that not many cards that I own are getting dropped. Especially not cards that I bought with tokens. But still, i would've much rather preferred more cards dropping. Also isn't Daken rumoured to be in a season pass soon? Why is daken still series 4?
Why do you care about cards you already own not being dropped?
What are you, a republican?