It is rare that a developer will straight up say, “I want my game to be the best ever, and I believe it can be.” It is far rarer that they might have a point. Ben Brode, and his team at Second Dinner, are the developers of upcoming mobile and PC card battler Marvel Snap. Many of them are also the minds that took Hearthstone from a relatively small World of Warcraft spin-off prototype originally announced in an unstreamed room at PAX to being one of the most profitable and played games of its era. There could be a debate as to whether it was the biggest card game of all time, but it certainly took the crown for digital and started a genre revolution.
So, let’s go again. What is Marvel Snap, and why is Brode quite so excited about it?
“So Marvel Snap is really different from other games in the genre. It’s super fast, the games take about an average of three minutes,” Brode says.
Your average Hearthstone, Legends of Runeterra, or Magic: The Gathering game is 3-10 times more than that. Even the most popular mobile games take five or so minutes to complete a session, often more. We’re talking more about how long you spend scrolling Twitter on the toilet than a full strategy game. How do they combine the two? Simultaneous turns.
“We took your opponent’s turns and your turns and layered them on top of each other,” Brode explains. “We cut out all the waiting, but none of the fun of making your own decisions. The core game is there are three locations, and each location has a unique ability. Every game you play, you have no idea what locations you are going to see – they reveal themselves on turns one, two, and three of the game.” There are 60 locations, randomized each game – that’s close enough to infinite variety. Each location has some effect, buffing cards there, destroying them, and so on. They’re also how you win.
You want to control two of three locations, using your cards to do so. More power than your opponent? You’re winning. Get to the end of turn six with two under your control, congratulations on your dub.
The game only uses 12 cards in a deck, each of them unique, so there’s significantly less time spent gathering additional copies of cards you have. Brode points out that most card games only have 15 unique cards per deck, which was their starting point. This helps to simplify deckbuilding, which is both the most complicated and difficult part of card games, and the one with the most UI challenges when developing for mobile.
“As you level up your cards, you gain collection level,” Brode explains. “The more upgrades you’ve done, the higher your collection level. There are a huge amount of rewards that you get as you increase your collection level, including most of the cards in the game. So if you want to get new cards, you play with cards, upgrade them, that gives you collection level, you get new cards, use those cards to play with, upgrade those cards, you unlock some new cards.
“The monetization is you can speed that up if you want to. There’s a shop where you can go and buy fast upgrades that cycle every certain amount of time. If you have some real money, you can spend it to do that quicker, or if you’ve earned some premium currency through playing the game.”
Simple enough. As you can imagine, those cards have endless possible effects – Brode cites two. Hawkeye, who buffs himself when another card is played in his location next turn, and Jessica Jones, who buffs herself if she’s alone. This leads into some of the primary gameplay goals of Marvel Snap: bluffing.
Brode’s example is Hawkeye, a card that incentivises him to play another card at the same location next turn. What assumption is that going to force his opponent into, and how can he play around that? Take the buff, or assume his opponent is going to see that coming and play elsewhere?
I compare it to online poker, a game where a beginner is going to be easily stuck in an infinite loop of ‘but if they know that I know that they know’ whenever they’re working out a bluff or particular play. But an expert player knows about betting ranges, what a size of bet tells them, what information they have given and how an opponent should play. They still might get blown out sometimes, but with consistency they will win more than they lose.
“There’s a lot of controlling what your opponent is thinking about you,” Brode says. “There’s this interesting blend of non-hidden information and hidden information – I call it context and hidden information. There’s a lot of context, right? Okay, he’s got these cards here, he’s got these cards here. This leads me to guess what deck he might be playing, what will be the strategy based on that context. So you need to think about what clues do I want to give my opponent here to mislead them into thinking my strategy is different.”
Marvel Snap is far from a gambling game, but that idea of bluffing for big rewards goes further with the titular Snap. In normal ranked ladder games, you can decide to ‘snap’ and declare that you’re so confident in victory, you’re willing to put an extra Cosmic Cube (the points used to rank up and down) on the outcome. Your opponent decides if they’re willing to wager that extra cube or give up now and let you take the original one. Of course, you might be lying, have nothing going on, likely to lose, and just want your opponent to give up. Brode thinks this makes the entire process of laddering more interesting.
“Let’s say you’re winning 40% of your games,” he explains. “But, every time you win a game you win eight cubes, and every time you lose, you lose one cube – you’re going to be way up that ladder. That is critical to your skill in the game.”
Obviously, that whole system doesn’t translate to competitive or tournament play, and mobile esports (not to mention card game esports) is an ever-growing industry. They aren’t talking about it yet, but they have a plan for that as well, which takes into account the massive differences between a random person on ladder and someone you might actually know the habits of in a tournament setting.
That metagame layer – everything outside of actually playing the card game – is vitally important, given we’re talking free to play. Here’s the rundown from Brode on how they’re doing that:
“So our first step was to make sure that you could get every card in the game for free eventually,” he says. “That’s a really important hallmark of a free to play game, in my opinion. Here’s how it works: you build a deck, you play with that deck, one of the cards in your deck gets some boosts, then you use some in-game currency and the boosts to upgrade your cards.
“This is one of the most stunning parts of the game. Our cards start out as common and then as they level up, they go from uncommon to rare to epic to legendary, ultra, infinity, there’s a bunch of rarities – they look cooler. The rarities are just cosmetic upgrades to the card. So when I go from common to uncommon, the cards pop out of the frame. Once you get it to rare, you can see this incredible 3D effect on every card as you move your phone. Then once it’s epic it animates, once it’s legendary the logo becomes shiny. They don’t get any more power, but they look incredible.”
This level of visual flare – cards popping, cool animations, gyroscope-guided 3D images – is vital, in Brode’s opinion, to bringing in new players. So long as it looks good, people will give it a shot, and he thinks that the three minute run-time that still provides strategic depth will keep them around. There’s also an endless amount of new content planned – adding at least a new location every single week.
“We have a ton of locations that we’ve just built already,” Brode says. “That way, we can just have them on the backburner – enough to do one every week for a year without having to design any more locations, and then we are going to design a ton more locations.”
At launch, there’s already over 150 cards, and the developers have made many more that they’re excited about. They plan to add those at a . Then there’s battle passes, events, seasons, and ranked rewards on top of all that.
“It’s gonna feel like constant content all the time,” Brode teases.
This also impacts the approach to balancing. Brode says they’re not remotely afraid to change cards: “If a card is too powerful we’re gonna make it less powerful,” he explains. “We don’t mind changing stuff up.” With this amount of new content coming in constantly, the speed of the games, the significance of locations, and how much a single card addition can shake up a meta where only 12 are in each deck, they may have built a game with significant resistance to the primary weaknesses all card games face.
“I think balancing is actually a tool for more content, right?” Brode says. “If there’s a certain deck that’s too good, just changing one card in that deck means that the format’s wide open again, and you look at all the cards you’ve got a little bit differently. So I think it’s a really useful tool for us to keep the game fresh to edit cards and change stuff.
“We’re adding new locations every week and part of that plan is, when they come out they’re hot for a couple of days, which means they’re a little more common. So you can maybe guess, ‘Okay, I’m probably going to see Stark Tower in most of my games, and Stark Tower on turn five buffs all the cards.’ So you might want to play some cards that are off-meta. Nightcrawler can teleport. So you might play him in Stark Tower, he gets the bonus, then you can move him somewhere else, making room for another card there.
“The reason balance matters is because if you don’t have balance, the game gets stale, it gets boring seeing the same thing over and over again. The locations make it so the game is never boring, it’s always interesting, and we can either inject new locations that change the meta, and make certain decks better or worse. Or we can just change the cards directly. We have a lot of tools to make the game feel great in that way.”
Will it work? Who knows. Footage and screengrabs are pretty exciting so far, and if there’s one thing this team knows, it’s how to make a good card game. Brode and much of his team helped make Hearthstone, how hard can it be to do it again?
“I think we really have a chance to make the biggest card game ever made.” he says. I point out this is an ambitious goal. “Listen, I got to do it once before,” he replies with a laugh. It’s hard to argue against that.
Written by Ben Barrett on behalf of GLHF.
