This is one of those games where it's hard not to make up a (likely somewhat accurate) narrative in your head about the tension between the developers and their bosses. This is the freshest take on its genre in many years, something that ought to belong to us all as a folk game. All games should, but you get my meaning. This is wonderful new territory, opening up massive tracks of design space almost entirely outside of the traditional grounds for tcgs/ccgs. And yet it squeezes you for cash like it's any other abusive mobile game.

The weird tragedy of Marvel Snap is that the developers who actually make the damn thing overperformed. Looking at its marketing materials and its monetization scheme, it's clear that Snap was never really setting out to change things or make a big splash. It was to be old school mobile whale bait using a valuable property. But the devs poured too much love in and had too many new mechanical ideas and oops! We accidentally attached a masterpiece to this store begging you for $100 to get a few jpegs that slows your progress to a crawl if you don't go digging in your purse.

Bless the artists here doing everything they can to genuinely contribute to and transform what competitive games are and can be. Fuck Disney and the studios they contract for shit like this.

Credit where it's due: it's very rare you'll get a sense of "card envy" driving you to buy. The matchmaking here prioritizes your collection level to an almost absurd degree, meaning that you are largely playing against people with the same cards as you. The pool system allows a bit of variety between two players at the same collection level, but in practice you and your opponent are essentially working with the same tools.

I will continue playing this, as I find the gameplay and laddering experience intrinsically rewarding and mindbending in ways that activate new parts of my brain I didn't know were resting in there. If you're more motivated by getting shiny new things (which is fine! I sure love some of that as well) and not so much self-improvement and the richness of competition, I'd stay away for now, as this will only frustrate you with its drip-feeding.

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The kinds of crowds I tend to hang around and the kinds of criticism I tend to read lead me to a lot of people turning their nose up at the very sight of Marvel. I get it and carry more then a little resentment when it comes to the cultural monolith that is Disney, but personally I'll have none of that sneering dismissal of "capeshit". I only hope that as Marvel's cultural relevance drops from "primary touchstone for all of popular culture" to "one very popular setting/brand among others", that hostility will cool down and people won't be walking around finding any opportunity to shut down others for liking comic books and movies too much. There's something to be said about toxic fanboys doing their thing and being obnoxious in the opposite way, but I won't comment since they essentially do not exist in the slices of the world I inhabit.

I mention that just to preface saying that Marvel's massive cast of characters with lots of individual charm, pre-existing emotional connections, and general flair makes for a pretty flavorful card game, all things considered.