Skip to main content

I can’t stop pranking my opponents in Marvel Snap

A lot of video games have made me laugh this year. Trombone Champ had me rolling on the floor from the moment I first heard its nasty toots on my Twitter timeline. I got some good chuckles from hearing Rabbid Mario rattle off Italian gibberish in Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope. The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe slayed me with its sharp meta humor, only to crush my soul with its damning satire on the current “content era.”

MARVEL SNAP GAMEPLAY TRAILER | AVAILABLE WORLDWIDE NOW

Though no game released this year has me laughing as consistently as Marvel Snap. That might be a confusing claim at first glance considering the mobile release is a collectible card game built around turn-based strategy. Plopping down cards with superhero art on them to try and out-math your opponent to win zones doesn’t exactly sound funny on paper.

Related Videos

However, Marvel Snap excels at comedy in two important ways. One is intended, with clever in-jokes about Marvel’s mightiest heroes baked into card abilities. The other is a more emergent form of comedy, one that turns every battle into a series of pranks where players have to one-up each other to win.

That’s comedy!

The more you know about Marvel heroes heading into Marvel Snap, the funnier it’ll be right out the gate. Each superhero card comes with its own specific ability that represents the character in some way — and often it’s a small joke. Ant-Man is a measly one-power card, but when three other cards sit around him, he gets an additional three power, implying that he’s grown into Giant Man. Meanwhile, Squirrel Girl has the power to summon common squirrels in zones, which is delightfully silly the first time you encounter it.

The space thjone location in Marvel Snap.

Locations have some similarly subtle comedy to them. I get a chuckle out of the fact that playing a card at Fisk Tower immediately destroys it, as if Kingpin’s goons are waiting at the door to ambush any unsuspecting superhero who waltzes in. There’s also the Washington D.C. location, which automatically grants cards with no abilities or special skills three power. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions about what that gag is getting at.

While those little jokes make for some good smirks, what really has me laughing while playing Marvel Snap is the almost accidental comedy that comes from the game’s myriad of interactions colliding. The card game is all about strategically playing around both card and location abilities, trying to find smart ways to get the most out of the hand you’re dealt in every circumstance. The key to victory is a flexible approach that’s open to experimenting rather than trying to execute the same strategy over and over.A Marvel Snap board shows a player winning by playing four Rocket Raccoon cards.

The more I step outside of my comfort zone and say “What happens if I do this?” the more I find myself stumbling into absurd plays. A recent example came from this when playing a round that featured the Cloning Vats location, which duplicates any card that’s played on it. To start one game I played a Rocket Raccoon card, which gets two extra power if the opponent plays a card there, too. My little buddy was buffed up to a three-power card and another was placed in my hand. I decided to push my luck by playing it there again, which is when my opponent made a counterplay with Elektra, killing a one-cost card.

Big mistake.

What followed was an almost troll-like back and forth where I’d play a Rocket clone, it would gain another two power because my opponent played an Elektra card to counter it, Elektra would kill Rocket, and he’d return to my hand with even more power. That cycle repeated a few times, until I suddenly had a one-cost, 10-power card that I could play on my fully open Cloning Vats. I won the game after playing four clones of Rocket Racoon total, giving me forty power between them. It felt true to the character: a snide jerk that would be laughing his tail off in that situation. I couldn’t help but laugh at the absurdity of it all.

That experience is common in Marvel Snap, which is why you may be seeing players tweeting out screenshots of some of their games these days. Unbelievable things tend to happen in a round and you can’t help but want to share them, even if just to have someone confirm that you didn’t hallucinate some absurd play. When one round ended with me summoning six tigers by augmenting White Tiger’s reveal ability, I rushed to take a screenshot and send it to some friends to chuckle at the mess I’d created.

It’s the eye of the tiger / it’s the thrill of the tiger. pic.twitter.com/319heIlPK7

— Giovanni Colantonio (@MarioPrime) November 2, 2022

Those moments are what have kept me coming back to Marvel Snap every day since its launch. Any time I load it up, I run into some sort of absurd, trolling setup that just has me laughing. Anytime I see someone drop a Hulkbuster on Bar Sinister, creating four copies of it and forcing me to sit through a long loop of animations as they all reinforce one another, it feels like someone is playing a good prank on me. I have no choice but to up my game and hit them with one better.

Marvel Snap is now available on iOS and Android.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Don’t expect Zelda’s $70 price to become the new Switch standard, says Nintendo
Link looks at his hand in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom will be Nintendo's first Switch game to be priced at $70. News that Tears of the Kingdom, a sequel to one of the bestselling and most critically acclaimed titles on the system, will have an increased price compared to its predecessor came as a surprise over three-and-a-half years after its announcement. It also raised questions about what the future of pricing for Nintendo games will be, especially as Sony, Microsoft, and third-party publishers all upped the cost of their new games in recent years. 
While Nintendo will release Tears of Kingdom at $70, a spokesperson for the company tells Digital Trends that this will not always be the case for its first-party games going forward. 
"No," the spokesperson said when Digital Trends asked if this is a new standard. "We determine the suggested retail price for any Nintendo product on a case-by-case basis." 
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom – Official Trailer #2
To get more insight into the price shift, I spoke to Omdia Principal Analyst George Jijiashvili, who explains what has caused the price of games to go up in recent years and how Tears of the Kingdom demonstrates that Nintendo will "remain flexible about first-party title pricing." Ultimately, Nintendo fans are finally starting to feel the impact of inflation that's been sweeping across the game industry, even if it's only "on a case-by-case basis" for now.
The price is right
Nintendo claims that not every one of its significant first-party game will be $70, and we can actually already see that in action. Preorders just went live for Pikmin 4, which launches on July 21, after Tears of the Kingdom, and it only costs $60. Still, Zelda's price tag indicates that going forward, Nintendo will at least consider raising the price of its most anticipated games to $70. But why start with Tears of the Kingdom?  
When asked why it chose Tears of the Kingdom as its first $70 Nintendo Switch game, a Nintendo spokesperson simply reiterated that the company will "determine the suggested retail price for any Nintendo product on a case-by-case basis." Still, it's a surprising choice for Nintendo to make that pricing change to just one exclusive game almost six years into the Switch's life span. Jijiashvili thinks the choice to do this with Tears of the Kingdom was a pretty apparent one for Nintendo, although it won't apply to everything going forward.
"If you are going to make a game $70, it's going to be the follow-up to one of your most critically acclaimed and bestselling games ever," Jijiashvili tells Digital Trends. "I don’t think that this means that $70 will become the standard price for all major Nintendo releases. It's worth noting that Metroid Prime Remastered is priced at $40. It's clear that Nintendo will remain flexible about first-party title pricing."

It makes basic financial sense for Nintendo to ask for a little bit more for a game it knows will be one of the biggest releases of 2023. But what factors in the game industry and world's economy at large caused Nintendo to make this decision? 
Priced Out
For more than a decade, people got comfortable with AAA video games being priced at $60. Of course, there were occasional exceptions to this rule, but it was seen as an industry standard until the dawn of the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X. Publisher 2K was one of the first to announce a price increase, and companies like EA, Sony, and Microsoft have all followed suit. Jijiashvili chalks this up to inflation-related pressure on game publishers.
"The games industry has already been experiencing a lot of inflationary pressure," he explains. "AAA games are much more expensive to make now than they used to be, but prices have actually been declining in inflation-adjusted terms -- if prices had risen with inflation since 1990, they would now be over $90. On top of that, we’ve had a big burst of general inflation, meaning that publishers are looking at big increases in everything from salaries to tools. It’s going to be really hard for most publishers to avoid passing on all those extra costs at some point."
Jijiashvili provided us with a graphic created by Omdia that "shows what the typical price points for each generation would look like if you adjusted for inflation." As you can see, the inflation-adjusted prices are only exponentially growing, and the big game pricing shifts the graph highlights were all technically not even enough to keep up with inflation when they happened. 

Read more
I played the original Dead Space before the remake — and I regret it
Issac stands tall in the Dead Space remake.

After skipping out on The Callisto Protocol once it became clear it wasn't going to become the next sci-fi horror classic, my eyes became fixed on the rapidly approaching Dead Space remake. While not made by the 2008 version's original team, developer Motive had been extremely transparent about how it was approaching the project through the entirety of its development. This was going to be a faithful remake, sticking true to what the original was, and only modernizing the look and making key changes here and there. This was meant to be a replacement for the original, not a companion piece.

Perhaps my expectations of Dead Space being closer to a spiritual successor came from the sort of marketing cold war going on with The Callisto Protocol. Both were heavily advertised and had high expectations; Callisto because it had Dead Space's original creators working on it, and Dead Space for being, well, a remake of Dead Space. While the former game turned out to be a major departure from what I was looking for in the genre, I decided instead to bide my time waiting for Dead Space by going back and replaying the old version one last time.

Read more
Marvel Snap is dangerously close to becoming a pay-to-win game
Venom effects on a Marvel Snap playng field

Marvel Snap is undoubtedly one of the best free-to-play mobile games on the market. With over 14 million downloads and counting, it's clear that the quality, as well as the casual and card game nature of the title, are doing a great job at keeping a sustained interest among players.

MARVEL SNAP | Gameplay Trailer

Read more