MARVEL SNAP Game Design Lead Reveals “Team Clash” And Teases The Biggest Card Drop Yet

MARVEL SNAP is building up to one of their most ambitious seasons yet, embracing more than just the classic legacy of the Marvel Universe. On top of a new December season (which seems to be including a new batch of X-Men antiheroes thanks to an overarching Weapon X theme), players will have new modes to dive into.

“Team Clash” is a very exciting development for the game, which puts emphasis on the team synergy that can sometimes feel lacking from MARVEL SNAP‘s card library. Launching December 18, the mode will incorporate a whole lot of new approaches to deckbuilding, especially with a team focus. During an interview with ComicBook.com, MARVEL SNAP Game Design Leader Samuel Stoddard discussed the upcoming “Team Clash” mode, how it introduces thirty new cards to the game, and the other ways MARVEL SNAP is barreling towards an exciting future.

Editors’ Note: The Brotherhood of Mutants was initially mentioned in this article as one of the teams included in the upcoming “Team Clash” mode. However, MARVEL SNAP developer Second Dinner has pulled the Brotherhood of Mutants from “Team Clash” for the time being. This article has been updated to reflect that announcement.

MARVEL SNAP’s “Team Clash” Mode, Explained

“Team Clash” is the latest addition to MARVEL SNAP‘s gameplay modes, one that comes with a unique tweak on the game. While certain heroic archetypes like the Spider-Verse of heroes or the Guardians of the Galaxy already have abilities that line up well for a solid deck, other iconic teams like the Avengers, X-Men, and Thunderbolts don’t have that natural synergy. “Team Clash” tweaks certain cards to make them work better together. In the mode, players pick one of five teams: Avengers, X-Men, Thunderbolts, Guardians of the Galaxy, or the Spider-Verse.

Each team comes with six remixed riffs on classic MARVEL SNAP cards, creating a new level of synergy between them. The Avengers buff one another when played to the same location, while X-Men deliver +1 Energy for each location with 3 or more X-Men. The Thunderbolts flip the script on weak positions, gaining +2 Power at locations if the player is losing. Guardians of the Galaxy cards gain +1 Power at a glowing location, while Spider-Verse gives players +2 Energy if Spider-Verse cards were moved last turn.

Players can then step into “Team Clash” duels with either pre-built decks designed around those six or can adapt and build their own to specifically complement the gameplay style. As a result of these tweaked cards, “Team Clash” includes 30 new cards for MARVEL SNAP, the single biggest card drop since the title launched. It’s an ambitious new push for the game, something that the team is well aware of.

Why “Team Clash” Is Such A Big Step For MARVEL SNAP

“Team Clash” is far from the first unique mode for MARVEL SNAP. The game has regularly brought back temporary modes like “Deadpool’s Diner,” “High Voltage,” and “Sanctum Showdown” each bringing a bit of unique flavor to the typical game experience. Discussing tweaking the standard rules of gameplay for these modes, Stoddard explained how it can be a surprisingly tricky challenge. “One of the great things about [Marvel Snap] is that it was really designed as a kind of mobile-first game. It has a lot of simplified rules for card games, but that has also created a lot of challenges for game modes, as there are just fewer variables for us to tweak. We have to be very mindful of the limitations that the game is built around.“

Citing the “Sanctum Showdown” mode as an example, Stoddard noted that removing the six-turn game limit and tweaking the point-scoring system added new layers and exciting new angles on deckbuilding and gameplay. “It’s a matter of how these are going to exist in a content space. One of the things I really pushed for with “Grand Arena” and “Team Clash” was being able to use some new card design content in the modes to keep them fresh… adding a change to the champions, add some new teams, tweak a few of the things here and there, using all of the combines resources to really keep the game fresh. A lot of people get really engaged in these modes because they enjoy that style of play a bit more. It’s great to be able to experiment with that.”

“Team Clash” amounts to a “huge change for the game,” Stoddard admitted. It reinvents a lot of the cards that players have grown very accustomed to over the course of the last few years, and shifts the dynamic between certain gameplay strategies. “Teams are a giant part of the Marvel Universe. Because MARVEL SNAP is set up differently from other card games, it has a smaller deck and greater release cadence. If I look back at when MARVEL SNAP first launched, I think teams would have been a much harder idea at that point — for no other reason than we just had a lot fewer cards. There were fewer options for how we fill those teams out. Now that we have hit this point where we do have a ton of cards, and we have that ability to really start filling out those teams to make sure that [balanced]. It’s very hard to compete with the number of X-Men, they just have so many people in those teams. If you look at this mode, we’ve definitely tried to do stuff where the teams have somewhat similar-ish numbers of members.”

“One of the things with card games that people really enjoy is coming in and making something a deck based around something. They can have a goblin deck or a knight deck, or a hero deck. Those things are really engaging for people. It’s something, especially with “Team Clash,” that players can push towards that. If you did an expanded X-Men deck, it’s not going to make a lot of sense. But “Team Clash” lets us reorient that a bit, both with creating new cards or changing older ones. That can have a focus on a very specific strategy. I think that’s something players are really going to engage with, and I’m super excited by it.”

Cosmic Invasion & Reflections Before The New Year

While “Team Clash” might be one of the biggest additions to MARVEL SNAP this winter season, it’s far from the only one. According to Stoddard, the month of December will feature both “Team Clash” and a new version of “Grand Arena,” specifically timed out alongside the 2D side-scrolling Marvel title, Cosmic Invasion.

“We’re using actual art from the game, so we have these really nice pixel art versions of all the champions. I actually really like pixel art, so seeing this arcade-esque high-fidelity version of it is awesome. It’s also the first time we’re doing pre-built decks only for that mode. A lot of people liked “Grand Arena,” but they would get frustrated with all the tech cards that custom decks would include. This is a great way of letting us test out this idea of what it actually looks like when we do only pre-built decks. It’s a good data point for us in the future as we keep looking at our game modes.”

Looking to what MARVEL SNAP has become and how it will continue to evolve, Stoddard noted that he’s been “really impressed by the continuing kind of advancement with the design space, and just how much breadth of cards there are in the game. MARVEL SNAP takes a lot of the core elements of card games and condenses it down to something that makes for a quick, fun experience. It can be a five-minute game that you can play on a mobile phone. That’s something a lot of card games cannot accomplish. But at the same time, we lost a lot of design space for that.

“Seeing how much we’ve been able to mine all the areas that we have — we’re three years in, we’re still making lots of brand new fun cards. We still keep coming up with new mechanics. We keep hitting all these characters. It’s been really impressive to see how well we’ve been able to keep all that new stuff coming out after. I think we have a lot more room over the next years to keep growing. But it’s definitely something that, I think, when I started playing the game, I was pretty concerned that the space would run out pretty quickly. But between the team being mindful of how to best deploy all the new mechanics — spacing out new mechanics, not doing too much the same way, that you mix popular characters and more deep-cut picks — seeing how that has evolved over time and how much work goes into it has been great.”