Marvel Snap is the long-awaited CCG from the former Hearthstone developers at the second dinner
Second Dinner, the independent studio founded by former Hearthstone director Ben Brode, is finally revealing the mysterious Marvel project it’s been working on for the past several years. Called Marvel Snap, it’s a free-to-play trading card game and battler published by ByteDance gaming arm Nuverse.
Marvel Snap clearly wears its Hearthstone DNA on its sleeve, right down to the booming voice of Brode showing off the mechanic in the official reveal. The main attraction is the brevity of the games, with the average Marvel Snap game ideally only lasting around three minutes. This is achieved by eliminating the back and forth flipping and allowing players to play simultaneously by layering moves on top of each other. It also limits both players to a 12-card deck in any given game.
The games take place in three randomly chosen locations – out of a possible 50 – which can affect strategy. It’s hard to tell from the reveal exactly how the gameplay plays out or works, but one element detailed in the reveal is the “cosmic cube” battle, where players compete to be the end-game one to be with the most dice. Associated with this is the ability to “snag” an opponent to double the dice at stake.
At launch, Marvel Snap will feature over 150 base cards made up of Marvel heroes and villains, including different variants of characters with different artwork and artists. As new seasons begin, more maps are released each month, and all maps can be acquired over time in-game without spending any money, although given that it’s a free-to-play game, it sounds like there will be microtransactions of some sort. At the moment, Second Dinner hasn’t said exactly which characters will be available at launch, but so far we’ve got cards from Cosmo, Captain America, Multiple Man, Shang-chi, Scarlet Witch, The Infinaut, Iceman, Ghost Rider, Spider-Man , Captain Marvel, Professor X, White Tiger, Gamora, Hulk, Mysterio, Venom and a ton more in various screenshots and footage. So we can expect a pretty robust lineup.
Marvel Snap is mobile first, but not just mobile, and Second Dinner is planning early access on PC to release concurrently with its upcoming mobile launch. There is no official release date yet, but a beta is said to be coming “soon”.
The second dinner was announced back in 2019 by Brode and his Blizzard colleague Hamilton Chu, who have since been joined by Jomaro Kindred, Yong Woo and Michael Schweitzer – all of whom are also from Blizzard’s Hearthstone team. Marvel Snap is released through a partnership with Marvel and publisher Nuverse, the gaming arm of TikTok parent company ByteDance.
Rebekah Valentine is a news reporter for IGN. You can find her on Twitter @duckvalentine.
https://www.ign.com/articles/marvel-snap-long-awaited-ccg-former-hearthstone-second-dinner Marvel Snap is the long-awaited CCG from the former Hearthstone developers at the second dinner
