Marvel Snap’s Rock Getting a Variant Before Most Tokens is a Tough Pill to Swallow

Marvel Snap is beginning the new year with a highly anticipated season and its debut Skaar card already seems popular. Marvel Snap also recently ended its regal Hellfire Gala, accentuating many cards with elegant variants appropriate for the theme. It’s fun to see Marvel’s most iconic characters fashioned with intriguing variants, especially when they meet the criteria of a popular in-universe event from the source material, but it yet again points out a disservice Marvel Snap has done to one back-burned card group since the game’s inception.

It’s been a long-wrung topic that Marvel Snap still hasn’t given token cards their due. Tokens make up quite a bit of what composes a player’s deck depending on what builds and metas they prefer, particularly with Brood being such a popular card and Central Park being such a frequent location spawn. The gripe is that tokens don’t have variants, even when the card that produces them receives its own. Squirrel Girl did receive a token variant for her Squirrels, but it remains a problem for all other tokens and is only exacerbated by the Rock of all cards getting a variant this holiday season.

Token Cards Haven’t Had Their Due Yet in Marvel Snap

Marvel Snap’s Coal Rock Variant is Cute, But Denotes a Bigger Problem

In what was admittedly an adorable and much-needed visual alteration for Marvel Snap, the holiday season introduced a Rock variant that portrays the meager stone as a piece of coal someone received as a naughty Christmas present in front of a decorated tree with wrapped gifts beneath it. The Rock has never been a huge concern in terms of needing variants since it isn’t often a card players can play from their hand—at least not willingly, thanks to cards like Debrii, Rockslide, and Korg, or locations like Lechuguilla—though it was certainly nice to see another illustration for it after all this time.

Still, cards players have actually purchased and can have variants for should be Marvel Snap’s priority and tokens deserve to be a larger part of the variant pool, if not a necessary accompaniment to every card variant introduced if it spawns tokens. It shouldn’t be left to holiday seasons for variants such as these when they’re lacking in the game as it is. Plus, while Squirrel Girl’s Squirrel variant was terrific it is only a single step in a long journey to making tokens feel sufficiently appreciated.

Marvel Snap Token Variants Need Priority Alongside New Seasons

The simplest way Marvel Snap could start to work its way back through available tokens and supplement them with variants is to do so within new seasons. This would allow it to center its attention on any cards being featured in the new season’s content, which commonly includes a variant for them, without needing to dump a ton of token variants on players at once.

Marvel Snap’s upcoming Black Order February season doesn’t may not have any token-producing cards, though, and this could create an unfortunate disparity where tokens continue to go on without variants for a while until a season decides to highlight them. Perhaps this could stir Second Dinner to make a priority of seasonal content with token cards in mind, but that’s understandably unlikely as long as there are timely and trendy themes or beloved comic book storylines to hop on instead.

Marvel SNAP

Marvel Snap is a new digital deck-based card game starring Marvel Comics’ vast collection of characters. It’s a simple-to-learn but hard-to-master deck-builder that is free to play with some optional microtransactions.

Released

August 22, 2023

Developer(s)

Second Dinner

Publisher(s)

Nuverse

Genre(s)

Digital Card Game

Multiplayer

Online Multiplayer