CRS - Keep Calm

 I like to spend my weekend by relaxing and playing games, mostly. Which is why I hadn‘t done a post on Orchi‘s Forge, or Asteroid M. But my relaxation last week was soured by something else, and I didn't post this while ai was fuming, but pondered, and decided:

Spicy hot take afoot. Let‘s snap this b***h.

Recently, 2nd Dinner announced changes to Marvel Snap, which we had reasons to expect to be „overly convoluted marginal improvements“ (roughly quoting Jeff Hoogland).

What we couldn‘t expect was their planned move to remove Series 3 (S3) cards from the token shop.

Yeah, you heard that right. And if you don‘t use social media at all (good on you!), then you possibly hadn‘t heard it until now. Outside of Collector’s Caches / Reserves, you will only get one (i.e. 1) card per season. Mind you, it‘s free, and completely your choice, but still - do not let yourself be distracted by the smoke and mirrors of people telling you „uhhh, you were getting roughly 1 card a month from the shop anyway.“

The „roughly“ part is significant. There were bundles with tokens. You received 3000 Collector‘s Tokens just for reaching CL 500, iirc. So there were opportunities to get more than one S3 card. And unless you were S3 complete (or nearly complete to the point were have all you desired), there is this uncomfortable reality:

80% of S3 cards only work on their own in 20% of all cases. Most powerful S3 plays require more than one card. Only Patriot can easily work as a deck concept without any of the other S3s, but it profits so much from Mystique.

So if you want to play any other S3 deck - particularly those you see propagated by content creators - you know you‘ll be lagging behind your aspirations by roughly a quarter of a year.

Per deck.

And any formerly existing method to accelerate it will be no more. And then there are the series drops that fatten S3 each month, keeping your odds at getting cards you really want/need low while you slog on through S3. Any more frequent or more numrous releases and they‘ll turn S3 completion into a death march where you can‘t acquire enough Reserves to make progress before the next drop - unless you play a big lot, or pay up.

I‘d hate to reach S3 right now, and if I talk about this any further, might actually advise against it, though it‘d be futile since the CL system pushes you over the edge eventually. Yeah, I need to stop rn, or I‘ll bust an artery. God I hope they put sensibility back on the menue at 2nd Dinner sooner than later.

So, farewell until next time, and remember: Keep calm, and Series 3 now means war.