In the Second Dinner mobile card game marvel Snap, One card seems to spark more curiosity than any other: Agatha Harkness. Part of this could be due to the character’s growing popularity stemming from her role in the Disney Plus series WandaVision, which led to the emergence of spin-off series Agatha: Circle of Chaosset to release winter of this year. However, she’s much more likely to play your cards for you due to her card’s crazy unique ability.
Marvel snap Creator Ben Brode also knows how special the Agatha Harkness card is, going so far as to say that the team “was afraid of this card for years.” But that uncertainty and instability is really the crux of the matter. Brode spoke up Eurogamer about the need for trading card games to avoid making players feel like they’ve seen it all before.
“You need something that will blow their minds and make them think, ‘Wait! Anything can happen in this game! I don’t know what to expect! What else do these cards do? I need to see all these cards now! This is wild!'” said Brode Eurogamer.
The ones who played Marvel snap Ever since the game released in October 2022, they’ve probably had that incredible moment where they encounter this card’s ability for the first time and realize what’s happening. However, what might be even more surprising is that Brode doesn’t actually want you to play the Agatha Harkness card, and the reason lies in the way the witch works.
It turns out that Agatha Harkness has only one thing on her mind: to play herself. If there is enough energy to play its 6-cost card, it will play itself. However, this usually doesn’t happen until the end of the game. In the meantime, she will play the game for you completely randomly. That’s right. There is nothing other than full randomization. This news is stunned Eurogamer‘s Christian Donlan, who asked Brode for clarification.
“Totally coincidental,” Brode replied. “She’ll take a random card, play it in a random place, and do it over and over until she runs out of mana. That’s it.”
Donlan confessed that he was trying to apply more logic to the Harkness map than the map itself, a mistake he’s probably not alone with.
“So one of my theories was that she has a quirk because she doesn’t know how to play Medusa, which only makes sense if you play her in the middle,” Donlan told Brode. “Agatha plays Medusa everywhere. But it turns out I read absolutely everything into it? Was that planned from the start? Total coincidence?”
Brode’s advice? Don’t rely on Agatha at all. But if you put your trust in her, maybe not combine her and Medusa in the same deck.
So if you’re not supposed to be playing Agatha, you might be wondering why have her in the first place? It’s all part of that core goal of keeping the trading card game unique.
“Actually, I’d rather you didn’t play Agatha. I’d rather you make tough decisions and try to find the right game. But we want there to be something really unique about the game,” Brode explained Eurogamer.
And the real magic of the card is being able to stand on your opponent’s side and discover at the end of a game that it was Agatha you were playing against all along.
“So this card wasn’t Agatha in the first place,” reveals Brode. “Once upon a time there was Adam Warlock. […] But then WandaVision came out. And there’s a moment — that’s a spoiler, sorry. But there is a moment WandaVisionwhere there’s a character who suddenly reveals that she was the villain all along.”
And, well, you probably know how the song goes.
