Marvel Snap’s Ben Brode explains why you can’t trade cards

Tense battles. Tons of superheroes (and villains). Holographic maps that practically force you to walk oooh and uhh and shiiiiny. Mainly, Marvel snap has everything except one thing: you cannot trade cards with other players.

To a certain extent, that makes sense. Marvel snapdeveloped by Second dinner and now available on mobile and desktop, it’s impeccable balance helped make it the most acclaimed Card Battler of 2022. You can’t buy a significant competitive advantage. Each unlocks new maps at a random cadence, with higher tier maps being restricted to tiered “pools” that you level up through. Mostly it feels Industrial fair, even if you are torn down. A card trading market could potentially destabilize this equilibrium. But something earlier in Marvel snap‘s development was on the table.

“Trading would be awesome! We actually dreamed of developing some kind of trading system one day,” Ben Brode, Second Dinner’s chief development officer, told Polygon via email. “However, as we evolved our systems, it became a bit more complex.” (Brode’s previous card collecting game, similarly dominating the Zeitgeist Hearthstonedidn’t have a trading system either.)

Much of the complexity is due to this Marvel snap‘s variant system, which allows players to have multiple copies of the same character, each in a different art style. Last month, Second Dinner added wintry variants to the rotation, which became a sticking point snap followers who lambed the rare drop rates. A trading system could work wonders here. Who wouldn’t want to trade in Captain America for a copy of Abomination in a tiny Santa hat?!

You can get variants both through standard play and because Marvel snap is based on a free-to-play model by issuing IRL money. In true multiverse fashion, you Marvel snap Card collection could quickly lead to containing multiple iterations of the same character. Functionally, they all serve the same purpose. They just look a little different.

Image: Second Dinner/Marvel

As you play your cards, you can level them up through a series of ranks of rarity. By default, maps have no visual effects. However, a rare card is given a snazzy three-dimensional look, while a legendary card sports a shiny logo. When Second Dinner first considered implementing a trading system, all of these cosmetic tweaks were completely random; Variants were at the heart of the trade, according to part of a design document Brode shared with Polygon. Here is the full list:

• You can’t trade “base” cards, only cosmetically enhanced cards like variants, foils, and the like.
• You can only make one trade per day.
• Once a card has been traded, it can never be traded again. (Brode calls this “soulbound.”)
• Traded cards would come with additional UI elements telling you who you got them from and when.
• A single card must be exchanged for another single card.
• If the card rarity doesn’t match, Marvel snap would display some sort of message alerting you to this disparity.

but Marvel snap‘s Infinity split mechanic fundamentally changes the calculus of implementing a trading system. With Infinity Split, once you fully level up a card, you can make a copy and level it up again from the baseline through the rarity ranks. When it reaches its maximum level, you can create Another Copy.

“We basically gave everyone a photocopier to make their own copies as many times as they wanted, which is destroying the ‘trading’ market because increasing supply is essentially free,” Brode said.

As with all things of this nature, there’s always the concern of third-party marketplaces popping up, but the planned soulbound feature would go a long way in preventing them from proliferating in a meaningful way lest they don’t Marvel snap find the latest battlefield in the war against NFTs. (Video games and NFTs have not had much success mixing in the past. See: Ubisoft, Square Enixthe history Axe Infinity Debacle.)

Marvel snap is constantly evolving. Just this week, a new location was introduced, the Double-edged Altar of Death. Over and underperforming cards are regularly adjusted in the constant quest for balance. Later this month, Second Dinner will add an expanded competitive mode that will allow players to battle their friends. But those waiting for the opportunity to trade cards may have to wait a while.

“I love how trading systems create stories and encourage social interaction,” said Brode. “Hopefully, despite these tremendous challenges, we can one day find something out.”