How 2 Snap, an exhaustive guide on the games central mechanic

Introductions

The stakes system in Snap is far and away the most impactful part of the game's design. Snapping and retreating properly is easily the best way to improve your success in the game, regardless of which mode you prefer to play. With good stakes management, it’s even possible to succeed while playing with a negative win rate. Despite this, snapping and retreating are often cited by most players as the hardest part of the game to get a grasp on. While I don’t consider myself an exceptional player, I end most seasons in the top 500 on the back of good cube management.

Since my last guide (now horribly outdated) was received quite well I figured I’d take a crack at one for something more broadly applicable than a single deck. Throughout the following enormous wall of text, I’ll be breaking down why exactly cube management is so impactful, different factors that should lead you to snap or retreat, the ways your approach to stakes should change in different game modes, and which cards can become much stronger in the hands of a competent snapper.

Why Snap when can just Marvel?

While it’s tempting to play games of Snap like any other card battler, simply running out your cards and trying your hardest to win every match, you’ll be doing the imaginary video game point equivalent of leaving money on the table by doing so. In most games, your wins and losses are worth comparable amounts, but in Snap you have a good deal of control over how much you climb and fall from each individual round. As such, players who can consistently keep the weight of their wins higher than that of their losses will consistently outperform those who don’t, even if they’re losing more often than they win.

Often when talking about snapping, I’ll hear people say something along the lines of “whenever I don’t snap, I actually climb better!” While there are indubitably players for whom this is true, this is less indicative of snapping being poor play and more so that they are bad at snapping. And that’s fine! Being bad at snapping isn’t something inherent to your being, it’s just a skill you haven’t learned yet. Stakes management is one of the hardest aspects of Marvel Snap to master, but it’s also where much of the game's competitive depth lies. Though it is difficult, learning to snap well is the best way to improve your gameplay regardless of what mode you prefer.

Say you’re trying to reach infinite again after the season reset. Getting from rank 70 to rank 100 requires you earn a net total of 147 cubes. If all your wins are only netting you one or two cubes a piece, reaching infinite will take you hundreds of games. While there’s always bots to soften this seemingly steep requirement, good snapping can easily double or triple the rate at which you climb the ladder. On the other side of the coin, good retreating will do incredible work at making sure you don’t fall an insurmountable depth after a bad run of games.

Retreating is, for many players, something of a feelsbad experience. As valid as your feelings are, that feeling is a trap for your brain. Escaping it isn’t hard though, you just need to restructure how you think about the big red button. Lodge this phrase in your brain: *Retreating is a win.* That may sound counterintuitive, even flat out wrong, but once you get good at identifying your losing lines retreating is a huge boost to your overall cuberate. You’ll never be able to win every match, no matter what game you’re playing. Retreating cuts the damage of an inevitable loss in half, so it’s better to look at it in terms of what you don’t lose. Whenever you and your opponent both snap, there’s an instinct to play the game out because losing four cubes feels bad. However, staying in on a loss is just going to cost you even more cubes, so you’ll climb much more efficiently if you can crush that urge to stay on the off chance you win. Always remember, retreating a high stakes game isn’t losing four cubes, it’s saving four cubes. You can’t prevent all of your losses, but making the losses count less is the next best thing.

The better part of Valor

Before you start thinking about how to boost your climb with snapping, you need to learn when it’s appropriate to leave a game. The most common point to retreat is on the final turn of the game, where the payout will double independent of either player's snap. It will often be the point where identifying if a retreat is necessary will be easiest. Unfortunately, the best way to do this is to do math. Counting your opponent's potential endgame output is often going to be not just the best way to determine if you should retreat, but also the best way to identify winning lines as well. As such, pausing to think about your opponent's ideal play will go a long way to improve your overall climb. Deck knowledge is obviously important for this, but keeping track of what’s happened throughout the game is also vital. Try to remember known quantities, like cards that you’ve already seen via locations like White Palace or Cloning Vats, or cards that you’ve seen enter your opponent’s hand through effects like Beast or Deadpool. An opponent holding two 16 power Human Torches that you can’t deal with is one you should run from, for example. Conversely, you need to be cognizant of what your opponent wants to play to close out the game. If your opponent has already played a Brood and a Sebastian Shaw, you should unambiguously be leaving if you cannot put out more power than their Silver Surfer. While considering these sorts of plays, you may think to yourself “Well what if they don’t have it?” but you cannot allow those thoughts to dictate your decisions, because it is the devil whispering in your ear. Marvel Snap has small decks, and by the end of the game both players will draw most of them. Therefore, you should be making decisions as though your opponent has what they want unless you are: 1; Already confident their power card isn’t in their hand, through cards or locations that can give you that certainty like Cable or WeirdWorld, 2; Playing against an Arishem deck or, 3; Ready to lose to your opponent's extremely obvious finisher. While you’ll occasionally call your opponents bluff and be rewarded for it, you’re far more likely to get hosed if you expect opposing destroy gamers to not have their Knull.

The final turn is often the easiest time to identify when retreating is correct, it’s by no means the only time you’ll need to do so. While you may instinctively want to skedaddle anytime something puts you on the backfoot, there’s a better way to discipline your choice to leave: Until the stakes are doubling, don’t think about retreating. Keeping this rule in mind will help you minimize unnecessary retreats and find more opportunities to win games that are looking unfavorable. Unless pressing end turn is going to double the number at the top of your screen, you shouldn’t be retreating. This isn’t to say you shouldn’t be retreating early, but that your early retreats should be dictated by your opponent's snaps more than the actual state of the game. Even if your Nimrod deck is getting bullied by a Dream Dimension, you don’t need to leave until you’re actually preventing the loss of additional cubes by doing so. Practicing patience in this manner will help you find winning lines in games you may not suspect have any. Other times, your opponent will just do you the favor of retreating first.

For when to retreat on enemy snaps, there’s always one question you should be asking to determine if you should leave or keep playing to try for a bigger payout; “Why does my opponent believe they are going to win?” The answer to this question can be somewhat opaque, especially if the snap happens early in the match. Do your best to weigh the information you have available before making the decision. While many factors can lead to your opponent snapping, it’s most practical to look at the public knowledge on both sides of the board. This largely consists of the locations that have revealed and what their effects are (or could be) on both players, and what cards you’ve both played. For example, a snap when there’s a Space Throne may indicate that your opponent has a way to occupy that single slot, such as Green Goblin. If you play a card like Patriot and get snapped on, it could mean your opponent is holding a means of countering it such as Enchantress or Red Guardian. Since snaps often at least suggest what your opponent may be wanting to do, if you have a solid plan to respond to a potential power play you can turn their snaps into positive cubes for you. In the previous examples, having a way to block the Goblin in Space Throne or prevent the disruption of your Patriot with a Cosmo are excellent ways to exploit your opponent's snaps. Conversely, if you don’t see a way to overcome your opponents strong lines you’ll be best served by leaving before the cubes double.

It is, of course, important to identify when your opponent snaps and you should stay. This decision can only be made based on what you suspect your opponent has, so you’ll never be able to get it right 100% of the time. The easiest lines to target are your opponent snapping on powerful interaction. For example, if you have a Thena who has scaled to high power and your opponent snaps, it likely indicates that they have a Shadow King that can reset it. With a card like Cosmo or Juggernaut, you can turn their attempt to double their own winnings into your own. It can be a little spooky to stay in on snaps, but learning when it’s appropriate is the only way to get enormous 8 cube wins, so practicing it is worthwhile.

Other times, you’ll be snapped on with no easily identifiable reason. While you’ll never be able to accurately know everything your opponent is thinking, it’s generally safe to assume that they’re snapping because they have a good draw if there’s nothing on the board that’s clearly advantageous for them. In these situations, your main considerations should be your own draw and the metagame as a whole. If your hand isn’t looking great and your opponent wants to up the stakes, it’s as good a reason as any to get out. Even if your hand is looking good, your ability to beat the nut draw of a currently popular deck should inform your decision to retreat or stay. Finally, even if you miss a better opportunity to retreat early, you should still be getting out of games that you think you’ll lose. While it’s best to get out for 1 when you can, it’s still better to leave and take 4 than to stay and lose 8.

One last note; When you’re retreating, always press retreat later. It doesn’t come up too often, but if your opponent also decides to retreat the game will end in a tie instead of a loss, preventing a loss of cubes entirely. While on the 1-100 ladder this will just leave you where you started, post-infinite it can shift your SP by a few points depending on how your opponent is ranked relative to you.

Snapping Marvelously

By comparison, snapping appropriately is much less clear cut than retreating well. Given the length of the last section, you may find that disconcerting. As anyone who’s played any competitive game will tell you, it’s easier to know when you’ve lost than when you’re going to win. Since we’re already well over a thousand words in on just retreating (which is the most important part of stakes management), now is a good time to tap out if five more pages of this seems beyond the pale for you. For everyone else, this next section will go over as many aspects of good snapping as I can manage to adequately explain.

First and foremost, timing your snaps is incredibly important. Unlike retreating, you want to get your snaps off as soon as you can get away with it. Most players are likely familiar with the term “boomer snap” to refer to someone snapping on the final turn of an obviously won game, prompting a swift retreat from the opponent and an overall loss of cubes. Snapping too late isn’t just leaving money on the table, it can often be deleterious to your overall cuberate. Your goal should generally be to snap early enough that by the time your opponent is thinking of leaving, the prize for winning has already doubled. Consistently being able to snap well in the beginning stages of the game is important, but determining when it’s correct to do so can often be extremely complex.

While it is difficult to tell when you’re going to win from the early stages of the game, you don’t need to be 100% confident in your chances of victory to snap. Simply being favored is often going to be a good enough reason to up the stakes. What exactly “favored” means is pretty variable from game to game, but in general you should snapping when things look good for you. If you wait to snap until it’s clear you’ve won, it will be too late to get any actual gains from it. Getting a snap to successfully double with any regularity is going to be based on one very important concept: *Information Asymmetry.*

The most consistent way to get your doubles off is to know something your opponent does not. This asymmetric knowledge comes in many different forms, and identifying when it’s appropriate to snap on takes a little bit of practice. The biggest factor to consider is the “weight” of your hidden information, or how much the game changes after it comes down. If you are going to play a card that will dramatically shift the game in your favor, something like a Mobius in an Elysium game, you should be snapping before he comes down. You should be similarly quick to up the stakes before playing a key card that progresses your own game plan, such as Mr Negative or MODOK. By snapping before your power play is revealed to your opponent, you lock in an additional cube (or two) from a retreat. While this one-sided knowledge comes up most frequently in relation to the powerhouse or disruption cards you may be running, they aren’t the only way that you can utilize information asymmetry for better gains.

Even though locations are always revealed simultaneously to both players, you should know before your opponent whether one of them is exceptionally good for you. As such, you should be snapping before they realize you’ve got the board on your side. While the benefit of locations can vary pretty widely depending on which ones show up and what you’re playing. Functionally every single card and deck in the game has locations that are extremely favorable for them, and you should be aware of what places your cards can use to the highest possible effect. Decks running Iron Man or Brood get a lot of use out of areas that buff cards there, such as Nidavellir or Muir island. Meanwhile restrictive locations such as Sanctum Sanctorum or Spider Island benefit cards who can get power in despite those restrictions, like Vision and Klaw. Like before, you want to be snapping before your opponent knows for certain how well you can utilize the other locations. As a rule, you should be snapping before doing anything that puts you in an obviously advantageous position.

You shouldn’t only be evaluating locations for their benefit to you, however. The ways they can hinder your opponent can be just as if not more important than the way they help you. As such, you should be looking for opportunities to snap whenever locations are bothering your opponent. For example, something like Crimson Cosmos becomes much easier to win versus an opponent playing a deck like Silver Surfer or Bounce, and becomes a significantly safer snap as a result. Conversely, if you see a Red Hulk in your opponent's hand, you have much more reason to up the stakes on locations that limit his use such as The Big House and TVA. In other games you might just see your opponent lose a key card to somewhere like Sokovia or Hotel Inferno, which is generally a safe indication of a win. As a heuristic, it’s good to snap on locations that make your opponent feel bad. After all, if you’d like to retreat when it happens to you, the other player is likely to feel the same when it happens to them. 

Direct impact on the game isn’t the only way that locations can impact your snaps, as many of them provide information that can be leveraged via stakes manipulation. The knowledge they give you varies in how obfuscated it is, from fully symmetrical information like Mindscape to entirely unknown quantities like The Hub. Because of how disparately the information is presented, you’ll need to alter how you play depending on which locations show up. Places that provide you with cards completely randomly can often be the safest snaps a location can give. Pulling a perfect tech card for the situation from somewhere like Triskellion or Camp Lehigh (especially one that typically wouldn’t be in your deck) is one of the easiest ways to take 8 cubes from an opponent the game ever gives. Conversely, it can be trickier to get a successful snap whenever your opponent has a better idea of what you got. While locations like White Palace and Daily Bugle will often give you higher quality cards, your opponent will also be able to make an educated guess as to what they are. In situations where the enemy has a good idea of what you’re holding, some discretion is going to be required.

This segues nicely into our next topic; Snap timing. Even though I spent much of the earlier paragraphs banging on about how you should snap as early as you can get away with (and it is typically good practice), it isn’t universally the best way to increase your gains. By practicing a bit of patience you can occasionally trick players to accepting a double that they may not risk earlier in the game. When most players consider what a snap may mean, they’ll often be looking at the newest changes to the game state. This recency bias is often able to be exploited by waiting a turn or two to snap on an advantage you haven’t revealed yet will help conceal it. For example, a hasty snap when a location like Daily Bugle reveals will often telegraph that it gave you an important card. After some turns have passed, the random card it gave you will be less likely to be on your opponent's mind, and thus will be a bigger surprise that’s more likely to secure a double. By occasionally slowing your roll on when to up the stakes, you can trick people into accepting your snaps more easily.

In a similar way, holding the powerful cards you intend to swing the game with until the final turn (if possible) will help you more frequently secure the extra cube double from the end of the game. Like how you want to snap before your strong cards are revealed to your opponent, saving cards that end the game for the end of the game will increase their overall success. While Shang Chi will always blow up your opponent's Monster, they can’t leave if you do it on the last turn. 

One last note, of great importance: *You need to be willing to admit when a snap was a mistake.* No matter how good you get, there’s always room for something you don’t expect to happen to ruin your plans. When this happens, your best course of action will always be gracefully taking your L and getting out if you still can. Sometimes it’ll be a learning experience, other times you will get your bones rattled and be no wiser for the trouble, but the important thing is to not let it tilt you into making further mistakes.

A word on Bluffing

Don’t.

Ladder, or how to Bully Bots

For many players in all kinds of games, climbing the ranked ladder is the overarching goal that informs most of their play. Snap’s ladder is divided into two fairly distinct sections, pre and post-infinite. Pre-infinite has ten ranked brackets, each of which requires 70 cubes to progress through. Each rank up gives you a buffer of 21 cubes, to prevent you from instantly dropping tiers. On the other hand, post-infinite simply displays your Snap Points and position on a global leaderboard. The change in snap points each match is calculated based on the difference between you and your opponents ranks, so beating higher ranked players will yield bigger gains while losses to lower ranked ones will hurt even more. The actual differences between each section game to game are generally pretty minor, with significant exception of bots.

Until you reach infinite, some amount of your matches will be against bots. Bots serve a few purposes, but most notably they inject bonus cubes into an otherwise zero-sum ecosystem. In order to better fulfill this role, they generally play incredibly poorly. Thanks to this deliberately poor play, you can easily exploit bots to make your climb to infinite much easier. Bots are most easily identified by their generic names, nonsensical plays and bizarre splits. If your opponent name Jerry is playing a shiny Swarm on turn 3 without discarding it once, chances are good it’s a robot. Bots will also never be in alliances or have an infinity/spotlight avatar, so seeing either of those is a sure indication that your opponent is human. By identifying bots, you can easily abuse their predictable and bad play patterns to get free cube gains. By simply throwing priority (losing two lanes) you can trick the bot to snapping you on turn 5. Snap them back, and collect your free 8 cubes. Bots will almost never retreat unless you snap them on turn 6 (and even then not consistently), and as such you can ride a wave of bot wins to infinite without ever actually beating a human player.

Once you’re in infinite, your matches will only ever be against real humans. This keeps the leaderboard more competitive and matchmaking more fair. It also means your ability to climb is going to be almost entirely determined by how good you are at stakes management. Since I’ve already spent a few thousand words trying to explain the nitty gritty of snapping and retreating, I won’t rehash any of that here. Instead, we’ll be focusing on one of the best ways to improve your success on ladder in particular; hot locations.

Twice a week, a location will show up in 50% of ranked games for 24 hours. If you’re not sure which location is currently hot (or if it’s a new one you’re not familiar with), it will be displayed in the main menu screens rotating carousel of info. While these can occasionally inhibit the decks you usually prefer to play, if you want to climb there is no better way to do it than building a deck that synergizes with the current hot location. Location effects are often extremely powerful, more so than any cards you can actually run. Because of this, building a deck that can use a hot location to its fullest extent means you’ll be able to turn the somewhat unreliable benefit of snapping on good locations into a consistent part of your gameplan. Even decks that are fully reliant on the presence of a hot location are viable options to climb with. Since it’s in half of your games, being able to snap whenever it appears will net you solid gains even if you have to fold every match where it doesn’t.

There’s two main strategies to maximize cube gains while a hot location is present; build a deck that can utilize the hot location extremely well, or run cards that counter the decks that can. Let’s use Kamar Taj (on reveal effects happen twice at this location) as an example. Decks utilizing powerful on-reveals such as Doctor Doom, Sage or Black Panther become much more powerful. Conversely, all of those cards can be easily countered with cards like Cosmo or Alioth. All hot locations have this dynamic to some degree, and deciding whether you want to go all in or try to counter those players who are is largely up to personal taste. If building your own decks or changing what you play every now and then isn’t up your alley, worry not. There is another way to play that is entirely unaffected by hot locations.

Vini, Vidi, Vici

Marvel Snap’s premier alternate game mode, conquest, comes with some serious alterations to the core gameplay loop. While each individual round is largely the same, playing multiple games back to back against the same opponent changes the ways you interact with the stakes system drastically. Since later rounds have less surprises, decks with more predictable output or straightforward counters can find themselves getting abused by more flexible strategies. And of course, cube management takes on a different role when you’re wagering health instead of your rank. Before we get into it I’d like to stress one important thing: Do not try to snap optimally in proving grounds. It’s not worth your time, and it’s certainly not worth your opponents. Just snap on turn 1 and concede if you lose, the social contract is there for everyone’s benefit. In every other bracket, feel free to try your heart out.

As opposed to single round games for cubes/SP, in conquest your health is the main thing at stake. Each player has 10 cubes they can lose before being out of the game entirely, and you can’t bring the stakes total to a higher number of cubes than you have. You’ll also be wagering the traditional amount of cubes (1/2/4/8) in each round, until round 5 where high stakes mode sets the minimum cubes to 2. By the time high stakes rounds hit, retreating becomes a lot more painful. Because of this, securing victories is much easier if you don’t bleed cubes in the early game and can afford to take a hit or two. High stakes matches can also lead to situations where you are “priced in” and will lose just as much regardless of whether you retreat or stay and lose, needless to say you should not be retreating from those matches. Additionally, you can occasionally force these moments to happen at specific health thresholds. For example, If you’ve reached high stakes rounds and your opponent has 3 health compared to your 4, you should always snap them on the first turn. Since the minimum amount of cubes is always going to be 2, your opponent will always need to beat you twice in order to win. Your snap will force them to either immediately retreat or play the current game out, leaving them with only one game remaining regardless of what choice they make.

Your snaps and retreats in the first round or two of a conquest match are largely going to follow the same general structure as a ladder game. The way you manage stakes should largely change around the knowledge about your opponent's deck you’ve already acquired, and the knowledge about your deck your plays will share with them. As a rule, if you’re going to play out one of your powerful “surprise” cards, you should make your opponent pay to see it by snapping. Once your opponent knows about a strong tech or disruption card you’re running, successfully getting double with it will become much harder. Conversely, you need to keep in mind what cards in your opponents deck you’ve seen and could lose to in a particular match, and play around or retreat against them accordingly.

Once you start to know your opponents deck better, it becomes easier to snap aggressively and be rewarded for it. If you draw power cards you know they cannot answer, or see a location that they’ll struggle to contest with the cards available, upping the stakes is almost always a good call. On the flipside, you should gain a better understanding of your opponent's snaps as the game goes on, and be able to make better informed decisions on whether to retreat or try to alter your play to beat the strong line they are snapping on.

Not all of conquests skill expression is stakes management, however. You can improve your chances of success by picking and building your deck around the more unique aspects of the mode. While the viability of individual decklists doesn’t change drastically from ladder to conquest, the mode tends to encourage more flexible lists for two big reasons. If your deck collapses entirely when up against a single tech card, queueing into an opponent who decides to run that card will generally spell an instant loss. The opposite of this effect is also true, in that a deck that can’t typically be beaten without tech, such as Living Tribunal combo lists, can safely farm opponents who didn’t bring cards to answer it. Additionally, conquest matches that go into later rounds will often leave you in situations where retreating is a complete loss. Because of this, decks that get hosed by single locations or can’t compete for restrictive ones will find themselves in trouble when these matchups arise. That isn’t to say narrower lists aren’t viable in conquest, but the more games you play the more you’ll feel these struggles.

These game dynamics that make conquest more punishing to decks that are more or narrow or fragile also serve to increase the overall utility of certain cards, most notably those that can spread power into otherwise difficult to reach locations, and cards that can interact with locations. Effects that can help you reach you into restrictive locations, whether through movement like Rocket and Groot or directly adding power like Klaw, are great for keeping you in games that you may otherwise need to retreat from. In a similar vein, cards that directly interact with locations can mitigate the worst effects of location variance. Particularly in those “locked in” games where retreating is impossible, being able to change a problematic location can save your entire run. Whether that takes the form of something like Nocturne or Legion depends pretty heavily on what exact deck you’re playing, but most everything has room for location interaction in there somewhere.

Finally, conquest matchmaking is infamously very loose in the higher brackets, particularly infinity conquest. This is largely because matchmaking has to be split into so many different queues, and stricter MMR bands would lead to much longer times to find a game. This has the notable side effect of making better players have an easier time getting infinity avatars. Ideally, once you get skilled at stakes management you too will be able to farm the worse gamers that you’ll be matched against.

Stakes Superstars

With all the fundamentals of snapping and retreating out of the way, this last section is going to focus on what cards gain the most benefit from those skills. It’ll be a bit more specific than the others, as we dial in on card types or individual cards that have the highest potential for gains with proper use of the stakes system. This list will be by no means exhaustive, but should help give you a better sense of how your card choices can open new venues to snap on.

Reactive Tech Cards: This category is a touch broader than the rest, and encompasses cards like Shang Chi and Shadow King. Being able to nullify your opponents powerful cards is obviously worth snapping on. As per usual, snap on them early and play them late if you can get away with it. The only times you should rip reactive tech early is if you suspect your opponent may have some way to prevent its use, something like a Cosmo or Alioth.

Cable and Copycat: The asymmetric information twins are grouped together here because they both give you very similar knowledge, which is what card your opponent definitely won’t be drawing. While their actual use case differs (Cable provides more cards to play while Copycat has high roll potential), you’re most frequently going to be snapping with them because you know your opponent won’t have access to a key card. Bear in mind that effects that shuffle the deck, such as Thor or Vibranium Mine, may give your opponent unexpected access to their bottom card. Like locations that provide information, it will often be better to hold your snap for a later turn after Cable pulls your opponent's win condition so as to not immediately telegraph that you stole it. 

Mr Negative: Also slightly differing from the rest of the list, Mr Negative is less a card that is improved by snapping and more one that is entirely supported by it. Any deck built around him will never be able to get a winrate above 50%. Despite this, he’s still a viable choice to climb with due to how incredibly strong those winning games are. This dynamic of being so reliant on good stakes management for success makes Mr Negative an excellent tool for honing your snapping skills. Think of him like training weights; Once you get used to climbing with Mr Negative, everything else will feel easy by comparison.

Pixie: Similar to Mr Negative, Pixie is a card that can provide you with hands that are simply unbeatable. Unlike him, she can support a wide variety of builds and has a downside that’s more easily negated thanks to her good friend Mobius. Because her builds are less well known than Negative, she also is more likely to get the end of game doubles. While it’s tempting to run her with the hope of swapping the costs of 6 drops with things like Wasp and Yellowjacket, you’ll get more consistent use out of her using 1s and 5s. Since your final turn is going to involve multiple cards getting played, you want your undiscounted power cards to leave some room for other things to be played alongside them.

Magneto: A respectably statted 6 drop, Magneto is a great utility choice for any deck that wants top-end without specific synergy. His ability to reallocate enemy power gives him a unique niche that can enable extremely hard to read snaps. Most players are making their end game plays thinking about where their power currently is, and moving it around can be absolutely ruinous. When running Magneto, you should keep an eye out for decks that concentrate a lot of power in their yoinkable cards, such as those built around Silver Surfer or Surtur. Additionally, you can pull your opponents cards out of beneficial locations or into negative ones. Pulling multiple cards out of Mojoworld or bringing ongoings into Isle of Silence can be devastating, and is worth upping the stakes for.

Juggernaut: A nasty surprise for anyone who wants to choose where their cards go at the end of the game, Juggernaut is an excellent “door slammer” type of card to close out games with. Playing best in decks that can easily secure priority of the final turn, he can completely shut out a huge variety of plays. Keeping your opponents tech away from your fragile scalers, knocking their power cards out of important lanes or into actively negative ones, or just shoving big guys into your USAgent that they would’ve liked to avoid, there’s plenty of opportunities for Juggernaut to earn you fantastic cube gains.

Hydra Bob: The only card (currently) in the game that directly interacts with snap mechanic, Hydration Robert will likely have more impact on how you snap than any other card. While most of his utility is wrapped up in being a 5 power card that only costs 1 energy, both players having the opportunity to move him with a snap opens up a lot of depth. As a rule, I recommend placing Bob in lanes you don’t necessarily need him to compete for, as a later snap is going to move him. Using a snap to move him out of clogged lanes or into restrictive locations will often be extremely valuable, enough so that it’s often worth holding your snap until you have an opportunity to do so. Though his movement is generally random, you can aim Bob's jump by filling the location you don’t want him to land in. Finally, be cognizant of your opponent's snaps also moving him. You’ll feel quite silly if he moves to fill a location you needed to play something in on the last turn.

Legion: Last and the polar opposite of least is my personal favorite card from any card game, Legion. Allowing you to essentially turn any given location into a card you can play, Legion opens up unique play lines that are fantastic to snap on. He’s not quite splashable enough to fit in every single deck, any list that can secure priority early and wants a 5 drop needs an extremely good reason not to run him. While his efficacy may initially seem like it’s entirely in the hands of RNG, it’s mostly up to how well you can identify the situations where his inimitable strengths are worth snapping on. Most games are going to have a location your opponent doesn’t like or you benefit greatly from, which are excellent targets to duplicate, or locations that hamper you or boost your opponent, which are easily deleted with Legion. In any of these games, he provides an easy and oblique snap, which is extremely likely to earn a double. Is your opponent's strategy dependent on slamming big idiots? They’re going to struggle to win 3 Mojoworlds. Are they bouncing cheap cards back to their hand for an explosive turn 6? They’ll feel like a certified Bozo for doing that with 3 Crimson Cosmos. Is there a Limbo suggesting that you should be playing the game on turn 7? Legion will make sure the game ends when it’s supposed to. Are they looking to fill the entire board? The extra Monster Islands will give you 20 power for not being so reckless. Got a Luke Cage? When everywhere is the Negative Zone, his stats look something like 3/big. And of course, copying Bar With No Name will make your opponent lose because they tried to win. While it takes some practice and matchup knowledge to identify all his potential lines, no card abuses snaps like Legion.

Too Long, Didn’t Read

There is no TLDR. If this guide is too many words for your neanderthal brain to comprehend then learning how to snap is beyond your meager mental faculties and you’d be better served playing a game more fitting your diminutive intellect, like League of Legends.