Best Surprise – Marvel Snap

Tom: A mobile card game that is actually pretty good AND doesn’t require hundreds of dollars of buy in to be competitive? It’s actually really fun? I’ve played Snap and still don’t believe it exists. The thing about Snap is you keep waiting for it to reveal how it’s exploiting you or to run into a brick wall of progression or something, but it keeps on being pretty playable and giving you a relatively soft sell. AND it’s really good.

Diego: Marvel Snap might honestly be my most played game of the year besides Destiny. I’m not really super into card games, and had just recently fallen off of Magic the Gathering: Arena from that game’s incessant grind and aggressive microtransactions. Here comes Marvel Snap out of nowhere, that I download to humor some friends and four months later I’m still totally hooked to it. It’s simple enough where you can easily create viable decks, but still deep enough to allow intricate combos, and is probably the most anti-microtransaction game I’ve ever seen. You get new cards by simply playing the game, there’s no way to pay to get ahead, what a wild concept.

Austin: The surprise really comes from how mobile Marvel Snap, while full of manipulative tactics and clever ways to try and get money out of players, manages to have a very engaging, fun to learn set of mechanics. It does a great job of making you feel like you don’t need to be spending money to be competitive, even despite its extremely transparent manipulation.