Draft mode finally arrives in Marvel Snap today, but after speaking to Second Dinner devs earlier this month, it feels like a work-in-progress that will be shaped by the community at large.
The mode has been in development for quite some time, and it’s still a fluid situation. For example, the first edition of the mode coming today won’t include players’ card variants and splits at all, but the devs say that’s a feature that will come in eventually.
Design team lead Sam Stoddard explained that Draft was first mentioned on a roadmap in 2024, but there have since been a number of different iterations of what is being released. The new Draft releasing soon has been in the works for “a year-ish, at least, in terms of some of the concrete design and development on it,” he said. “A lot of “individual pieces of tech” have been added over time to help make it what it is now, such as the ability to have duplicate cards in a Draft deck or buff them throughout a run.
Despite that, Stoddard told me that Draft still has a lot of “known unknowns” when it comes to the mode and how it will look and play moving forward after its initial two-week launch period today, beginning at 2pm CT.
“This is probably the most ambitious limited time game mode we have done,” Stoddard told me. “And so there’ll be a lot of figuring out how much interest is there in it, how fresh does it stay over the course of its entire life cycle.”
Stoddard pointed out that one of the things that makes things difficult for Snap is that other card games, like Magic the Gathering, releases potentially thousands of cards per year, and that in those games “it’s very easy to keep things fresh and different.” For comparison, Snap has been releasing around four to six cards per month and season.
“With us, because we release so few cards, there are certain challenges [where] we can’t just refresh the card pool constantly,” he said. “So, we’re looking a lot at like what cadence makes the most sense for us. I would say that’s something we have not completely figured out yet.”
Starting out, there’s a set number of cards that can be found in Draft mode pools, but new ones will be added over time with each assumed new iteration of Draft, including recent releases so players who may not be able to acquire them right away can get to try them out.
“There’ll be some amount of changing things like cards, changing some of the strategies that are in here, changing which Augments appear…that’s one of the ways that we’re looking at really trying to keep it fresh,” he said. “Because we can’t change the card pool dramatically between each run, we just don’t have that many cards. We’re going to kind of change a lot of these things around it to recontextualize things.”
To begin with, Stoddard said there are “70-ish” starter sets of three cards to be found in Draft mode, including multiple within the same archetype. That, combined with Augments, helps make it so that the game type feels fresh and different with a bit of a roguelite twist for each run.
In my hands-on play time with Draft earlier this month, it felt like the casual mode I always wanted outside of Conquest and regular ladder. That’s by design, too, according to Stoddard.
“There definitely was a lot of thought on this being a really good mode for new and returning players,” he said. “They get a lot of the excitement of playing this mode, but also something where they have the ability to play with cards they don’t previously own, or highlighting a lot of strategies that exist in the game.”
“The hope is obviously if you come in and you’re playing Draft and you get to play with something like Red Hulk or She-Hulk and you get to see that ‘oh, this is how the She-Hulk works, what if I could just play with that in every single game?’ And you have that opportunity to build your deck around it and play in constructed.”
To echo that, principal product manager Colin Drake confirmed that players will be getting three free decks for logging in to the game when Draft launches in its first week. This is a big selling point, to me, considering how card acquisition has always been a point of contention for Snap.
“A lot of players that are coming back for Draft will get a bunch of free cards to help catch up,” Drake said. “They’ll be able to get a ton of free cards by playing through Draft and buying out packs in the shop as well, so hopefully players will engage with cards they haven’t seen before and then actually be able to acquire them as well.”
As a long-time Snap player myself, I came away impressed with what I played in Draft. And for Second Dinner, it’s been a long time coming and a process to make it happen after all these years. But even still, this first iteration feels like a jumping-off point into what it could eventually be, and it’s been shaped by what’s come before it, too.
“It’s definitely the most robust [game mode], and all of our limited time game modes that we’ve been developing over the least year, year and a half, two years, have all been incremental as we built foundational pieces for it and are able to then add those features across each game mode,” he said. “Draft is really kind of the next evolution of all that work combined. And then there’s a lot of fun possibilities what we can do with the ruleset of Draft and take in some of our other game mode elements and have those be centerpieces as you draft decks into something like a Grand Arena champion driving the game mode.”
