Climbing Ranks in Marvel Snap
Been trying to put this post together for a while now because I know a lot of people want to climb the ladder and are struggling and getting frustrated (I was one of them in the 30s and felt like that's where I would be forever). My only claim to know what I'm talking about here is having made it from 40 to 100 in under a week last season (hitting Infinite with under an hour to spare), and now I'm at 92 this season, having reached the end of pool 2 CL but using the same deck solely made up of pool 1 cards.
Note that if you
don't care about rank that's completely valid and you can play the game unlocking every card over time with your rank each season barely making a difference. There will be additional modes coming to the game in the near future that make this even more viable to explore.
The Two Metas
The first thing I want to point out when it comes to climbing rank is that there are two metagames at play, and being good at one doesn't necessarily make you good at the other.
- The first is the obvious metagame of the card game... the actual gameplay. This involves dozens of actions even pre-match, from building your deck, to choosing what deck to use, what cards to play (or end a turn without playing cards), interacting directly or indirectly with cards already on the board... countless choices, and your opponent has an equal number of totally different actions at their disposal.
- The second is the ongoing personal meta of acquiring cubes. This involves three total actions available to both players: Snap, Stay, and Retreat.
Obviously the status of the game board impacts your decision making in the second meta, but realizing that these are two totally separate things is one of the key steps toward making consistent progress.
While nothing that happens in one match should affect anything about your next match in the first meta, you can and should use information you have about your previous and upcoming matches in a given play session to influence the second.
The key is to ensure the vast majority of your matches end in either wins or retreats.
That might sound extremely obvious but consider that if you're getting 1/3 wins, 1/3 losses, and 1/3 retreats, that's a majority wins and retreats... but it's still FAR too few retreats and too many losses.
By considering the stakes of the game and retreating conservatively, you can manipulate probability in your favor such that you aren't necessarily
winning as many games as possible, but simply gaining cubes safely over time.
I'll go through the relevance of each of the three actions and some overall strategy, and finally some tips on managing frustration.
Snapping
The mechanics of snapping are covered in an early tutorial, but as a player it likely comes waaay before you understand much of the psychology of the game, so it's worth revisiting.
You can Snap at any time, as can your opponent. There are three states a match can be in: neither player has snapped, one player has snapped, or both players have snapped.
I call games in which no player has snapped 2-cube games.
One Snap makes it a 4-cube game.
Both makes it an 8-cube game.
The actual stakes on any given turn depend on
when players snapped. When you Snap, the cubes double on the next turn, then automatically double at the conclusion of turn 6. So the stakes can be as high as 4 cubes on turn 2 if both players Snap on turn 1, or remain at 1 all the way until turn 6 and immediately swing to 8 once the game ends if both players snapped that last turn.
As far as the question of when to Snap (and when not to),
this is a good video.
Some things to consider when deciding about snapping are: your starting hand, the locations on the board, and the kind of deck your opponent appears to running. Turn 3 is a good one to consider snapping, as you'll have a good sense of your hand and draw luck, you can see all three locations, and may have a decent sample of your opponent's deck type. If you Snap on turn 5 or 6 just as an obvious victory is assured, a smart opponent is likely to retreat. Do
not Snap if you're starting the match with suboptimal conditions like a bad hand, one or more locations that screws you over, etc. You want the stakes to be as low as possible in the likely event of a retreat.
Staying
Staying refers to simply ending the 6th turn and seeing the game play out. Whether or not this is a good idea depends a lot on the cubes at risk. It is always worth looking at the stakes and looking at the whole board one last time before clicking that End Turn button.
This is how I typically view it:
- For a 2-cube game, you can stay under a lot of circumstances. Unless you have absolutely no chance of success, it's typically worth it. Always stay if it's a 50-50 shot on turn six, considering the outcomes if you retreat:
- If you would have lost, it's a one cube loss vs a two cube loss, barely any difference. (-1 vs -2, a difference of 1)
- If you would have won, it's a one cube loss vs. a two cube gain, totally worth it. (-1 vs +2, a difference of 3)
- In a 4-cube game, this is where a lot of judgment calls come in. Do not stay if it's a 50-50, but if you think you still have a good route to victory you may not want to retreat. If you're "pretty sure" you can win, staying on 4 is a valid approach, minimizing your losses if you're wrong without risking the Snap back. If it's a 4-cube game because you snapped and your opponent Snaps back, well now it's an 8-cube game and you need to reevaluate.
- in an 8-cube game, you only stay if you are extremely confident in the outcome. Typically this takes one of three forms:
- Your intended strategy is being executed as desired and you believe that your opponent's intended strategy can't overcome it, and you ALSO believe their deck does not have any hard counters (or you know that you can avoid them, such as by lacking turn 6 priority).
- You have found an alternate/sneaky strategy for victory that you do not believe your opponent can predict.
- The locations are negatively impacting your opponent and neutral or positive for you, in a way that they are unlikely to overcome even if their strategy would ordinarily beat yours.
In this way, if you lose an 8 cube game it should generally be because the opponent had an unexpectedly better strategy than you or a counter that you could not predict, not because of any of the potential outcomes you predicted (where you were hoping for one that would win it but knew that if they made some other specific play, you would lose). This can help take some of the sting out of these 8 cube losses, when you know that you couldn't have guessed their approach, and you may learn something as well. Taking risks like a 50-50 on 8 cube games is the fastest way to find yourself spiraling down in rank and frustrated.
Retreating
Retreating is very simple... you give up the current stakes to immediately leave the match. If neither player has snapped, this is always 1. it can be up to 4 if both players have snapped prior to turn 6.
You can retreat at almost any time. The exception is that
you cannot Snap and retreat in the same turn.
Bluffing
Wanted to make sure to include a little section about bluffing. Since there's another human being on the other side (most of the time), you don't actually have to have any winning strategy at all to achieve one type of victory: your opponent retreating. If your setup at the start of turn 6
looks like it would be an an easy win if you just had one card that would make it all come together (that you don't actually have), consider snapping and they may retreat under the impression that you know you can win.
However I must note that I never bluffed during my climb at all. This is a personal preference of course, but when you bluff you are counting on the other player to understand enough about the state of the game board to perceive what you would be able to do with the right cards—where ordinarily you are hoping they understand as little as possible about your intentions. It is also particularly high risk, because if they Snap back because they really
do have a good play to execute, you're out of luck (remember, no snapping and retreating same turn).
Retreat to Advance
"If you are someone that's struggling to climb the ladder, the problem is almost certainly that you are not retreating enough."
This is definitely gonna be the most important section... you gotta retreat more. There was a big psychological breakthrough for my climb when I stopped thinking about retreating as a different type of losing. It really isn't. The developers wisely included three potential announcements for the outcome of a match:
"VICTORY"
"DEFEAT"
"ESCAPED"
This is very intentional, because when you retreat you do "escape" to fight another day with more of your cubes intact. At first I thought that a couple of negatives against my deck—bad initial hand, an unfavorable location—was a lame reason to retreat. Shouldn't you at least see if you can still win?? But the more I played the more I realized that it's usually the right call. You
can come back and win under these circumstances, and if
winning rather than
climbing was the goal here, it would often be worthwhile for the learning experience. But retreating and hoping for more favorable conditions in the next match is almost always the better move.
In this way you're capitalizing on randomness that favors you, and minimizing the damage of randomness that does not. Again, it's really a metagame of manipulating probability.
It's extremely similar logic to playing multiple rounds of poker, rather than trying to win any individual round. In poker,
you fold the majority of hands you are dealt. Then when you're certain you have a winning hand, you go all in.
It's not a bad thing at all to say that you retreat more than 50% of your matches.
Another analogy I like to consider comes from basketball. Basically, you only want to take
high percentage shots for your particular deck. You know where your deck excels and struggles. If the conditions on the board let you take your preferred high percentage shots, or even give you
more opportunities to take them, then go for it- capitalize on the advantage. If the conditions force you into taking low percentage shots turn after turn, it's time to retreat.
Here are some other good qualities to bear in mind about retreating:
- When you retreat the stakes are usually low (typically 1 or 2 cubes). While retreating over and over for multiple games in a row can be demoralizing, nothing matches the bummer of an 8-cube loss. Consider that you could retreat 7 games in a row for 1 cube, then win one game for 8 and still have actually made progress.
- Retreating relieves you of the burden of trying to predict what your opponent is doing. In many cases, I retreat simply because I can't figure out what the hell they are up to. Of course, this may be because they don't actually know what they're doing, but a lot of the time (especially at high levels), they are setting something up and being unable to predict what it is puts you at an instant disadvantage. Tip them a cube for being sufficiently disorienting and move on.
- The biggest one for me: more retreats means more matches. Your ability to climb is going to be limited by real time over the course of any play session and season. When you retreat, especially earlier in a match when you see bad luck compounding, you're in another match 5 seconds later. Counterintuitively, the more you retreat the more opportunities you have to actually win over a given span of time.
Your Personal Rules
Above when I talked about the cube meta being a personal, psychological one, here's what I was talking about. You can use the information you have about your current play session and your deck's ongoing performance to become more systematic in your snapping and retreating.
Here's the easiest way to understand this that I could come up with. It is 100% within your control as a player to not have two 8-cube losses in a row. Seriously- if you lose 8 cubes one match, just don't Snap in the next match, and it will be impossible for you to lose 8 cubes again no matter the outcome. That's an example of a rule you can enact to curb your losses and frustration if you've noticed it happening and getting to you (and man does it suck).
Your rules can also concern your deck's performance over a stretch of many games. If you've come to realize that you tend to win if you have a certain combination of cards in your hand by turn 4, consider making it a rule to Snap if you've got them, and retreat if you don't. Alternatively, if you notice your deck truly struggles against certain other deck archetypes, consider a rule to retreat as soon as you can discern your opponent is playing that archetype.
Making rules like this and sticking to them can take some of the emotion out of any given match for sure, and I know how appealing it can be to pull off a wild comeback victory or shut down an opposing deck with a huge advantage with a last second gamble. But if you want to climb, consider limiting that stuff to 2-cube games, and let logic and probability carry you when the stakes are higher.
A Note on Frustration
This is a ranked PvP game, and there's currently no other way to play it—so frustration when losing is like its bread and butter. Snap doesn't put me
as fully on tilt as Smash Ultimate's GSP system, but it can definitely still really get to me when I have multiple losses in a row.
First thing to note is that absolutely nothing is worse for your rank than losing, getting frustrated, and then doubling down on bad Snaps and risky matches to try and "catch back up quicker." It's a trap and will put you further down, making the climb seem more and more insurmountable... when it really isn't. Think of it this way, one 8-cube win plus
any other victory is a full rank, in two matches. Nothing's ever out of reach, it's just that frustrating losses go hand-in-hand with making it feel that way.
Additionally, if you feel as though you have worked out all the possibilities for an 8-cube game and your opponent does something totally unexpected, legitimately outsmarting you, I've found this is a lot less frustrating than losing to RNG. You might have learned a new possibility and you kind of just have to give it up for the legit win. Use that fist bump emoji, it honestly helps. :)
Retreating frequently, especially if you have terrible luck 5 matches in a row, can be a real bummer. But I promise it makes things way less frustrating overall than the equivalent losses would if you stayed every match. Same with the rules above. Sometimes you'll really
want to just go for it and make a risky play and see what happens, or roll the dice on your opponent being less clever than you, even if it conflicts with your rules. But stick to your personal plan and you'll make more solid progress over time, match after match.
Happy to clear anything up if anybody has any questions. I hope this was of some help to those looking to make the climb this season!
www.marvelsnap.com
