Snap Into Marvel: “Sanctum Showdown” Event Is About The Chance Of The Draw

“Sanctum Showdown” is the latest Marvel Snap in-game event. Like “Deadpool’s Diner” and “High Voltage” before it, it features variations on traditional Snap gameplay along with exclusive rewards. What makes this event particularly noteworthy — and a source of buzz within the fan community in the weeks leading up to the start of it — is that for the first time, included amongst the various rewards is the ability to earn not just the event-exclusive cards, but regular old Marvel Snap cards missing from your collection. So does the event live up to the hype? Unfortunately, for as much as the rewards in particular are appealing, it is held back by a couple of key issues.

For the most part, “Sanctum Showdown” is played like any other game of Marvel Snap — three random locations, snaps, retreats, etc. However, in this mode, players are competing not for cubes but for charms, and the key to victory is not having the most points on two lanes, but by earning 16 or more energy first. This energy is acquired by winning lanes in each round. In the first two rounds, one of the three lanes will randomly be worth one energy. Starting with round 3, all three lanes will offer the chance to win energy, with two lanes offering one a piece and a special “Sanctum” lane offering four. Each time a player snaps, the Sanctum lane energy increases by one. This means that under the right circumstances, one player could acquire the necessary 16 points of energy to claim victory well before the sixth and final round of the match.

While the fundamentals aren’t terribly different from regular Snap, the mode makes subtle but impactful changes to both deck construction and gameplay. Decks that are designed to build explosive turn sixes, like Mister Negative, are out; chances are, the game’ll end before the big play gets off. Instead, decks that prioritize going wide and/or flexibility (like Move decks) have an edge. Given that the Sanctum location moves each turn, the ability to reposition power is key. There are a number of cards banned from play in “Sanctum Showdown” in addition to ones which alter the ability to play on all three lanes (like Galactus or Storm) or extend the game (like Magik). Clog cards (with a few notable exceptions) are banned. And because both players know which location is the Sanctum location, there is a premium on cards which benefit from knowing where your opponent is likely to play, cards like Negasonic Teenage Warhead and all of the Guardians of the Galaxy.

What this ultimately has come to mean in the early days of the event is that all the best decks largely play the same core cards, and that core is large — lots of Guardians, some Move cards, and a few of the disruption cards, like Negasonic and Cannonball, allowed into the event. Which means the whole thing becomes both deeply tedious and more prone than ever to the randomness of the draw. Since everyone is playing mostly the same cards, success largely hinges on drawing the right cards at the right time while your opponent doesn’t.

The specific mechanics of the game-winning energy acquisition also means there’s no reason to ever retreat from a match. Unlike the regular game, where cube acquisition is all or none, the amount of energy you end a match with translates to the number of charms you win. If you fail to get to 16 before your opponent, you still win the number of charms equal to the energy you did acquire in the (losing) match. Since you need charms to get rewards, it’s thus better to stay in a losing match and walk away with a handful of charms than to retreat and get nothing (seriously, if you’re playing “Sanctum Showdown” and retreating, stop. You’re only hurting yourself). But this also means games can go long, and can become nigh-insufferable if you get a terrible initial draw. In regular Snap, you can just forfeit the cube and peace out; in “Sanctum Showdown”, doing so is much more harmful.

Retreating is also bad because the ability to even play “Sanctum Showdown” is finite. That is, each game costs a scroll to play. If you win, you get the scroll back. If you lose, it’s gone. Everyone starts with 12 scrolls, and automatically gets two more every eight hours (so long you have fewer than 12 at that time). This means there’s an added premium to staying in a game — retreat, and you get no charms and lose a scroll. There are other ways to get extra scrolls: you can purchase some with charms (but this is not recommended, you need those charms for cards) and you get extras as you climb the special “Sanctum Showdown” ladder.

Given that even the best decks in Marvel Snap have a 60% win rate, at best (and early stats on Untapped suggest this is true of the best “Sanctum” decks as well), this means the story of “Sanctum Showdown” is one of a constant struggle between acquiring charms while making sure you don’t lose yourself out of the ability to even play the game. 12 scrolls and a 60% win rate seems good enough to stay competitive, but there’s no guarantee of consistency on that win rate. Hit a run of bad luck at the wrong time and suddenly you’ve got two scrolls left and every match becomes a coin flip as to whether or not you’ll even be able to keep playing.

Yet, for all the repetition in game play and the added anxiety of managing scrolls, the available rewards make “Sanctum Showdown” difficult to resist. Three brand new, exclusive cards, plus up to four unowned Series 4/5 cards are sweet. There’s also a bunch of variants, credits, emotes, and oodles of cosmetic borders that are apparently very attractive to certain kinds of players. At the same time, the rate of charm acquisition means that to get even just a few of the rewards you may want, the game is going to turn into a grind.

Let’s say you earn 16 charms with every win on average. The exclusive cards are 1200 charms each. That’s 3600. Let’s say you want to get the maximum number of unowned cards, which is ultimately the most appealing thing about this event. Each of those costs 2200 charms. So that’s an additional 8800 charms. To walk out of the event with seven cards, you’ll need 12,400 charms. At 16 charms per win, that’s 775 wins. If we assume, best case, a 60 win rate, that means you’ll need to play 1,292 games to get all seven cards.

Now, just like with scrolls, there are periodic opportunities to get a boost in charms as you climb the Sanctum ladder. All told, you’ll get an extra 4,750 charms from the ladder. That’s just under 40% of the total needed to get all seven cards, and reaching the top of the ladder will automatically net enough charms to get the exclusive cards. The problem is, once you finish out the ladder, the extra charm drops stop. Any desire for any additional rewards will mean a terrible grind, chipping away 16 charms at a time, playing the same cards against the same cards over and over, hoping the Card Draw Gods smile on you enough to keep your head above water in terms of scrolls.

All of which adds up to a game mode that, once the initial flush wears off, will become tedious to play and slow to cash in rewards. “Deadpool’s Diner” often felt like a slog, but at least the rate of currency acquisition increased as you climbed the ladder. While the available rewards in “Sanctum Showdown” are some of the best ever, the means of acquiring them may result in one of the most repetitive and frustrating in-game events yet.