Marvel Snap’s New Alliances And Leagues Are Exactly What Digital TCGs Have Been Missing

If you’ve played trading card games both online and in-person, you know how vastly dissimilar those experiences are. Despite having the same cards, rules, and release dates, Pokemon TCG and Pokemon TCG Live are completely different games. Going to your local store every week and meeting up with the same group of 20 people to play one-on-one matches for a few hours has little in common with sitting alone on the couch silently grinding the ladder against tens of thousands of invisible opponents. This goes for MTG Arena, Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel, Pixelborn (RIP), and any other physical card game that exists both physically and digitally. They may have the same names, but they’re not the same games.

There’s a vocal group of TCG players who resent digital card games. They believe the ritual of game night and its social benefits are so core to the identity of the hobby that they see digital clients as soulless, hollow imitations. The community depends on consistent, enthusiastic weekly participation, and digital clients provide an easier, lower-effort alternative that some feel threatens the health of their games and their local scene.

It’s strange to me that digital CCGs don’t try and capture some of that sense of community. There doesn’t need to be such an enormous gulf between physical and digital TCGs, and as unlikely as it may seem, Marvel Snap is the rare game that’s trying to bridge that gap.

Unlike Pokemon and Magic, there’s no physical version of Marvel Snap. That hasn’t stopped studio Second Dinner from looking for ways to foster the community in a similar way, though. The summer-long Deadpool Domination event will see the debut of a pair of new features designed to inject a greater sense of community into the game, and, if they’re successful, these mechanics could be a model for how other digital card games can evolve.

The first, coming July 30, is called Alliances. This is Marvel Snap’s version of clans, a common social feature in most online games, but inexplicably missing from TCGs. Starting this month, you’ll be able to form Alliances with other players to complete bounties and earn progress toward material and cosmetic awards. Bounties are basically challenges that you’ll select and complete with other players, sharing the rewards.

The most exciting thing about Alliances is that it adds a chat where you can talk to your clanmates and share deck lists. For paper TCGs, it’s common for competitive players to be part of testing teams that practice together and develop new strategies in secret. That’s an important part of how people build relationships in TCGs and how metas develop, but there’s never been a digital game that offers anything like this until now.

The second feature being added is Leagues, a new kind of timed event that is also directly inspired by the way people play physical card games. If you join the upcoming Deadpool League starting August 8, you’ll be put into a group with 30 other players. You’ll then compete against those players to see who can earn the most cubes in 72 hours. It’s not quite the same as a weekly TCG league where you meet up with a group, learn their strategies, and develop your own little micro-meta over several months, but it’s a good start that could one day build into a more fleshed-out system closer to in-person play.

Digital card games will always be different from physical TCGs, but it’s nice to see Snap making an effort to bring some of the value that physical offers into the game. It’s always been strange that digital card games lack the basic resources for communities that almost every other online game has, so hopefully this is the start of an evolution for the genre.