OUR FIRST BRAND NEW ABILITY: ACTIVATE!

Activate is Marvel SNAP’s FIRST BRAND NEW ABILITY, and the best part is that YOU get to choose when the Ability triggers.

 

What is Activate?

Activate is a new Ability that lets the player decide when the Card’s text will trigger.

Cards with Activate must be played and resolved prior to using their Ability. On the following turn, press and hold the Card until the “Activated!” message appears. To deactivate the ability, simply press and hold the Card again until it’s deactivated, or click the Energy icon and select the “Undo All Actions” button.

 

When is Activate Releasing?

SERIES 5

Activate: Merge your lowest-Cost card here with this. Copy its text like it just revealed.

Our first ever Activate card launches in just a few days! If your Spidey sense is still tingling, that’s because two more Activate Characters are coming during The Amazing Spider-Season!

 

Finding the Fun! Inside look at designing Activate

Our goal with a new Ability was to expand the kinds of cards we could make while staying true to our philosophies about accessibility and fast-paced play.

When you play a card with Activate, nothing happens–yet. On a future turn, you’ll be able to tap and hold the card to activate it, queuing its effect in the same way that you drag a card from your hand to a location. Just like the order in which you play your cards determines the order in which they’ll reveal, when you activate the ability determines when you’ll get the effect. So if you activate a card, then play one from your hand, the Activate ability happens before the other card reveals. If you play the card first, the Activate happens last instead.

In fact, the simplest way to think about an Activate ability is that it’s like an On Reveal ability you use at a later time, rather than immediately. I’m sure we’ve all played a 1-Cost, a 2-Cost, and then looked at the Ironheart in our hand, wishing there was some way to get a third target into play for that extra +2 Power. If Ironheart had Activate instead of On Reveal, it’d be no sweat–you just wait until turn 4, play a card, and activate away.

No, we’re not planning to change Ironheart to an Activate card; we enjoy all the existing points of synergy with Mister Negative, Wong, and Odin. This is just an example to illustrate the differences–though perhaps a future card could fill the gap?

 

Iterating on Activate

Before settling on this execution, we explored a handful of different ideas about how to build this mechanic. We tried multiple uses, extra rules, and even considered inventing new resource types. However, we mostly boiled down to a pair of options:

• We could attach additional costs to the abilities, and let cards be activated the same turn they were played
• We could make Activate free to use, but require cards to be in play for a turn to use it

As you can see above, we wound up going with the latter. The biggest reason was that the more often an Activate card was used immediately, the more like an On Reveal card it tended to feel and perform. That wasn’t ideal, since we already had that mechanic–it would make the cards less novel. Another was that playtesting with versions of the mechanic that had additional costs to use tended to confuse people and make the play experience considerably more complex. Last but not least, the actual range of reasonable costs was smaller than we expected. We tried some things like a 2-Cost card with an Activate that costs 3, but the designs just weren’t satisfying because they were so conditional–the majority of our costs wound up being 1 or 0 anyway.

We decided to keep it simple and go for the cleanest version of the mechanic on the first run. It does have a fairly meaningful drawback to navigate–playing a card with Activate on the last turn of the game isn’t very useful. However, that gives us the license to put a little more strength into Activate than we might on an On Reveal card at the same Cost, further differentiating both mechanics.

 

A Time To Activate

So that’s how Activate works, and why it works that way. But why are we adding it to SNAP, and why now? Funny enough, the Activate mechanic was an ability that was on the table in the early days of design. It wound up being cut from launch consideration, but it stayed on our wishlist for functional additions to the game. Why?

As a mechanic, Activate is a bit of a workhorse for us. Currently, there’s not a lot of gameplay space between executing similar effects like Gambit and Negasonic Teenage Warhead. We can adjust the conditions of the latter in a variety of ways, but most cards with singular effects either happen immediately or ask the players to do something specific later. That’s rather limiting when it comes to the variety of ways we can build cards.

For example, situational effects like Elektra or Polaris can be difficult to squeeze into decks sometimes because they’re inflexible–the effect fires immediately, and waiting to play the card later can prove costly. Activate is a tool that can be explored to make more flexible designs like these.

(No, we’re also not changing them.)

 

Araña Gonna Be My Girl

One of the decks most constrained by dynamics like these has often been Move. Many of the cards that enable movement have to be played either immediately before or immediately after the target. While there’s a decent amount of variety, the play patterns ask for more specific sequences.

There are some exceptions, such as Heimdall, but mostly that’s just how it works. It’s difficult to balance, because we can’t always make combos stronger based on the difficulty level. There’s a point where the improvement is just “win more” and not actually more fun on either side.

When we decided to set Activate live in a season dedicated to our favorite eight-legged legends, it was a no-brainer to aim one of the Activate cards at improving the Move archetype with another option.

SERIES 5 

Activate: Give the next card you play +2 Power and move it to the right.

Like Iron Fist, you use Araña to move another card. Unlike Iron Fist, you can play Araña much earlier in the game and bide your time, waiting to Activate at the perfect spot. Is Araña strictly better than Iron Fist? No–for one thing, they move in different directions. But Iron Fist can also resolve immediately, which means the effect works on turn 6 and also can’t be disrupted by a card like Killmonger earlier in the game. Araña requires more setup, but offers a potentially stronger reward. That’s the kind of thing that makes Activate interestingly different from On Reveal.

 

The Fate of Activate

SERIES 5

 Activate: Add an exact clone of this to another location.

You can expect to continue seeing new Activate designs pop up from time to time, just like any other mechanic. It’s just another tool in the box for design to use to make fun, interesting cards. As time goes on, we may identify a handful of existing cards that might be better off as Activate, and in those cases we’ll update them accordingly. In fact, we have a couple coming in a future patch! But by and large, Activate is going to be used to make new designs, not rehash old ones.

Is it possible that we’ll update Activate further, or consider adding some ideas like the aforementioned Energy costs or repeat uses into the mix later? Sure, that could happen. But for now, we’re content to explore the mechanic with you all and just make some fun cards. We hope you enjoy them!

 

Frequently Asked Questions

• When is Activate coming to Marvel SNAP?
  • The first new card with Activate will arrive with The Amazing Spider-Season. Our newest Season Pass Card, Symbiote Spider-Man, will be swinging in on September 3rd!

• Will more Activate cards be coming?
  • Three brand new Activate cards will be in The Amazing Spider-Season, and keep an eye out for a few existing cards that could be getting a rework in a future patch.Holy Cow! Did a Swan just fly by my window?
• How does Activate work?
  • Activate abilities cannot be triggered until the turn after they are played. After that, Press & Hold to Activate the ability!
• How many times can I use Activate?
  • Each ability can only be used once per game!
• Does it cost anything to use Activate?
  • Nope! Just Press & Hold to Activate.
• How does Activate work with other cards?
  •  The Activate ability will resolve prior to the next card revealing.
• Can anything stop me from using Activate?
  • Destroying Araña will prevent her ability from happening.
• But what about Cosmo?
  • Cosmo only prevents On-Reveal abilities!
• How can I search for Activate in my collection?
  • There’s no dedicated button for Activate yet, but searching for the key word or specific characters will work.