Digital card game Marvel Snap is celebrating spooky season with a month-long event featuring Marvel's preeminent demon hunters and arcane warriors, a shadow organization of superheroes known as the Midnight Suns. But rather than simply spotlight the likes of Magik, Blade, and Doctor Strange, developer Second Dinner has partnered with 2K and Firaxis to bring official art from last year’s tragically under-appreciated Marvel’s Midnight Suns to Marvel Snap as new collectible variant cards.
The crossover is one of the most impressive I’ve ever seen. 27 brand new variants will be available during the event, including both the character portraits of playable characters featured in Marvel’s Midnight Suns, adorned in their signature black and golden costumes, as well as the collectible Tarot cards you can find hidden all around the Abbey. The Abbey will also appear as a new location duri🧜ng the event, which will bring new avatars, titles, a bundle, and a conquest reward all themed around Marvel&rs☂quo;s Midnight Suns, using artwork originally created for the tactical RPG.
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Video game crossovers are nothing new🦋, but they generally don’t feel as cohesive and natural as this one. Not only are the tarot card variants a perfect fit for Snap, but it’s clear that a lot of thought has been put into ensuring that this feels like an authentic Midnight Suns event, and not just a copy and paste. Take for example the Magik’s Birthday Party bundle, which includes a variety of currencies, as well as a Magik variant, avatar, and title. The bundle only makes sense if you’ve played Midnight Suns, as Magik’s birthday party is a pivotal moment in the story and one of its strongest sequences.
The writing, performances, and specific focus on relati🍨onships in this chapter of the game perfectly e♍xemplify what makes Marvel’s Midnight Suns so special, so the fact that Snap has selected this scene to build a bundle around demonstrates the CCGs reverence for the RPG. This is how you handle a crossover.
I’m taking the time to praise the event while also acknowledging how incredibly niche it is. Take-Two Interactive’s CEO Strauss Zelnick called Midnight Suns a critical success, but a commercial flop, blaming the December release window. The Switch version of Midnight Suns was quietly canceled while both director Jake Solomon and producer Garth DeAngelis, the creative leadership behind Midnight Suns, exited Firaxis Games to pursue other opportunities. With the r𓄧elease of the final DLC pack in May and Firaxis moving on to the next Civilization, it’s likely that Marvel’s Midnight Suns won&rsq⭕uo;t be getting a sequel, despite being one of the best games of 2022.
Marvel Snap has fared considerably better than Midnight Suns. In fact, just last month it became the top-grossing digital card game of th✅e year, surpassing Hearthstone, Magic: The Gathering Arena, and both Yu-Gi-Oh! Games. Since its release in October, it has been downloaded 22 million times and earned over $100 million. In the high-risk world of live service games, Marvel Snap has managed to beat the odds and, at least in its first year, emerge as a huge fina𝔍ncial success.
Which is why it's exceptionally strange that no one is talking about Marvel Snap anymore. During the first month after launch, Snap was all over social media, all of my friends and coworkers were playing it, and you could tell it was going to be a massive phenomenon. But like all games, the hype quickly faded, and everyone other than the core player base moved on. After a year like 2023, which was filled with the likes of Dead Space, Tears of the Kingdom, Resident Evil 4, Diablo 4, Final Fantasy 16, Street Fighter 6, Starfield, and so many more huge releases, a digital trading card game that launched last October might as well be a retro game.
This crossover event should be a huge deal. One of the best games from last year is showing up in the biggest digital card game of the moment, both featuring Marvel - the centerpiece of western pop culture for the last decade - and it’s barely going to move the needle. If♎ you told your friends about this event, they might even be surprised that Marvel Snap is still around. The video game market is oversaturated, players are overstimulated, and, not to sound like I think my taste is objectively correct, but we’re not giving enough attention to the games that really deserve it.
It’s one thing when a fundamentally flawed and meagerly supported game like Marvel’s Avengers fails, but seeing the world of gaming collectively shrug when two phenomenal💫 Marvel superhero games come together is alarming. This crossover is the peanut butter and chocolate of video games, but it’ll be regarded as the thing-you’ve-never-tasted meets the thing-you-forgot-exists.