Marvel Snap’s First Official Tournament Is a Bit of a Mess So Far

Last week, Second Dinner announced their first officially sanctioned tournament for Marvel Snap, the popular digital card game that released late last year. Named Conquerors, this was meant to be a tournament that brought together all of the game’s most popular content creators and see who could win the most number of Infinity Conquest runs in a specified period of time.

There’s no prize money for the tournament; all creators were given an appearance fee, and this was meant to showcase Conquest mode itself to promote it. At the time of writing, the tournament is still underway, and it’s been a bit of a mess so far. Let’s go over all the missteps.

When the tournament was first announced, the rules were fairly clear: win as many Infinite runs as possible over a 48-hour period. It’s not exactly ideal, as competitors would be subject to various obstacles outside their control, such as opponents intentionally roping them to run down the clock, or opponents deliberately letting them win. The player base was encouraged to vote for who they thought would win the tournament, and those who voted correctly would be rewarded with an exclusive Spectrum variant.

However, just a day before the tournament, Second Dinner changed up the rules. Now, instead of getting in as many runs as possible, the winner would be decided by who had the fastest clear in a single run. This effectively turned the tournament into a speedrun, which in and of itself is not a good showcase of Conquest mode, a mode that’s supposed to encourage players to be more deliberate with their deck choices and decisions they’re making during a game.

It definitely doesn’t help that in order to win a Conquest match in Marvel Snap, one has to whittle down their opponent’s health from 10 to 1. While Marvel Snap is inherently a fast-paced card game, Conquest matches tend to run for much longer than usual because of this format and players’ desires to potentially claw back a victory while they’re down to their last two cubes in order not to waste their Conquest ticket.

This led to some unpleasant situations during the tournament, including Twitch streamer Jeff Hoogland expressing the sentiment that he felt like fellow competitor Attrix was deliberately running down the clock after losing eight cubes to him so that Hoogland would get a much worse clear timing on his current run.

This doesn’t even take into account the fact that we weren’t able to properly determine a winner by the end of the event, as the official leaderboards were busted at the time. The cherry on top comes with YouTuber Bynx topping the leaderboards once those were fixed, followed by an official announcement on the Marvel Snap Twitter account that fellow YouTuber Dera had won instead.

Think that’s confusing? I should also mention that this tournament will crown a second winner, based on the original ruleset: whoever wins the most Infinity runs over the course of 48 hours after the event ends will also be considered a winner.

The tournament rules were messy, exacerbated by the fact that they were changed up a day before, and the original rules themselves weren’t even that great to begin with. Marvel Snap is still one of the best and most innovative card games you can play right now, but damn, this tournament has just been a complete bust.