The new Marvel digital collectible card game, Marvel Snap, was released for everyone on October 18th, 2022. Since then, the app has been all the rage among comic and strategy game lovers. Created by Nuverse and Second Dinner, Marvel Snap pits two players with a 12-card deck full of Marvel iconic heroes each. Using these cards, the players have to conquer at least two out of three locations to win.
To make things interesting, each location (randomly selected per battle) can influence the game through different effects. A great deal of playing the game is understanding how these locations' effects can be helpful. However, there are some locations that can't be spun around to be of assistance. Whether it is because they're useless or harmful to any player's strategy, fans hate encountering these locations.
10 The Big House Only Allows For Low-Cost Cards
In the comics, the Big House is a New York prison that has been shrunk using Pym particles. This tiny institution holds all kinds of Marvel's iconic supervillains, who have been shrunken, ensuring they won't hurt anyone again. Although it's ironically named the Big House, it's small enough to put inside an office.
Given that the Big House is a minuscule place, it's impossible to play high-cost cards on it in Marvel Snap. Cards with 4, 5, or 6-cost can't be placed here. Since cards have more power depending on how much energy they need, this puts the players in a predicament, reducing the available cards and limiting the battle to weak options.
9 Mojoworld Gives 100 Points To One Player
A more technologically advanced version of Earth, Mojoworld is the extradimensional place where the Spineless Ones live. These aliens can receive Earth's television and radio signals directly into their brains. This makes them obsessed with television entertainment but incredibly afraid of humans. Mojoworld's culture is so centered on media that the rulers' main priority is to produce content to keep the masses entertained.
When Mojoworld is revealed during a Marvel Snap turn, it immediately grants the person with the most points at the location a hundred points. Considering that few Marvel Snap cards actually go higher than ten power points, a hundred points makes it impossible to win the location. Players can always focus on the other two, but this definitely raises the stakes of the game.
8 The Danger Room Destroys Cards Out Of Nowhere
Created by Charles Xavier, the Danger Room is one of the main facilities of the X-Mansion, where the X-Men members train as a team. Throughout holographic hyperrealistic images, the mutants can strategize for hypothetical situations while training their abilities.
Marvel Snap's Danger Room only has one rule: any card played here has a 25% chance to be destroyed at that moment. Of course, these odds are in the player's favor, but bad luck could ruin a whole strategy if an important card disappears when played.
7 Subterranea Adds Useless Cards Into The Decks
Subterranea is a network of caverns underneath the surface of Earth where Deviants used to live. This kingdom, which connects to the center of the Earth, is also the home of the Moloids and the Lava Men, two villainous races of the Marvel multiverse.
Whenever Subterranea appears as a Marvel location in Marvel Snap, each player must add five rocks to their deck. These cards have a 1- cost but don't add any power points. Since each player can only draw one card per turn, having so many rocks can make them miss good chances for better cards.
6 District X Changes Each Player Deck
Grant Morrison introduced District X in New X-Men #127, with art by John Paul Leon, Bill Sienkiewicz, Hi-Fi Design, and Comicraft. District X is a New York neighborhood inhabited mostly by mutants. This location became so popular it got its self-titled solo series, which followed Detective Ismael Ortega as he solved criminal cases around the place.
Marvel Snap's District X replaces each player's deck for 10 random cards. This change reduces the player's options by two, forces them to replan their strategy, and often confronts them with unfamiliar cards to work with. District X is not a good location for those who like to plan ahead.
5 Shadowland Occupies Two Spaces Out Of The Available Four
Shadowland is both one of Daredevil's most famous storylines and an important location in this comic. This series sees Daredevil as he returns to Hell's Kitchen and builds Shadowland, a temple/prison. Here, he adopts more extreme vigilante methods, which leads his allies to realize he had been possessed by the Beast of the Hand.
When playing Marvel Snap, the location known as Shadowland adds two -2 power ninjas to each player's side. This forbids players from using all the available spaces and it also hits them with a -4 score immediately. It makes it difficult to recover from such a hit, rendering the space almost useless.
4 Lechuguilla Spams The Players' Decks Every Time They Add Cards To It
One of the most prominent cities in Subterranea, Lechuguilla is a Moloid city that the Fantastic Four discovered in Fantastic Four #575, by Jonathan Hickman, with art by Dale Eaglesham, Paul Mounts, and Rus Wooton. This cave formation was named after a real-life rock formation called the Lechuguilla Cave in New Mexico, which was particularly famous in the '80s.
Lechuguilla is barely prominent in the Marvel comics, but its Marvel Snap effect is quite negative. Every time a player uses a card in this location, they must add three rocks to their deck and shuffle it. With 0-power, rocks are one of the most useless cards in Marvel Snap. Since decks only have 12 cards, having even only 3 rocks added to it lowers the player's odds for good cards.
3 Ruins Does Absolutely Nothing
In 1995, Warren Ellis, Cliff Nielsen, and Terese Nielsen created Marvel Ruins, a series where "everything that can go wrong will go wrong." This series follows Philip Sheldon, a Daily Bugle reporter who documents this dystopia, where Bruce Banner became a bag of tumors, Spider-Man lost his skin due to the radioactive bite, and Wolverine can't resist the adamantium in his bones.
Marvel Snap's ruins aren't as dangerous, but they're also completely purposeless. The Ruins are the only locations where nothing happens. This isn't as bad when considering that other locations have negative effects, but it's also quite frustrating losing a possible tool during the game.
2 Knowhere Renders All On-Reveal Cards Useless
Knowhere is a port of call and observatory of the End of the Universe where all space travelers can arrive from time to time. This location, which eventually became the Guardians of the Galaxy's secret lair, is located inside a severed Celestial's head, but its origins are unknown.
One of the most important things about Marvel Snap are on-reveal powers. A great number of cards have positive effects that take place during the beginning of their turn. Without them, the game is reduced to a mere sum of math and luck. Whenever Knowhere is revealed, the battle loses one of its more interesting angles.
1 Starlight Citadel Can Potentially Ruin A Strategy
Originally introduced in Daredevils #1, by Alan Moore and Alan Davis, Starlight Citadel is located in Otherworld. Here lives the Omniversal Guardian and the members of the Dimensional Development Court. Its history is mostly unknown, but it holds some of Marvel's most iconic places, like the Tower Omniverse.
In Marvel Snap, Starlight Citadel messes with the whole point of the game by swapping the position of each location after turn 4. By this point in the game, players already planned and revealed their cards based on the correlation between the effects of the cards and the effects of the locations. By mixing it up, Starlight Citadel absolutely destroys their strategy. This earns it the place for the worst location in the game.