Meta changes shift across most games. Balance patches arrive and the development and gameplay teams at Marvel Snap has been very active the last few months with regular patches and OTA ("over the air") balance updates. The issue is that these patches are obviously pushing a specific narrative; that being: pay us for the season pass. Galactus was just nerfed into oblivion destroying an entire playstyle while Loki ran unchecked for a month and still hasn't been touched. Loki's popularity was one rarely seen before because, simply, he was grossly overpowered. Reminds me of dark days in the Silver Surfer era. However, he has been only recently eclipsed by Elsa Bloodstone based decks who get to run rampant for the next month. And as soon as a Sandman counter raises its head her decks shift to a Forge/Brood build that can both flood power early and late in game. Are Elsa and Loki in line for the Galactus treatment? No, they won't even sniff a balance update for some time. Why? Because Elsa and Loki are the cards you can actually buy with real money (so was Silver Surfer).
The rest of Marvel Snap is a bit of a slot machine. New cards are mostly only available on rotations in the store for in-game "tokens" or in weekly Spotlight rotations using premium upgrade "caches." The only cards you can outright buy are in the season pass. And the only cards that are safe from balance updates until well past their sell-by dates are those same season pass cards.
So if you want to compete at the highest level in Marvel Snap and have the only decks untouched by balance updates, they that $10 per month is fairly mandatory. This is the same scummy shenanigans Hearthstone pulled by nerfing every meta card right before new content releases to force players into paying heavily to open packs in the new DLC to stay competitive. Ultimately that's what drove me away from Hearthstone to eventually land on Marvel Snap. Maybe it's time to move on again...
