Designing Draft: an Interview with the Game Designer

Sam Stoddard, you are described as THE GUY behind Marvel Snap's latest game mode, Draft. To make sure people fully know you and your thought process before diving into Draft itself, I wanted to ask you what you would like everyone to know about who you are as a person, your understanding and insights on CCGs, and how you got to designing Draft itself in Marvel Snap?

So, I've been into TCGs since pretty close to the beginning. I started playing Magic: The Gathering in '94 or so, and then I kept up with it for well over 20 years. I played a lot of card games during that early kind of "boom" in the '90s. It really stuck with Magic. When Magic Online came out, I played tons of that. I have also played lots of other online TCGs all the way back to Chron X. That was technically the first online TCG and then, you know, through Magic Online, Hearthstone, Legends of Runeterra, and eventually up into Snap.

As someone who was well-versed in the card game space digitally, what piqued your interest in Marvel Snap?

What I appreciated was that there's a lot of clever things in Snap that I thought really were some of the first times I'd seen in a digital TCG. So many digital card games were very much like, what if it was Magic: The Gathering but on your phone, or what if it was like Magic but we had animations? At the end of the day, I think many of them were good card games, but they weren't necessarily great mobile games. A lot of these games exist in the mobile arena, but ultimately their best expression is on the computer because the games are pretty long. Snap really went in on this idea of let's make a card game that is truly mobile-first. This is something that you can truly play in these very bite-sized intervals, but it still has enough depth and enough interesting things going on that you're not going to get bored of it in, you know, in six hours or twelve hours, or even three years.

How did your interest in Marvel Snap lead to working with Second Dinner?

I got hired at Wizards [of the Coast] in 2012, working on the play balance team and I eventually ended up working on essentially the final design side of it. I was there until about 2019 when I just kind of needed a break, so I went and started getting more into actual digital card games. Eventually Snap came out on iOS and I started playing it, a lot. Also, I knew some people that were [at Second Dinner]. Shortly, there was a job opening and it was something that I felt that I was excited about and good at. I applied and eventually, you know, came on here as the Feature Design Team Leader in November of 2024, which is a little bit different than designing cards.  It's much more holistic about the product and what are the things that we're trying to accomplish as a live service game and [how we can] give people those kinds of experiences.

You jumped into Second Dinner in November of 2024, and Draft mode was first mentioned in concept June 8th of that year. About how long into your employment did you start working on Draft mode?

When I was interviewing, I mentioned [Draft mode] because this was a thing that I had been thinking about for a long time – it's not like the people who were working here hadn't thought – what if we did a draft format?

What were some challenges when initially conceptualizing Draft mode in Marvel Snap?

If you were going to design a card game that is impossible to do a draft mode for, Marvel Snap hits a lot of the things that are working against how a traditional draft mode works. Your decks are very small, so even if you want to draft twelve cards individually, that's not a ton of decisions. Games are quick and decks are small as it’s really a melding of a hero collector and a card game. Snap has removed the filler cards and decks are so synergistic; there’s no half-Discard, half -Move deck or something. 

So what did Draft mode look like in the concept phase?

Some of the early ideas behind Draft, are how do you get decks that make sense? How do you make this into a fun experience? Because I knew initially… the fail state is every Draft game just feels like bad Snap.

It’s a level of frustration because you just can't get all your combos to work, you start looking at things, “I want to make a Destroy deck.” Well, how many cards are there that are Destroy enablers? The answer is not that many, you've got Carnage and Venom, and then you start getting further out. Because obviously when you think about how a Marvel Snap deck works, you need twelve cards, so you don't need that many enablers for a lot of these strategies. 

Especially when you are a brand-new player to Marvel Snap, you don’t have all the cards yet.

I think that's important for any draft mode. That sounds small, but some people in the early iterations of Draft were thinking, you must own the cards to be able to play with the cards. Well, that doesn't really line up with what you would expect out of a draft environment. I really think you need to be able to play with everything. The hope is that someone who may have never played with Thanos Fractured Frontier, gets him in Draft and they go, "Oh, wow. That's fun. I wonder what could I do with this in this format?" That kind of thing is great for people to learn in terms of tying it back to regular Snap, "Oh, I enjoy these cards and I want to go collect them." I think that's a powerful part of Draft. I think it's good that when you play the game, you want to go out and get these cards. You can play more with them as opposed to setting people's experience off with you can't play with this card until you've gotten it in your regular collection.

So if you give everyone equal access to the card pool in Draft, what comes next?

When getting into the many things working against Draft, I knew the right direction was to add in some rogue-like elements, so we added Augments to cards to make them more than just their base cards. Because even though you're only going to have a twelve-card deck, you get to make all these other decisions. We can make Augments that are enablers for a Destroy deck. So now you don't need to have a Carnage and a Venom in every single deck. The other thing that we added in was the ability to play with duplicates, as Snap was designed as a game where you couldn't play duplicates in a deck. There's a lot of these things that got built over time into the core version of the game to hit a point where now we've got enough of the tools we need to make what I felt was a compelling and satisfying version of Draft.

The age-old question: which came first, the Augment or the duplicate?

The very first prototype of [Draft] just used duplicates of cards, and that was something that there was some skepticism of, like, “[Are duplicates] really going to matter?” I told them to trust me; there's a lot of stuff you can do. When people had three Thors in their deck they would go, “Oh yeah, that's really cool!” Or they would play two Wolverines at a location and then Carnage them. This is the kind of stuff that these extra cards do that I like. Duplicates go a long way to proving that the core version of this exists and they get it. It’s fun.

Duplicates are great but Augments are really where I think Draft mode shines.

Of course; the Augments that let you take the [Destroy] deck that you're playing and reward with one of the Augments is Regeneration – which is Wolverine's effect of When Destroyed, but it also triggers the card’s On Reveal again. So now you want to play a White Tiger at a location and then next turn you’re going to Carnage White Tiger. Not only do you get the advantage of I'm getting the plus Power there, but I'm also now getting its On Reveal for a second time. What if I put Tag In – the Angel ability – on a Giganto? So I've got a Destroy deck, but I'm able to, on Turn 2 or 3, throw Giganto into my right lane! These are the kinds of things that go a long way in adding the sort of variety and the feeling that I think rogue-likes and draft formats do really well.

Are these new features only working in Draft? Will we ever see duplicates or Augments in Conquest?

At least for right now, I'd say we're locked in [Draft]. Some of that is they are very [fun] or that they take away a lot of the fun of Marvel Snap. Because it turns out there's one or two things you can do that are so much more powerful than everything else when given all the options.

Did you have any moments in development that made you stop and go, “Wow, this is fun?”

Some of the some of the very first Augments that we made were the ones like On Reveal I destroy something and gain power or Moveable. I think it was Moveable on Jean Grey where it's like, “Oh yeah, now this is really cool.” Getting to really control a bunch of elements of the game that I'm not used to was fun. It was this very subversive thing that I've never experienced before.

As new players are jumping into this game mode for the first time, do you have any advice for them?

A thing that we've done is as you start to pick cards you are sort of given a deck, and you start seeing more cards of those strategies. I would say if there's a strategy in there, it should work. You're not going to go play a Move deck, then three picks in, you see no more Move cards now your deck doesn't work. We have gone a long way toward making sure that as people are playing this, the core experience is something where things work. To some extent, I think people can start off by going in playing things that they're relatively comfortable with – they have some idea of how these strategies work. I think that is probably the best starting-off point. But ultimately, you should know all the [archetypes] that we have included are in there because they do work.

This article was featured in-game by Second Dinner during the inaugural run of MARVEL SNAP Draft.