LTGMs

Team Clash Economy Guide - Sep ‘26

Lauren walks you through the economy of September’s run of Team Clash.

Team Clash is back, and the prizes are refreshed. I’m here to cover the prizing and review how generous (or at least fair) it is. This guide should help you optimize your resource spending in the way that’s best for you!

I remain worried that Lady Bullseye hasn’t been banned, but maybe newcomers like Thanos FF and Anti-Polar Magneto can put a dent in her dominance? For more strategy discussion like that and a bunch of decks, check out Scott's article!

Event Overview

Dates: September 16th – 23rd (with the Shop open an additional 48 hours)

Economy Key Features:

Dual prize tracks you climb with XP (Free Pass + Premium Pass)
Shop where you can buy prizes with event currency (Emblems) and Gold

Primary Goal: Clear missions
Secondary Goal: Win games

Tips & Tricks

Lots of great economy optimization tips are the same every time an event runs. I keep those in a separate article so that this one can focus on what changes each time! This "recurring tips" guide is always free and has great info for each event. If you want a refresher on those tips, check out this article and read the sections with the Team Clash logo.

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The rest of this guide will get into the details of the Team Clash economy. Fourth Location subscribers had early access to the full guide until the event was ~48 hours old.

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Grand Prizes

The Free Pass rewards the new card, Entropic Havok, at 1,035 XP. I think the card looks absolutely awful (both Scott and I ranked him last in our pre-season rankings). He’s expensive and clunky and very difficult to use proactively. But, uh, maybe you just want to nab him while he’s free instead of letting him move to your Snap Packs in a month.

The Premium Pass offers this exclusive Entropic Havok Variant by Dardo Studios. I really enjoy the colors on this one and how distorted his face is – it feels far more entropic.

Tickets

It costs a Ticket to play a game. You get it back if you win. Winning also grants 10 Emblems and 10 XP. You'll get half as much for losing or tying.

That Ticket refund is what makes your win rate so important. A better win rate means stretching your Tickets further, ultimately resulting in more Glory and XP.

Starting Tickets: 6
Regenerating Tickets: 6 every 8 hours
Tickets Soft Cap: 9 (you cannot regenerate beyond this)
Tickets Hard Cap: 99 (you cannot have more than this)
Free Pass Tickets: 20
XP Sprint Tickets: 3
Total Free Tickets: 149
Premium Pass Tickets: 27
Total Premium Tickets: 176
Single Ticket Cost: 10 Gold
Ticket Bundle Cost: 7 for 50 Gold

A 50% win rate translates to two games per Ticket, on average. That’s one win and one loss, for 15 Emblems and 15 XP.

Mind the cap! To avoid wasting free Ticket regen, never collect Tickets from the Passes or Shop until you want to play and have zero Tickets.

Note three of the free Tickets come from an “XP Sprint” Mini Event that will run September 17th–18th.

The Ticket regeneration rate has notably been increased from 4 every 8 hours to 6. That's a significant bump! It matches the regeneration rate from the weekend-length Team Clash they ran at the end of July. My best guess is that it's still supposed to be 4 every 8 hours, but Second Dinner forgot to change it back.

Missions

Team Clash uniquely bottlenecks your progress with both Tickets and Missions.

The Missions grant 20, 40, or 60 Emblems and XP.

Starting Missions: 6
Regenerating Missions: 3 every 8 hours
Missions Cap: 6 (you cannot have more than this)
Total Missions: 66
Total Mission Emblems + XP: 2,640
Single Mission Cost: 30 Gold

There’s some quirkiness to how Missions work. That’s covered in the Events Tips & Tricks guide.

Passes

The Premium Pass costs 800 Gold and instantly rewards the following prizes whenever you buy it:

1,150 XP
2 Tickets
2 Red Web Borders

Here's everything you can find on the Passes (with the instant rewards shown at 0 XP):

Cubes

For the first time ever, Cubes appear on the Free Pass. These Cubes will contribute directly to your pre-Infinite Ranked progress until you hit Rank 90. After that, each Cube will convert to two Wild Boosters instead.

I’m really pleased with how Second Dinner implemented this. The only thing they cut from the Free Pass is 220 Random Boosters. Whether you’ve reached Rank 90 or not, I think 21 Cubes or 42 Wild Boosters are both better prizes than a couple hundred Random Boosters.

Premium Value

In terms of progress value (resources to acquire your next card), this Premium Pass falls in line with all other modern full-length events, coming in at 63.42% value.

If your primary goal for your Gold is to acquire more cards, the Premium Pass is probably a bad buy.

It might be a good buy if you want to…

Get Entropic Havok without playing Team Clash
Grab more cosmetics from the event (especially the exclusive ones!)

And those really get to the bulk of the Premium Pass's value. You get a bunch of extra XP (to skip to Entropic Havok) and a bunch of extra Emblems (to spend in the Shop).

There could be situations where the Premium Pass could be good for progress value, like if the 2,200 extra Emblems help you grab the Collector’s Series 4 Pack. These situations are unusual, though. Most active players should have no problem earning enough Emblems to collect the Series 4 cards on offer without spending any Gold.

Time Investment

This table shows how many Tickets/Games you’ll need in the last two columns. These numbers are based on:

Whether you bought the Premium Pass
What your goal is
What your win rate is

The Premium Pass saves ~47 games if you're just in for Entropic Havok, or ~49 games if you want to complete the Pass.

With 109 free Tickets available, it is very doable to complete the Pass for free – as long as you have the time to play. It should at least be pretty easy for anybody to grab the new card.

The Shop

Here's what you can buy with your precious Emblems and Gold:

Each Portal Pull will randomly give you one of the three you haven’t already pulled.

Variant Series

This can be useful info if you're missing any of these cards. When you get the Variant, you'll get the base card, too.

Card	Series
Havok	3
Mystique	3
Ghost Rider	3
Captain America	1
J. Jonah Jameson	4

Shop Priorities

You need to decide how much any of the cosmetics are worth to you. If you’d like to focus on progress value, here’s what you should prioritize buying. Ellipses represent big gaps in value differences.

J. Jonah Jameson (unowned base card)
…
Collector's Series 4 Pack
Credits
…
Portal Pull: Havok, Mystique, or Ghost Rider (unowned Series 3)
…
Series 3 Pack
…
All other Variants

Portal Pulls: I assume two-and-a-half pulls to hit a specific prize in the Portal Pull. The average is two, but I've penalized it a bit to represent how unreliable it is – if it takes you three to get what you want, that increased cost might mess up your other plans!

Series 3 Packs: I credit them with some value – 24.19 Credits for a new gray card plus the average value of the two Pack goodies. I do not credit them with the cost of the Pack (650 Tokens) because it is better to get Series 3 cards for free from the Collection Level track. I would only suggest buying these if you have a significant surplus of Emblems or you are trying to complete Series 3 as fast as possible (regardless of the cost on other resources).

Shopping with Gold

If you try buying something when you don't have enough Emblems, the game lets you spend Gold to cover the gap. This is an inefficient way to spend Gold, but if you're going to do it – note that each item has its own Emblems-to-Gold conversion rate (which is obnoxious at best, and I think it's bad that SD does it). That means there's a strategy for which items you spend Emblems on vs. which items you spend Gold on. The higher Emblems / 100 Gold in the purple Shop tables above, the better deal you’re getting.

Every eight hours, you can buy seven Tickets for 50 Gold. This gives you the best deal for converting Gold into Emblems. At a 50% win rate, 7 Tickets are worth 105 Emblems (equal to 210 Emblems / 100 Gold). Of course, you’ll need to actually play games to convert those Tickets into Emblems, so it saves you Gold but costs you time. Buying Tickets for Gold is an even better deal when extra games will help you finish the Pass or avoid burning Missions.

Expected Emblems

The table below lists how many Emblems you can expect to earn in total. This should help careful players plan out their purchases.

If you stop playing when you complete the Pass, you'll have 5,200 Emblems from the Free Pass alone, or 6,250 if you have the Premium Pass.

You can earn hundreds-to-thousands more if you keep playing after finishing the Pass. The amount you end up will depend on your win rate and whether you bought the Premium Pass. “Use All Tickets” assumes using all Tickets without buying any extras with Gold.

Note that the Ticket regeneration rate was increased by 50%. I expect very few players will actually use all of them.

Relative Pricing

While Shops feels really similar from one event to the next, they are not all created equal! Some Shops offer much better deals than others in terms of how your play time translates into prizing.

I recently started tracking this difference with an arbitrary comparison:

take the event currency you'd have by clearing every Mission and spending every Ticket, with a 50% win rate (as applicable for each event)
how many Portal Pulls, S4 Packs, Emotes, or Credits could you buy from the event's Shop if it had unlimited stock?

This Clash falls right where I’d expect: right around the previous run of Clash, and between Overdrive and Draft. Overdrive’s expensive Shop is what inspired this section in the first place, and Draft was really generous.

Conclusion

Modern Snap events remain really consistent from one run to the next. It’s not always the case, but this even is an example of the Passes and Shop being pretty much identical, down to which Borders are available.

The Pass has been slightly reordered, but the only net change is swapping out 220 Random Boosters with 21 Cubes on the Free Pass. I think this is an awesome change (with Cubes converting to two Wild Boosters apiece if you’re already at Rank 90+). When the Patch mentioned the addition of Cubes to the Free Pass, I was worried about what would be cut. Random Boosters are a minor loss.

I appreciate that the new card is very easy to unlock – though it is an extremely weak and boring card. It always casts a bit of a shadow on the event when the new card doesn’t make any splash at all, and that’s even worse when the meta is feeling stale. That’s especially unfortunate in a week where the Series 5 card (Rogue Scion of Division) is pretty weak and boring, too. It would be nice to see SD take more care in avoiding a week with multiple impact-less releases.

My biggest critique of LTGMs is that Tickets stifle exploration. I hate the bottleneck they represent when there’s an event I genuinely have a lot of fun playing. With Team Clash specifically, I’m disappointed that there’s no new team and barely any changes to the ban list. It’s going to continue to feel really samey, which makes each run less fun than the last.

Overall, LTGMs are inoffensive. The addition of Cubes to the Pass will help alleviate the time pressure that two LTGMs a month (not to mention the weekend-length ones) puts on your Ranked climb.

Finally, here’s my reminder to check out Scott’s article covering Team Clash strategy and decks.

If you’re interested in chatting with us and other Fourth Location readers, come hang out in our Discord server!

Finally, special thanks to Snap.Fan and SnapComplete. Our blue-bordered art is provided by Snap.Fan, and the data mines from both sites are critical for filling in economy details not shared directly by Second Dinner. Please go support both sites with page views.