The Ultimate Guide to the Team Clash Economy
How easy is it to get Fastball Special? Is the Premium Pass worth it? Lauren covers an event economy that uses both Tickets and Missions.
Hey, y’all! Lauren here and excited about my first article on Fourth Location! My dream is that this ends up sitting in the sweet spot between how verbose I got on Marvel Snap Zone and how restrictive Twitter’s format felt (retrospective note: I probably went too long. 😅).
Our premium members had early access to this guide for about 20 hours (until ~8 PM Eastern on Friday, December 18th). These guides take me countless hours to put together. Premium membership helps make that work sustainable. It starts at just $4! If you’re interested, please sign up today. It would mean a lot to me.
Don’t miss Scott’s excellent strategy guide for Team Clash which includes thoughts on each team and recommendations for how to strengthen their decks.
Scosco
Enough ado! Let’s get into it!
Ebb and Flow
It's been a year for events in Marvel Snap! We played Sanctum Showdown, High Voltage: Overdrive, Grand Arena, and a reworked Deadpool’s Diner for the first time. Team Clash rounds out the year as the fifth new event in 2025. I expect that to slow down a lot going forward.
And all along, Second Dinner has been experimenting with the economies for these events. They ranged from the player-hostile disaster of Kid Omega in June’s High Voltage to the extreme generosity of the new Deadpool’s Diner in September. I expect that experimentation to continue a while longer.
Things seem to be settling into a pretty consistent format, at least. Team Clash rocks a format very similar to Arena and Showdown: games cost tickets to play, you earn event currency and XP, the XP contributes to two Pass tracks (Free and Premium) loaded with prizes, and you spend the event currency in an event-exclusive shop.
The key changes are:
- The Premium Pass getting more expensive
- The Passes getting much longer
- The combination of game-entry tickets and High-Voltage-style missions
The Skinny
I’m gonna front-load this with broad answers to the two key questions everybody has:
- How difficult is it to acquire the new card(s)?
- Is the Premium Pass worth it?
Card Acquisition x2
Two cards are up for grabs this time: Wild Child and Fastball Special. I won’t get into them too much here. Suffice it to say I think Wild Child is the best card in the Discard x Destroy hybrid deck, and I ranked Fastball Special #1 in my pre-season rankings.
Wild Child is available at the 1,260 XP mark on the Free Pass. Fastball Special is available in the shop for 4,000 Emblems (the Team Clash event currency). Both are quite achievable for free if you’re willing to grind. Even with a poor win rate, active play can get you both cards about halfway through the event.
The Premium Event Pass gets you to Wild Child instantly, and Fastball Special after a day-and-a-half of active play.
Is Premium Worth It?
Premium costs 1,200 Gold (up 50% from the 800 we saw in past events).
The value proposition is just like November’s Sanctum Showdown and the Grand Arena that was running a couple weeks ago. It’s quite bad when you only consider how much game progress it gives you. By progress I mean stuff like Credits and Tokens that actually contribute to card acquisition. If it were an ordinary Gold bundle, I’d never recommend it to anybody except those who loved the cosmetics. But it’s not an ordinary Gold bundle – it represents big time savings.
The Premium Pass might have great subjective value to you. Do you think skipping to Wild Child and Fastball Special is worth $15 of your Gold? That’s a steal for two Series 4 cards if you don’t have the time (or will) to grind for them!
The value of the Premium Pass is also genuinely great if you value cosmetics, especially the ones exclusive to the event.
They’ve extended the Passes so much that it’s very unlikely anybody will finish it for free. That’s pretty disappointing to me as I’ve finished two or three without ponying up for Premium. Ultimately, it’s most important that you can acquire the new cards for free – and you can.
Hitting the final Pass level at 7,000 XP would require a roughly 70% win rate to do for free. With Premium, you can finish the Pass even with a very low win rate, as long as you’re finishing all your missions and not wasting any Ticket regeneration.
A quick reminder I’m keeping it high-level for now. I’ll have more details further on.
Mechanical Minutiae
Let’s breeze through some of the details for how the mode works. Please feel free to plow ahead to the nerdy tables if that’s what you’re here for.
First of all, Team Clash runs for ten days, from daily reset on December 18th until daily reset on the 28th. The Shop will stay open an extra 48 hours after the event ends.
Tickets
Each game costs a ticket to play. In Team Clash these are called “Team Tickets” (I’ll be capitalizing “Ticket” when talking specifically about these).
You get 10 XP, 10 Emblems, and your Ticket back if you win. You get 5 XP and 5 Emblems if you tie or lose.
- Starting Tickets: 6
- Ticket Regeneration: 4 Tickets every 8 hours
- Soft Cap: 9 Tickets (regeneration will not take you above 9)
- Hard Cap: 99 Tickets (doable with Tickets from the Passes and Shop)
- Total Starting + Regeneration Tickets: 122
- Total Free Pass Tickets: 11 (but you’ll only reach 7 with a 50% win rate)
- Total Premium Pass Tickets: 22 (but you’ll only reach 20 with a 50% win rate)
You can buy extra Tickets for 10 Gold apiece, or in a bundle of seven for 50 Gold. The shop will feature that bundle once every eight hours.
Because of the way the soft cap works, you must get your Ticket balance down to five or lower before each refresh to take full advantage of regeneration. You should not claim Tickets from the Passes until you are at 0 and ready to play a game.
Missions
Team Clash Missions are very similar to those in High Voltage. They grant 20, 40, or 60 XP and Emblems.
- Starting Missions: 6
- Mission Regeneration: 3 Missions every 8 hours
- Cap: 6 Missions
- Total Starting + Regeneration Missions: 93
- Total XP and Emblems for Free: 3,720
You can refill Missions early for 30 Gold each (regardless of whether the new Mission is a 20, 40, or 60).
Griffin answered in the official Discord that refilled Missions match the value of the Missions you cleared. In reality, they work just like High Voltage Missions, where each successive new Mission follows the repeating pattern of 20→40→60, regardless of how it’s refilled (by time or Gold).
Note that you can have six Missions active at a time, but only three regenerate at a time. That means you’ll generally have two refreshes' worth of Tickets (eight!) to knock out each Mission. Most of them are pretty easy, but they also encourage you to play different decks. There will be times you can’t make progress on multiple Missions with the same game.
Pass Prizes
The Passes go all the way up to level 51, which requires 7,000 XP to reach. Once you’ve reached a level, you need to manually claim the prizes there. Importantly, this means you can delay claiming any Tickets until you need them. Note that if you have the Premium Pass and claim any prize, it will automatically claim the prize at the same level of the other Pass, too.
Here’s a (very long) table showing what you can get from the Passes. Note that the Premium Pass comes with 1,960 XP (skipping you well past Wild Child), a Border, and a couple Tickets whenever you purchase it.
Shop
Everything in the Shop costs Emblems except a bundle of seven Tickets that’s available to buy once every eight hours for 50 Gold. Well, you can also spend Gold to cover any Emblems you’re missing. Obnoxiously, every item in the shop has a different Emblems:Gold conversion rate. I really dislike how user-hostile that is, but it seems to be the norm now (it has been for several of the past events).
The highlight of the shop is, of course, Fastball Special, but the Nightcrawler Variant and emotes on offer are pretty fun, too.
I recommend buying out all the Credits. There are only 300, but they’re pretty cheap and offer the highest progress value after Fastball Special.
It’s worth highlighting for low CL players that you can buy up to six Series 3 Packs (these aren’t available if you already have every S3 card). I don’t normally value these super highly because you’ll eventually finish Series 3 for free, but I totally understand wanting to get new cards and catch up faster. And they are worth something because you start getting Tokens from the CL track a little bit faster once you’ve completed Series 3.
In The Weeds
Time for my favorite part. I’m gonna cover a few more things in deeper detail, and mostly let the numbers do the talking.
Premium Pass Value
Being as charitable as possible, the highest I can get the progression value for the Premium Pass is about 0.62x. Again, by “progression value” I mean only the stuff that contributes to acquiring more cards.
It’s pretty realistic for a player who’s playing actively (knocking out Missions and spending Tickets on games) to finish the Premium Pass.
A similarly active player who didn’t buy the Pass and has a 50% Win Rate can expect to reach level 41 on the Pass. The extra XP and Tickets in the Premium Pass close that gap, so it seems reasonable to count the bottom ten prizes from the Free Pass as value you get from the Premium Pass.
Finally, you end up with about 4,360 extra Emblems for shopping. There’s hardly anything with progression value in the shop, but Variants give you a tiny bit (about 24 Credits’ worth).
The point in saying the Pass has “only” 0.62x value isn’t to say it’s bad. It’s just a useful metric for comparing it to other ways to spend your Gold and money if card acquisition is what you value most.
As previously covered, the value of the Premium Pass is quite good when it comes to time savings and cosmetics.
Time to Goal
The following table highlights how long each major goal takes to accomplish with active play, depending on your win rate. You’ll notice that completing the Pass for free is the only thing that takes longer than the 10 days Team Clash is running. As such, it is also the only thing that requires you to buy extra Tickets.
The “Tix Gold Cost” column indicates the cheapest way to buy the extra Tickets, prioritizing the seven-Ticket bundle available once every eight hours.
Total Currency Acquisition
For those who like to plan out what they’re getting from the shop, here’s a table showing how many Emblems you’ll have to shop with. Again, we’re concerned with active play here – spending your Tickets on games and keeping up with your Missions.
Note that you’ll only pick from one column. The “Premium Emblems” column includes Emblems you’d get from the Free Pass as well as the Premium Pass.
Gold Optimization
Team Clash offers a BUNCH of ways to spend Gold to speed things up. It’s not the most resource-efficient thing to do, but if you’re gonna do it, you might as well maximize your bang-for-buck. The following table will help you do just that (lower Gold Ratio = cheaper Emblems).
Mostly, saving on Gold means spending time instead. Buying Fastball Special at the full Gold price in the shop is the most expensive way to acquire it — but it’s fast. Of course, it’s not always that simple. Missions are slow and expensive.
I’ve included the option to buy Fastball Special directly from the Shop. Please refer to the purple tables in the Shop section above for the Gold prices and ratios for the rest of the Shop.
Basically, if you’ve got the time to grind, the best way spend your Gold is the Premium Pass or the seven-ticket bundles available in the Shop.
The Premium Pass loses a little value as your win rate goes up. This is actually because it gets to claim less value from the Free Pass – the higher win rate means a free-to-play player could reach more of those prizes without spending any Gold.
There is one option in the table above I haven’t mentioned before now – “Buy Pass Level”. If you have the Premium Pass, you can skip levels of the Pass for 100 Gold each. This is pretty poor value because it gives you the 140 XP to level up, but no matching Emblems. The only reason I’d ever recommend doing this is if you want the Farro Hulk variant at the end of the Premium Pass without investing any time playing Team Clash.
Event Comparison and Economy Obfuscation
I want to briefly touch on something we’ve seen clearly demonstrated in the last few events: adjusting the Pass and Shop numbers for each event.
With a 50% win rate, Sanctum Showdown gives you ~27.5 event currency per ticket vs. only 15 in Grand Arena. They use ticketing the same way, and neither uses Missions. Sanctum Showdown’s Pass ended at 2,000 XP while Grand Arena's ended at 1,500. That’s not perfect scaling, but it’s a good thing to make Grand Arena’s Pass shorter when it gives XP out at a slower rate.
However, the Showdown Shop and Arena Shop had very similar pricing. That meant you had to play more games of Arena to afford the same kind of prize. In essence, the Arena Shop was more expensive.
Now Team Clash’s Pass has gotten much longer (7,000 XP). Scaling it up a bit makes sense because Team Clash lasts 3 days longer and Missions have made a lot more XP and currency available for “free”. Compared to Grand Arena, the Team Clash variants cost 2.5x as much, the emotes cost 2.1x as much, and the avatars cost 3x as much.
These might actually be seen as discounted. As (with a 50% win rate) an eight-hour refresh in Grand Arena is worth 60 currency while an eight-hour refresh in Team Clash is worth 180 (thanks to Missions). That’s 3x as much currency-per-game while most Shop items didn’t scale to 3x the cost.
Anyway, the main point is that it’s very tricky to compare some values between events – and I’m sure that’s intentional.
Conclusion
Overall, I don’t find the economy of Team Clash to be very offensive. I’d have liked to see Premium offer an even shorter grind for Fastball Special. I mean, I think I’d have liked Free to have a shorter grind, too. Playing an event actively for ten days straight is asking a lot of players.
Ultimately, though, I care that the cards are reasonably acquirable for free, and that’s very much the case here. Fastball Special requiring four–five days of active play during a ten-day-long event seems very reasonable to me.
In some ways I wish events still had more progression value (such as Credits and Tokens) on offer, since I’ll grind any event if it’s fun. But on the other hand, I like that the event has front-loaded so much of its value. If it’s not fun, I can get Wild Child and Fastball Special then skip half the event without losing much at all.
I want the game to monetize cosmetics and the last few Premium Event Passes seem to be doing so effectively. It’ll be interesting to see how people react to 50% price hike. It came with a more-or-less proportional value spike, but it’s still true that almost all that value is in time savings and cosmetics.
I have personally enjoyed reaching the end of event Passes for free – but I have also just had fun playing every event not named “High Voltage” (it’s just not for me, and that’s okay). So I’m not sure how much of my extra play time has been motivated by “reaching the end” vs. just having fun. That might be irrelevant if more events follow the path of Team Clash and make it very difficult to finish the Pass for free. In any case, my plan for this and any future event is to get the cards for free, and then only keep playing if I’m having fun.
