Last year was rough for Marvel Snap, but its new Foundational Focus promises more than a long-awaited game mode

One year after being an unfortunate casualty of the TikTok ban, Marvel Snap, one of the best card games around, is back. It never really left, but the incident meant Second Dinner Studios had to pivot to self-publishing the ; a task that required fast learning and the creation of several brand-new teams to handle support, marketing, and a whole web store. The team had to “figure out what made sense for Snap.” It had to look for ways of “supporting Snap and the community for years to come.” And after a few slip-ups, it’s ready to share what that renewed vision looks like.

More than 12 months after “the snappening,” an unfortunate instance of downtime caused by being published by TikTok’s ByteDance, Marvel Snap has issued its Foundational Focus – a lengthy retrospective of the last year of operational challenges and the road ahead. In it, the team over at Second Dinner talks about what it hopes to do to “be sure Snap remains your forever game.” And for a creative, quick-fire strategy card title that was all over Twitch, YouTube, and the other socials for a time, it’s great to see it mounting a comeback.

Despite having to suddenly figure out how to become its own publisher right after the holidays, Marvel Snap’s Second Dinner Studios added around 100 new cards throughout 2025. These didn’t all go to plan. “We fell short of both your and our own expectations in certain areas,” it says, blaming incidents like the Kid Omega pricing, communication, web shop complications, and overall technical performance as just a few of its bigger fumbles.

“Adding features sets and spotlight variants to the card shop has been a clear win” says Second Dinner, but it’s coming into 2026 with a vision to ensure that “new and returning players can get to the fun part faster.”

It considers the game’s content rhythm “strong,” but by focusing on upgrading systems and tools, future updates should be “easier to build and smoother to play.”

That seemingly started with this month’s X-Men Origins of Apocalypse season, which added the ‘Objective’ keyword as a new gameplay mechanic to create a “timing choice,” one you can play early on or hold onto until later in the game.

Not content to ride solely on new keywords and their mechanics, the team wants to “give some overlooked strategies their moment.” And that sounds likely to happen with light rule tweaks to existing gameplay modes on top of a new gameplay mode or two. Some of the best Marvel Snap decks are about to come back into fashion.

Rounding out the lengthy post, Second Dinner reveals that one of these is Draft – something players have apparently been “very loud” about in the past. Once it lands, Draft mode will be ” built around new deckbuilding rules that haven’t been possible in Snap before.” Will it be enough to shake its ‘mixed’ review standing on Steam? As someone who was a little slow to understand its appeal, I really do hope so. It’s an incredibly inventive take on the often complicated card battler genre, and it deserves to stick around. It almost died back in 2023 and took a bullet in 2025. It’s been through the wringer, but it’s still going strong.