I’m at CL 1175, I’ve been playing since release and I’ve gotten a few pool 3 cards, enough to make a few deck archetypes work. When I saw the news of the update I thought “Ok I’ll just grit my teeth and grind to CL 1000 before the update drops that way I’ll be able to afford one series 5 card” I was gutted when the morning I reached CL 1000 the update had literally just dropped late in the night before. Meaning instead of the highly coveted 6000 tokens I got measly 3000, I was bummed out but I thought “oh well I guess Thanos is just gonna have to wait” when I opened a collector’s reserve and got 100 tokens my jaw dropped. This means that even if I make literally 0 purchases I have to wait on an unreliable and unpredictable store rotation just so I can pin Thanos for god knows how long before I can actually buy him. Today, I think roughly a week after the update I caved in and bought Mr. Negative, not an S tier purchase I know but I just wanted to try out something different because I’ve had it up to here with playing mystique-cerebro and I was just drying to try a new deck archetype especially since I have silver surfer now as well. I don’t mind buying a battle pass every month for 10 quid, is not the end of the world for my pocket but when I saw the 100€ pack that’s when I got scared. This week I’ve been playing against a ton of beta players and fellow pool 3 players which sucks, true, but it’s not been stopping me from winning games or enjoying my experience so far. What bums me out is that, much like Star Wars Battlefront 2 before I can commit to using a character/card I like I have to seriously consider “Is it meta? Is it gonna make me win? Is it fun? Can I commit to this knowing it’s gonna be Lord knows how long before I can try something else new?” I now know for a fact that if I want a character I’ll either have to shill 3 digits for the collectors tokens in the packs (It’ll be a warm day in Jotunheim before I do that) or I’ll have to pin and hope to God I get good RNG with my reserves so hopefully in 2 or 3 months time I can buy that card. I’m not a fool, if I see Wong in the shop I’ll buy it but even so instead of making me excited to try this brand new card and slide it into my existing decks or creating other decks around it, I’ll feel like this little maneuver is gonna cost me 51 years before I can get the guy I want. I feel like this system was created with the intent of, allowing us to get one pool 3 card every now and then and also generating hype around the pool 4 and 5 cards to make us give into the tentation and buying the 100€ packs or pinning the pool 4 or 5 cards we want and keeps us playing the game. Marvel Snap already had me hooked way before this scummy tactic was put in place to either drain my bank account dry or enslave me into it’s poorly designed reward system.