In Second Dinner’s Marvel Snap, locations often play a larger role than the cards in your deck, which makes Featured and Hot locations very important. Revealed one-by-one during the first three turns, beneficial or detrimental locations can single-handedly swing a match either way. Take, for example, Space Throne, where only one card per player can be played. If your opponent drops a Green Goblin into that slot, they have a massive advantage from already securing a lane. To balance this, locations have different rarities, meaning game-swinging locations such as Ego will appear far less frequently than Central Park.
Each Week Second Dinner Introduces a Featured Location and a Hot Location to Marvel Snap
Featured locations release every Wednesday at 3AM UTC or, for those of us in North America, 8PM PST/11PM EST. They last for 24 hours. They have a 50% higher chance to appear and introduce new locations themed around the current Season Pass. Take, for example, the Days of Future Past season, which introduced the Sentinel-producing Orchis Forge to the game. For Featured locations, you can plan ahead by checking out the official Marvel Snap news list. Featured locations generally have pretty exciting and powerful effects, so it’s worth researching them ahead of time. After the Featured location period ends, they’ll enter into the regular pool.
Hot locations work much the same except for two caveats: they release every Sunday and are randomly selected (or, perhaps, chosen by the game’s creator Ben Brode himself — who knows?) from the pool of existing locations, making them more difficult to prepare for. As of this article’s publishing, the last Hot location was Project Pegasus, which gave both players +5 energy for a turn. This spawned a lot of decks with high mana, game-winning plays, such as a turn one Galactus.
As you can imagine, if you don’t have the right cards, Featured and Hot locations can make it difficult to rank up in Marvel Snap. In fact, some would argue they’re anti-fun because they reward players with a more complete collection. I digress.
Keep in mind that both Featured and Hot locations have had different appearance rates and lengths in the past, but as of March 2023, they’re both live for 24 hours and have a 50% chance to appear. Second Dinner may change the appearance rate again, but I doubt they’ll switch off the Wednesday and Sunday schedule.
And that’s everything you need to know about Featured and Hot locations in Marvel Snap. Good luck out there against whatever meta deck is dominating the ladder!
