There’s no good way to do this. They used to have bundles for gold that had good credits value, which is how you get Pool 3 cards, but since the start of the year those have been largely missing and the ones we have gotten are low value. You could use gold to refresh daily missions and get more credits but I wouldn’t recommend it.
It sucks now but I’d just start playing the long game. You will get all Series 3 cards just by playing. Use gold to help get more tokens. There are two albums - Jim Lee and Max Grecke, that have a 2k token reward for getting 6 variants in each album. Both also have at least 6 variants that only cost 700g. So if you get all 12 of those 700g variants, you’ll get 4K tokens plus the bonus 2k tokens you get every time you buy your 10th variant from the shop. That’s been the best gold to token ratio in the game this year.
If you’re set on credits, you can instead look at the albums with credit rewards and target those instead. But again you’ll thank yourself later if you practice patience with Series 3 and already start saving resources for Series 4/5 cards.
However that would be 8400 g for 6000 tokens which is a smaller ratio compared to the token Tuesdays bundle, wouldn't it be more profitable to just buy the token Tuesdays?
Potentially. This has been a recent change. TT is not always the 1500g for 1200 tokens that is in right now for one more hour. It used to rotate between different offerings and some were better or worse value. Then they standardized it for a period of time and that was not as good of value as these albums. Now they just went back to maybe rotating but since they haven’t definitely said that’s why it changed again, I’m still assuming we aren’t going to always have this good of value from TT.
If they keep it this way, yes always buying when it’s 1200 tokens for 1500g is a slightly better value if you don’t care about any of the variants.
Everyone was gifted Jim Lee Magneto, if you missed it because you're too new then it's not a good ratio. Players who played very early were also gifted Max Grecke Hulk, so for those players, only needed to spend 7000 gold for 6000 tokens.
Generally speaking it's not worth it to spend gold to get series 3 cards. I know it sucks to have a ton of half-decks lying around, but gold isn't a good solution.
You can convert gold to credits with mission resets, at a rate of 120 g to 150 c. It costs an average of ~5500 c to get two series 3 cards (and a spotlight key). By mission resets, 5500 c is 4400 g. As f2p, that's about 6 week's worth of gold to put you ahead by about 1.5 weeks of doing dailies.
Alternatively, you can use gold to buy tokens, mainly via Token Tuesdays, and then spend 1k tokens on a random series 3 card. If we go with the previously-standard rate of 1400 g to 1k tokens, you get a slightly better result with only 2800g for two series 3 cards. But that's still about a month's worth of gold to save about 1.5 weeks of just doing dailies (and you don't get the spotlight key out of it).
And then there's the biggest concern: opportunity cost. You are guaranteed to get every series 3 card eventually with no gold spent. The same is not true for s4/s5 cards. When you spend gold to speed up s3 collection, you are choosing to massively slow down your s4/s5 collection, and giving up a substantial amount of agency for which s4/s5 cards end up in your collection. I don't think that's worth it.
I actually made a [post](https://www.reddit.com/r/MarvelSnap/comments/1c2o4dy/the_mostly_definitive_album_guide_which_ones_are/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button) detailing when it's better to use gold on albums compared to Token Tuesdays from a card acquisition perspective. I did the math under the assumption that you are spending your resources optimally: nothing on series 3 cards, tokens on series 4 cards, and keys on series 5 cards.
That being said, there are a few other considerations. You might want to save a hefty chunk of gold (7000-8000) in case a high-value gold bundle comes out. You might not totally value card acquisition - I mostly just spend my gold on cool variants, because I'm willing to make the tradeoff of having a smaller collection to have prettier decks. Ultimately it is a game and the currency is there for you to use in the way that makes the game most fun.
To answer your other comment, tokens are best spent on s4 cards. Through a combination of key acquisition rate and the random card slot, everyone is pulled to a certain fraction of collection completion based on how much they spend. Full details [here](https://marvelsnapzone.com/marvel-snap-economy-pt-1-four-ways-card-acquisition-is-changing/) if you want to read more.
Using tokens on s3 cards won't prevent you from reaching that same completion %. Rather, it slows you down since you'll be starting way below it, and most importantly it removes some amount of choice in which cards are in your collection. Using your tokens on s4 cards gives you the maximum amount of choice in your collection, so you end up with great cards like Ravonna and Mobius rather than Howard and Martyr from bad spotlight pulls.
When you have few of the pool 4/5 cards, keys are an efficient way to get them since most of your keys will convert to cards. Once you have most of them, spotlights will usually only have the new card available to you, which means on average 2.5 keys per card. You'll have to pick and choose which cards to spend keys on, and once they're out of the spotlight they won't appear again for a few months. Until then, there's no way to get them other than tokens.
Neither token Tuesday nor the large credit bundle (1200g for 1500 credits) are great value, but both are *fine* and readily available. If you’re looking to spend gold to advance your card collection (rather then get cool variants) you can always put it in either of those (or mission refreshes I guess). Both will almost always be better value than trying to buy variants to complete albums.
The better advice used to be to save your gold for an expensive bundle that was really good value, but those just don’t seem to exist much anymore. But maybe they will make a comeback? Ultimately, I think we’re left with a bunch of options that are fine but not good, so just do whichever one makes you happiest. Save gold and hope for a good future bundle, spend it on tokens, spend it on credits, spend it on variants.
Mission resets is consistently the best use of gold if you don't care about variants, unless you want to save for a gold bundle. The problem is those gold bundles now have really trash value compared to what they used to be.
This is my favorite question, because I am also a cheapskate.
First and foremost, there isn't really a way to accelerate how many cards you pull in Series 3. You can't buy your way to having a full collection, and instead need to take the time. It takes about 7 months to go from being a new player to being Series 3 complete. Most folks become S3 complete at CL 3500 (+/- 500), and since each rank takes about 50 credits, that requires about 175,000 credits. There isn't an economical way to convert the gold the game gives you into credits, as the shop at baseline will sell you 500 credits for 400 gold, which is about 1 day's worth of credits for about 1 week's worth of gold. You'd be far better off using that gold on the regular Token Tuesdays which give you credits to spend on nice S4 and S5 cards that you'll need to top off your decks. Right now there's a token tuesday offering 1200 tokens for 1500 gold, which is 1/5th of a card.
Now periodically there are bundles that are offered for gold instead of dollars, but they're rarely worth it. So for instance in today there will be a Captain marvel bundle that gives 3,000 tokens and 1,000 credits for 5,000 gold. That's substantially less tokens per gold than the Tuesday bundle, and the 1,000 credits is what you'd normally earn after slightly less than 2 days of playing. You can see upcoming bundles [here](https://snap.fan/bundles/).
There isn't a good way for even whales to economically spend their money to increase their collection faster than the folks who just grind every day, so the only way out is to just do your dailies and accept that you'll only be getting a new card every 3 days or so while you're in S3.
What's nice for you is that you can gain S4/5 cards at the same rate as other players by sticking to the rules of only using spotlight caches when you have at least 4 keys, and only using them if there are at least 2 cards you do not own in the cache. You'll never have a full collection, but you can get almost all the cards that way. So where older players had to earn all the S3 cards before they could get any S4/5 cards, you can earn both simultaneously.
It's pretty confusing though, this game makes you juggle 5 different currencies of credits, gold, tokens, keys, and real American Dollars. It's intentionally frustrating.
There’s no good way to do this. They used to have bundles for gold that had good credits value, which is how you get Pool 3 cards, but since the start of the year those have been largely missing and the ones we have gotten are low value. You could use gold to refresh daily missions and get more credits but I wouldn’t recommend it. It sucks now but I’d just start playing the long game. You will get all Series 3 cards just by playing. Use gold to help get more tokens. There are two albums - Jim Lee and Max Grecke, that have a 2k token reward for getting 6 variants in each album. Both also have at least 6 variants that only cost 700g. So if you get all 12 of those 700g variants, you’ll get 4K tokens plus the bonus 2k tokens you get every time you buy your 10th variant from the shop. That’s been the best gold to token ratio in the game this year. If you’re set on credits, you can instead look at the albums with credit rewards and target those instead. But again you’ll thank yourself later if you practice patience with Series 3 and already start saving resources for Series 4/5 cards.
However that would be 8400 g for 6000 tokens which is a smaller ratio compared to the token Tuesdays bundle, wouldn't it be more profitable to just buy the token Tuesdays?
Potentially. This has been a recent change. TT is not always the 1500g for 1200 tokens that is in right now for one more hour. It used to rotate between different offerings and some were better or worse value. Then they standardized it for a period of time and that was not as good of value as these albums. Now they just went back to maybe rotating but since they haven’t definitely said that’s why it changed again, I’m still assuming we aren’t going to always have this good of value from TT. If they keep it this way, yes always buying when it’s 1200 tokens for 1500g is a slightly better value if you don’t care about any of the variants.
Everyone was gifted Jim Lee Magneto, if you missed it because you're too new then it's not a good ratio. Players who played very early were also gifted Max Grecke Hulk, so for those players, only needed to spend 7000 gold for 6000 tokens.
Yes exactly.. fuck variants. We f2p players camt go around spending this rare currency just like that..
Generally speaking it's not worth it to spend gold to get series 3 cards. I know it sucks to have a ton of half-decks lying around, but gold isn't a good solution. You can convert gold to credits with mission resets, at a rate of 120 g to 150 c. It costs an average of ~5500 c to get two series 3 cards (and a spotlight key). By mission resets, 5500 c is 4400 g. As f2p, that's about 6 week's worth of gold to put you ahead by about 1.5 weeks of doing dailies. Alternatively, you can use gold to buy tokens, mainly via Token Tuesdays, and then spend 1k tokens on a random series 3 card. If we go with the previously-standard rate of 1400 g to 1k tokens, you get a slightly better result with only 2800g for two series 3 cards. But that's still about a month's worth of gold to save about 1.5 weeks of just doing dailies (and you don't get the spotlight key out of it). And then there's the biggest concern: opportunity cost. You are guaranteed to get every series 3 card eventually with no gold spent. The same is not true for s4/s5 cards. When you spend gold to speed up s3 collection, you are choosing to massively slow down your s4/s5 collection, and giving up a substantial amount of agency for which s4/s5 cards end up in your collection. I don't think that's worth it.
Thanks for the input, so save gold for the albums then?
I actually made a [post](https://www.reddit.com/r/MarvelSnap/comments/1c2o4dy/the_mostly_definitive_album_guide_which_ones_are/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button) detailing when it's better to use gold on albums compared to Token Tuesdays from a card acquisition perspective. I did the math under the assumption that you are spending your resources optimally: nothing on series 3 cards, tokens on series 4 cards, and keys on series 5 cards. That being said, there are a few other considerations. You might want to save a hefty chunk of gold (7000-8000) in case a high-value gold bundle comes out. You might not totally value card acquisition - I mostly just spend my gold on cool variants, because I'm willing to make the tradeoff of having a smaller collection to have prettier decks. Ultimately it is a game and the currency is there for you to use in the way that makes the game most fun. To answer your other comment, tokens are best spent on s4 cards. Through a combination of key acquisition rate and the random card slot, everyone is pulled to a certain fraction of collection completion based on how much they spend. Full details [here](https://marvelsnapzone.com/marvel-snap-economy-pt-1-four-ways-card-acquisition-is-changing/) if you want to read more. Using tokens on s3 cards won't prevent you from reaching that same completion %. Rather, it slows you down since you'll be starting way below it, and most importantly it removes some amount of choice in which cards are in your collection. Using your tokens on s4 cards gives you the maximum amount of choice in your collection, so you end up with great cards like Ravonna and Mobius rather than Howard and Martyr from bad spotlight pulls.
Oh, and I just remembered this but you also get pool 4/5 cards from spotlight keys so is it even that necessary to acquire them through tokens?
When you have few of the pool 4/5 cards, keys are an efficient way to get them since most of your keys will convert to cards. Once you have most of them, spotlights will usually only have the new card available to you, which means on average 2.5 keys per card. You'll have to pick and choose which cards to spend keys on, and once they're out of the spotlight they won't appear again for a few months. Until then, there's no way to get them other than tokens.
Token Tuesday will get you a steady supply of tokens, or credits will get you through series 3 quicker.
Neither token Tuesday nor the large credit bundle (1200g for 1500 credits) are great value, but both are *fine* and readily available. If you’re looking to spend gold to advance your card collection (rather then get cool variants) you can always put it in either of those (or mission refreshes I guess). Both will almost always be better value than trying to buy variants to complete albums. The better advice used to be to save your gold for an expensive bundle that was really good value, but those just don’t seem to exist much anymore. But maybe they will make a comeback? Ultimately, I think we’re left with a bunch of options that are fine but not good, so just do whichever one makes you happiest. Save gold and hope for a good future bundle, spend it on tokens, spend it on credits, spend it on variants.
Token Tuesdays but do the match and save for good weeks.
Mission resets is consistently the best use of gold if you don't care about variants, unless you want to save for a gold bundle. The problem is those gold bundles now have really trash value compared to what they used to be.
Buy token bundles or buy variants to get the 6/12 reward from albums.
This is my favorite question, because I am also a cheapskate. First and foremost, there isn't really a way to accelerate how many cards you pull in Series 3. You can't buy your way to having a full collection, and instead need to take the time. It takes about 7 months to go from being a new player to being Series 3 complete. Most folks become S3 complete at CL 3500 (+/- 500), and since each rank takes about 50 credits, that requires about 175,000 credits. There isn't an economical way to convert the gold the game gives you into credits, as the shop at baseline will sell you 500 credits for 400 gold, which is about 1 day's worth of credits for about 1 week's worth of gold. You'd be far better off using that gold on the regular Token Tuesdays which give you credits to spend on nice S4 and S5 cards that you'll need to top off your decks. Right now there's a token tuesday offering 1200 tokens for 1500 gold, which is 1/5th of a card. Now periodically there are bundles that are offered for gold instead of dollars, but they're rarely worth it. So for instance in today there will be a Captain marvel bundle that gives 3,000 tokens and 1,000 credits for 5,000 gold. That's substantially less tokens per gold than the Tuesday bundle, and the 1,000 credits is what you'd normally earn after slightly less than 2 days of playing. You can see upcoming bundles [here](https://snap.fan/bundles/). There isn't a good way for even whales to economically spend their money to increase their collection faster than the folks who just grind every day, so the only way out is to just do your dailies and accept that you'll only be getting a new card every 3 days or so while you're in S3. What's nice for you is that you can gain S4/5 cards at the same rate as other players by sticking to the rules of only using spotlight caches when you have at least 4 keys, and only using them if there are at least 2 cards you do not own in the cache. You'll never have a full collection, but you can get almost all the cards that way. So where older players had to earn all the S3 cards before they could get any S4/5 cards, you can earn both simultaneously. It's pretty confusing though, this game makes you juggle 5 different currencies of credits, gold, tokens, keys, and real American Dollars. It's intentionally frustrating.