My friends, I quit playing Marvel Snap after reaching a collection level of 1,465, after spending over $500 in the store, and after getting as high as the 70s in rank. And you will love hearing why, because Marvel Snap is a very fun game. If you get into playing it, the locations, the collections, the Marvel characters, it is definitely a fun game. However, is playing a competitive game the best use of my time at this point in my life?
I quit playing Marvel Snap because for me, playing a competitive game like Marvel Snap is not fun unless I can really give my all to being competitive. For me, this means that as a YouTuber and a Twitch streamer, if I want to play Marvel Snap, I don't want to be a casual and always be losing games because I don't understand the deck. To me, Marvel Snap is a game that's really fun if you've got hours every day to play. If you can be researching the cards and the meta, and you can always know exactly what's possible, and really play the locations of the day all the time and customize your deck, it's a fun game to kind of get way, way into. But it's not that fun to play casually.
Gaming first and foremost needs to be about fun
Why? Because to me, gaming first and foremost needs to be about fun. And what's not fun to me is to get beat by people who are try-hards all the time, which is why I'm quitting not just Marvel Snap, but all competitive gaming.
At this point in my life, I find it frustrating to do competitive gaming because I've been a pro gamer in the past. I've been really insanely good at a bunch of the different games I've played. And I don't want to play a competitive game unless I can be one of the best people at a game. I don't want to make Marvel Snap videos and content unless I can make really good videos that actually give you great info.
The live stream that pushed me over the edge
What really pushed me over the edge with Marvel Snap and being a creator is that I researched several different decks. I had this nice deck, but I couldn't get Venom to really make the deck work properly. On my last live stream on Twitch, I had won a bunch of cubes and had like a 70% win percentage. I don't know what happened, but I got wrecked after that. Maybe my MMR went up and I got some tougher opponents, made some bad calls. Maybe I just got lucky before that. But I got smacked after that.
And I took four hours. Four hours. And I couldn't even come out with a decent video. Where I'm at in my life, four hours is a lot.
Yesterday, I started a new YouTube channel called Jerry Banfield Thoughts. And in around two hours of real time, I cranked out videos on this channel that easily have the potential to go viral. I recorded three videos on this channel in under two hours, all from other viral YouTube video titles. This has really important information in it, like how I hacked reality to get anything I wanted. The ideas in there are really valuable. And if you give me four hours of time, I could probably film a week's worth of videos coming out every day. So I could have a video every day. At this rate, this channel will probably be my second or third channel to hit 100,000 subscribers after my main channel. And then maybe we'll see if it can beat my crypto channel. This channel is so exciting and has such power and energy behind it, and it's so fast for me to crank videos out about it.
Where I want gaming content to go
For gaming, I was able to make a beginner's guide for Marvel Snap that people liked, and I was able to make a couple of other videos people liked. But the further you get into the game, the harder it gets to create good content. For me, I want to be able to make gaming videos. I want to be able to relax and have fun when I'm playing games. And what's really fun for me is learning.
I've already been a competitive gamer, and I can tell you, being a competitive gamer for a job sucks. I made over 100 grand in 2021, mostly on Facebook gaming, as one of the best Warzone solo players in the world, with strategies that people were very polarized about — just basically camping and playing extremely tactical and slow and patient. And I got to hate that. I got to hate every day that all people wanted me to do was play Warzone, because it's boring. It's boring. (I dug into this side of competitive play more in my take on Warzone and playing the long game.)
If you're a gamer, your mind probably thrives on learning and playing new games. But you get into these routines. You get into the comfort zone of playing the same game. You get into the comfort zone of playing games all the time. And for content creators, if you're doing gaming, there are kind of two different paths. You can go the variety gaming path, where you're always making videos about other games. Or you can go, you know, I'm going to make a video about this game over and over and over again. If you go that path, though, lots of times people will not transition to the new games. So I'm at a key point in my gaming channel.
I was wrong about Marvel Snap — and still right to quit
With Marvel Snap, I made a video saying, "I played Marvel Snap for 10 hours so you don't have to," where I came to this same basic conclusion. But then I got excited after that video got over a thousand views organically, and I said I was wrong about Marvel Snap. While I still stick to that — yes, I was wrong, Marvel Snap is a very fun game, it's a great game to play competitively if you play card games. I'd say it's better to play Marvel Snap competitively than about any other card game. Better than Magic: The Gathering, Hearthstone, Gods Unchained, whatever all the other ones are.
However, is competitive gaming the best use of your time? What I've noticed for me is that some of the worst days I've had, some of the worst I've felt — and I feel really good almost all day, almost every day — two of the days where I felt the least good were after playing a whole bunch of competitive games. One of them was competitive Call of Duty Warzone. The other one was Marvel Snap. On my live stream, I tried too hard last time in Marvel Snap. I played for four hours straight, and I couldn't even get one good video out of that live stream. I felt like I just totally wasted my time and my energy. Unless I want to dedicate my entire self as a YouTuber and a Twitch streamer to playing Marvel Snap — which there's no way I would do.
Because being a competitive gamer sucks for money. If you want to be a creator and make money, crypto is the best place to create and make money, which is why I have two crypto YouTube channels. And if you want to make money also doing finance videos, or like the Thoughts videos I showed, that are much more general relevance — gaming is niche. There's a ton of people playing video games all the time. There are lots of creators. There are creators creating video game content all the time.
All in, or just play for fun
For me, Marvel Snap is either an all-or-nothing kind of thing. The other day, doing Marvel Snap for four hours, it's like — I did the video before saying I was wrong about Marvel Snap, saying I'm all in. I have to be all in. And does it make sense for me to dedicate all my energy to being all in on Marvel Snap? No. I've shown in the past, I will always get bored playing the same game over and over again. (That's the same restlessness I wrote about in why starting a brand-new game is the hardest thing in gaming.) And what really sucks playing games is to be bored and to try and create content from a place of being bored.
So for me, I either go all in and get really good at the game and become one of the best players in the world, or I'd rather just play casual single-player games or cooperative multiplayer games like zombies for fun and relax. This is the kind of honest, behind-the-scenes thinking I share with everyone in the Jerry Banfield Family.
So for those of you who liked my Snap videos or my Snap streams and were wondering why I wasn't doing them anymore — that's what happened. That's why I quit Marvel Snap: because it's not fun to play casually for me. It's fun to either be all in and be like addicted to it, or just don't touch it. It's the same logic that had me walk away from Twitch after nine years rather than keep doing something halfway.
Going forward, I am going to keep uploading gaming videos that are taken from my Twitch stream. You'll get to see lots of different games I'm playing, and I'm going to show you games that I think will be really fun for you — things like Hogwarts Legacy, Hades, and Returnal. I have a list of the 21 most fun games I've played since 2020. My goal is to share gaming videos with you that are fun, that will help you enjoy gaming, relax, and that you can play casually — videos for those of you that just want to have a little fun gaming, not those who are going to be playing games for eight hours a day. If you enjoy that, you can find more of it in my Games playlist, where I share the games that are actually worth your time.