After nearly six years, Genshin Impact has finally opened the door fans have speculated about since launch: Version 7.0 brings Snezhnaya, the frozen homeland of the Fatui and the Tsaritsa. It’s the seventh major nation and one of the most anticipated destinations in the game’s history — the place where years of story threads have been pointing.
A new nation is Genshin’s biggest kind of update, and it always comes with the same reality: a wave of must-pull characters in a short window. For players, that turns 7.0 into less a content drop and more a planning problem — and understanding that problem is the key to getting through it without regret.
What’s actually live in 7.0
Version 7.0 rolled out in two phases. Phase 1 (August 12 – September 1) debuted the new 5-star Odette and new 4-star Electro Alyosha, alongside an Arlecchino rerun. Phase 2 (September 1 – 22) is running Flins and Ineffa rerun banners with their signature weapons. Looking ahead, Version 7.1 is expected around September 23, bringing new Snezhnaya characters Vesna and Vodyanitsa.
The clear takeaway: a new nation front-loads desirable pulls. New characters, reruns of popular units, and signature weapons all stack into a few weeks — and they don’t wait for your Primogem balance to recover.
Why Snezhnaya makes Primogems the real bottleneck
Genshin’s design is a pull economy. You earn Primogems slowly through exploration, quests, and events, and a new region floods the banner schedule with characters worth wanting — often back-to-back, with little recovery time between phases. That’s the squeeze: the scarce resource in a nation launch isn’t content, it’s Primogems and the discipline to plan them.
This is the honest reason planning matters more here than in most games. Pulling on impulse for a Phase 1 character can leave you short for a Phase 2 rerun or a 7.1 debut you wanted more. The players who come out of a nation launch happy are the ones who decided in advance which banners to commit to and which to skip — and who topped up their reserves deliberately rather than mid-pull.
Where top-up fits — and a caution on accounts
For players who want to secure a reserve before a specific banner, Genesis Crystals top-up is the straightforward lever: convert to Primogems and go into a banner with a known pull budget rather than hoping for luck. On a marketplace like iGV, top-up is the low-friction, account-safe way to plan around the Snezhnaya banner cadence.
A necessary honesty note on accounts, though: Genshin Impact’s account market is far more sensitive than most. HoYoverse’s Terms of Service prohibit account trading and sharing, and the studio actively enforces this — account-related activity carries real ban risk. If you consider the account market at all, treat it with heavy caution: understand that it runs against HoYoverse’s ToS, and weigh that risk seriously. For most players, planning Primogems and topping up on your own account is the safer path to the characters you want.
Snezhnaya is the update Genshin players have waited years for, and 7.0 delivers it the way every nation launch arrives — with a dense run of must-pull banners that Primogem income can’t keep pace with. The winners aren’t the luckiest pullers; they’re the ones who planned. Decide which of Odette, the Phase 2 reruns, and the 7.1 debuts you actually want, budget your Primogems against that, and top up deliberately rather than reactively.
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