Developer Update for the Week of May 4, 2024: Valentina Edition (20+ Questions)!

Hello all! Welcome back to this week’s breakdown of what’s happening over on the Marvel Snap official Discord! This week, we get answers to questions such as: why are the new borders not global purchases, is Fogwell's Gym back permanently, will we be getting a new Series Drop soon, and more! If you want to stay up to date with what’s coming and what answers developers have for the community, make sure to check back here each week!

This week’s edition comes after the launch new card Valentina! If you don’t know if this card is worth a Spotlight Cache, make sure to check out our weekly Spotlight Cache guide, as well as our Valentina and Baron Zemo Bonus Challenge guide!

Answers and questions may be slightly rephrased for more clarity and ease of reading. This week’s topics will be divided into Card Specific Questions, Other Questions, and Questions From You!

Remember, you can check out our new Marvel Snap Developer Tracker to see all questions and answers in real time! Topics can also be searched, filtered, and sorted.

Card Specific Questions

Q: Can we get an update on the Thanos rework? He wasn’t changed in the last patch. Also, will Sancutary II be reworked? Getting Time Stone is horrible now.
A: Glenn “Because changing the Stones requires VFX work, it’s a patch change. The 4/30 patch was locked on design work before we made the initial change to Thanos himself, so there has not yet been a patch where it would’ve even been possible to make those changes.

We’ll talk about them when they go live; we don’t generally ‘preview’ balance updates. We will also adjust Sanctuary II, although I wouldn’t say 1/1s that draw a card aren’t helpful—we’d never print such a card outright for strength reasons.”

Q: Do you think Valentina, Cable, and Mirage are too similar? In Loki decks, they are all 2-Cost cards that give a card.
A: Glenn “No; these cards are all meaningfully different for both different decks as well as what players find appealing to do.

It’s true that for Loki in particular they are fairly similar, but that’s specific to what Loki’s effect does. If you assume you’ll always play Loki then Cable and Sentinel are the same card. Like other decks, the differences arise in what you think you’ll want when you don’t play Loki.”

Q: Will Blink flip cards based on their original costs, or current cost?
A: Glenn “Blink doesn’t use modified Costs, and will always look at the original Cost.”

Other Questions

Q: Does having Hot Locations and character driven weekends mess with your balancing data?
A: Glenn “We by default remove games played under hot and featured locations, but weekend missions are mostly just a little impactful to play rates and less meaningful to slice out, so we often look at it both ways for them.”

Q: With cards now labeled as “Spotlight”, is the new feature set to allow players to buy Spotlight variants?
A: Stephen “Yes its ready to go.  The first set of spotlight variants will arrive in the daily offer shop once we hit the anniversary for when the feature launched in June.”

Q: How will you be able to get old Spotlight cards when it launches?
A: Stephen “Spotlight variants will be available for Gold”

Q: Was Fogwell's Gym added to the card pool rotation?
A: KentErik “correct! it has been added to the general pool, sorry this one missed the patch notes!”

Q: Why are the new card borders per-card and not universal? Also, it is not super clear in game that purchasing those are character specific.
A: Stephen “The primary goal of the new borders and the future upcoming splits is to make them a new reward type we can give out throughout the game.  Having borders by character aligns with how Custom Card works and enables them to be a cool new reward type.  Thanks for the feedback that its not clear if its global or not.  I’ll take that back to the team to see what we can do to update it in a future patch.”

Q: Will we be getting more custom card borders?
A: Stephen “Yes we plan to add more borders in future updates”

Q: Have you thought about changing the interaction that moving an unrevealed card will still give the moved card the benefits of the original location? For example: Playing Juggernaut and moving a Red Skull on a Shuri location, but Red Skull still gets the buff after his reveal.
A: Glenn “Those effects currently operate consistently based on our intent. Playing a card to a specific location is the action of a) staging it from your hand at a location and b) revealing it there.”

Q: Can we expect a Series drop in the next few months?
A: Chris “Yes, more info soon”

Q: When will we see the next roadmap? We haven’t seen one in 4 months.
A: Griffin “We’re really excited to share what’s coming this summer and beyond. The team is working on putting together a roadmap to showcase what’s coming after this next season, ‘A Blink In Time’. We try our best to provide updated roadmaps quarterly but shifting development plans can cause delays in our ability to deliver them.”

Q: Will you ever update the mobile splash screen on login?
A: Griffin “This has been on our wishlist for a while now! We’ll share your desire with the team.”

Q: Are there any plans to optimize the performance on mobile?
A: Griffin “We feel your pain on this. Good news is that we’re bringing a bunch of new performance improvements in our next patch that should see significant performance gains in app start times, download times, and collection screen responsiveness. It will require another full re-download but we think it’ll be worth it.”

Q: When a new album gets released, the variants for it become featured. This wasn’t the case with pixels though and I collect them. Will we ever see a featured pixel day?
A: Griffin “Wait, your Mystery Variants aren’t all Pixels like mine??? (j/k)

I’ll pass along your desires here to the team! Love seeing a pixel collector.”

Q: Why is the Cyclops emote not like other emotes that mirror when viewed from the other player’s perspective?
A: Griffin “Good question! Some art is able to flipped as they are vertically symmetrical. For Cyclops, his X-Men ‘X’ logo on his chest is always over his heart (left side). However, the team is aware that players desire Cyclops to be facing the other way for your opponent.”

Q: Which Dev picked the “Dev Pick” variants?
A: Glenn “Everybody picked one. I picked Peach Momoko’s Magik variant, for example.”

A: Daniela “I picked baby Morbius 🪦”
A: Chris “Fiona Lockjaw for me”
A: Addison “Pixel Korg!”
A: Alex “Mine’s the Winter Vacation Devil Dinosaur! ❄️
It was the first variant I ever chased way back during beta”
A: Bella “Artgerm Loki 😍”

Questions From You!

Each week, I ask readers of the weekly dev update to leave their questions down in the comment section. That way we can ask those questions on your behalf, or let you know the answers if those questions have been asked before! I read each comment you leave, so I will be adding this section at the end of each week’s edition to highlight your questions that you asked last week!

Q: Is there a reason why golden tickets can be found in caches?
A: Stephen “At the time conquest had just come out and we felt they were perceived as a valuable reward that would help players save time and jump straight into gold conquest to try to earn an infinity ticket.  Unfortunately the perception of gold tickets did not reach that bar.

Hopefully in the future as we add more features (events, clans, more game modes, booster vats, etc), we can find a replacement for gold tickets with something that the community values more.”

Q: Can the devs clarify, once and for all, why they refuse to rework Kang?
A: This question gets asked a ton, and devs have stopped directly responding to it. To summarize past responses for you though: They are aware Kang is a bad cars and needs a change, but as KentErik said, “Kang is a tricky one”. The card can’t be adjusted by stats alone, and needs a full rework. Those kind of adjustments are as much work as designing a whole new card according to Glenn, so that is resource intensive. They don’t want to lower his Series cost either because players purchased Kang with the knowledge he would never lower Series. So the development team is aware and are likely working towards a solution when time and resources permit.

Q:Will you add ‘collect all’ function in future? So we dont have to collect CL rewards one by one.
A: Stephen “We have plans to add this but no ETA right now.”

Q: Will the team add X-Men ’97 variants?
A: The latest datamines have shown 2 new variants coming to Snap, and Mister Sinister and Bishop will be available as Twitch Drops!

Keep Your Questions and Feedback Coming!

That’s all for this week’s update! Be sure to check back here at Marvel Snap Zone for next week’s update! If you enjoyed the amount of content in this edition, make sure to keep asking your questions to the developers by submitting it in their official Discord in the “#ask-the-team” channel. If you have questions and don’t use Discord, leave your questions for the developers in the comment section here, and I will make sure your question has been answered by the devs!

If you have feedback or changes you would like to see with these weekly updates, also let us know in the comment section!