Table of Contents
Welcome back to this week’s Developer Update! This week’s edition comes after:
- The launch of the new Fantastic 4 Season.
- Series 5 cards Mister Fantastic First Steps and H.E.R.B.I.E.
- Super Premium Season Pass card Fantasticar – our take on it here.
- If you don’t know if these cards are worth getting, make sure to check out our Bonus Challenge guide for a post-release review of the card and new decklists!
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, Long Answer Questions and Questions From You!
See all individual questions and answers updated in real time!
Card Specific Questions
Q: Is it a bug or intended that She-Hulk counts as a “end of turn” card with Fantasticar? Is it because she checks your energy at the end of the turn?
A: Glenn “This is a bug we’re already in the process of fixing. You’ve correctly guessed that she uses an End of Turn trigger to count your Energy, but that trigger should have a flag to ‘hide’ it. Fun fact: She-Hulk also has an Ongoing ability to apply the reduction, similarly flagged as hidden.”
Q: Do you think She-Hulk SHOULD qualify for the “end of turn” text?
A: Glenn “No, I don’t believe she should qualify. The trigger is simply used to return an integer value and has no gameplay relevance. That’s in contrast to someone like Black Cat, whose trigger isn’t on the board but is gameplay-relevant.”
Q: Why can Agamotto’s skill bring him out of the discard graveyard, but Dormammu’s Skill can’t?
A: Glenn “Differentiating the outputs of the cards is intentional—summoning Dormammu into play is a fairly different kind of ‘threat’ from adding a 5-Cost to your hand. The design accounts for that by offering more counterplay to the opponent. It is potentially a balance dial we can turn, if Dormammu needs that kind of help specifically, but that function was tested internally and ultimately removed.”
Q: Why weren’t locations like Kyln or The Vault not updated to let you play Skills on them when locked down like Professor X was?
A: Glenn “Professor X didn’t change because we wanted to enable skills playing to his location—he changed because we wanted to enable skills ‘leaving’ his location. For example, if Professor X reveals before a skill played on the same turn. Ignoring them completely was just the most elegant way to do that. None of the locations mentioned (or other cards like Goose) have that unique problem, so they don’t merit any change.”
Q: With so many “End of Turn” cards becoming their own archetype, has Nebula been considered to get that text?
A: Glenn “Nebula’s already one of our strongest 1-Cost cards, so we elected not to make that change.”
Q: What does the team think about Jeff? He was once the best 2-Cost, but now he sees almost no play with all of these new 2-Costs added.
A: Glenn “A lot of Jeff’s success came from a lack of competition. Environments and other elements may change his strength over time, but Jeff previously being the most played 2-Cost in tons of decks was actually indicative of a problem with that metagame. We’ve just designed a bunch of good cards since then.”
Q: Why make the new Fantastic 4 cards repeated names? Why not use their character names (like Reed Richards) to make them more uniquely named?
A: Glenn “We thought about that route, but creatively it actually felt more dissonant. If anything, the movie trailer implies these versions of the characters are primarily known and celerated as their heroic aliases, even if they are public figures.”
Q: Is the new Skill “Council of Reeds” like surge in that it keeps triggering as you play cards?
A: Glenn “Yes, it’s quite similar to Surge. Unlike Surge, this ability attaches to the player, like Iron Fist.”
Q: Is there any way for Mister Fantastic FS to fail his end of turn?
A: Glenn “No, he’ll only give an available buff to his target if able. Skill cards always get Cost reduction, and 0-Cost cards will always receive Power. A minor exception is that he can hit a 0-Cost skill, which won’t be able to receive either buff.”
Q: Is Zabu becoming a problem with how much use he is getting? Decks with unique identities are fading with everyone using the same card.
A: Glenn “Among the top ~60% of Series 3-complete players last month, our core cohort for balance review, Zabu is right at 51% and 0.03 cubes—that’s just not a very strong performance in the general matchmaking pool. Even narrowing the band to the top 25%, those numbers are flat.
It isn’t until we’re looking at the top 0.5% of MMR that Zabu’s metrics start to shine a bit, but even there he’s not a Top 10 card or anything. As we’ve said in the past, this player cohort is also too small to support balance changes on their behalf.
It’s true that Zabu is overly popular relative to his performance, but he’s currently quite far from past cards that have generated nerfs on play rate alone. We’re also not seeing any indicators that metagame diversity is ‘fading’ in his presence, though I agree that such a signal would be significant.”
Q: Was the feedback around Kid Omega not enough reason to move Fantasticar to the token pool this season?
A: Glenn “The voluminous feedback around Kid Omega, from my following, primarily centered around the cost of the card in resources and/or effort, though the delay was also brought up. In either case, all of the July season’s content was locked way before High Voltage: Overdrive was even announced, so it wouldn’t have impacted the outcome.
Time-delayed releases have been a core aspect of the game since the beta, and specific to all of our season passes, so Fantasticar followed suit.”
Q: How did Mister Fantastic FS look in internal testing?
A: Glenn “He was strong. We had similar decks in our internal pool for sure, and we balanced appropriately. He’s got pretty great dials if it turns out that we were off, but it’s very early.”
Other Questions
Q: Can we get more details about the release of Fantasticar, and why it wasn’t spoken about before release?
A: Griffin “Fantasticar will be available at the start of the following season, just like the other Season Pass cards.
In regards to not speaking about it, we have a policy that we don’t talk about data mines. Historically, we have always talked about the ways to acquire seasonal cards in the blog as opposed to the Dev Updates. This is primarily due to how early we have to lock the Dev Update scripts and film them.”
Q: What’s the point of the seasonal developer commercials when they don’t actually showcase everything like the blog? And why does the blog always release inconsistent with the video in some way?
A: Glenn “They’re definitely a fun piece of marketing we do to hype up the season. We don’t call them ‘commercials’ per se but I [guess] you could. They’re meant to provide a high level overview of what’s to come while the blog provides more in-depth details.
As for the accuracy issues in the blog, that’s something we’re actively trying to improve.”
Q: Is the super premium card the new normal going forward?
A: Griffin “As with everything we try, we hope it’ll work but if it doesn’t we’ll pivot. As of now, we plan to continue to try this in future seasons but nothing is ever written in stone.”
Q: How does the team balance creating content for free to play players versus regular paying players?
A: Glenn “That’s the core tension of designing economies in F2P games. Sanctum Showdown’s shop remains an example of one way we sought to do that, by making sure F2P players had the ability to pick their favorite reward(s) while creating enough rewards for spending/grinding players to also target.
Ultimately, anything awesome enough to be worth buying is also going to be awesome enough that some players will be frustrated it’s not free, and how many varies.”
Q: Would you make a card that lets you see the other player’s hand?
A: Glenn “It’s not so much that such an effect is too strong, though it can be strong. It’s that the effect isn’t very fun. For example, if two players were playing poker and one of them could see the others’ cards, that player would win a lot—but the gameplay would not be fun. Maintaining a significant amount of incomplete information is important to CCGs, and more important for the snap mechanic.”
Q: How impactful would it be for more cards that add cards to your opponent’s hand?
A: Glenn “It’s pretty strong, but more importantly it tends to be pretty frustrating. I imagine elements like this we pursue in the future will avoid simply occupying the opponent’s hand. Maybe more stuff like Baron Mordo, or stuff that self-banishes under a criteria.”
Q: Why aren’t 0-Cost cards ever used in this game’s design?
A: Glenn “0-Cost cards are fraught design space in any game–the difference between 0 and 1 is dramatically more than the difference between 1 and 2, from a costing game actions perspective. 0-Cost cards have to really justify their own existence, because the risks are so high and the design space fairly restrictive.”
Q: Will future versions of Grand Arena introduce new champions?
A: Glenn “Assuming players enjoy the mode, we expect to continue adding new characters to the Arena for future runs.”
Q: Is there a character limit on card names? On mobile these long names are next to impossible to read.
A: Glenn “We haven’t really defined that, no, as it’s not a visible value in many places. I’ll bring it up.”
Q: Isn’t Cost reduction a Powerful ability that should be used Sparingly?
A: Glenn “Yes. A primary way we try to manage it is by polarizing them around when they’re played and how much Power they add to the game on their own, so that the redundancy comes at some cost to your board position.”
Q: How is the balance of 4-Costs possible when cost reduction like Zabu exists?
A: Glenn “Conditionally ‘breaking the rules’ is a core aspect of CCGs, and doing that with cost reduction or ramp is a pretty ancient tradition at this point. It doesn’t prevent balance, it just complicates it. The primary impact is often polarizing decks–they’re strongest when they hit their curve and weaker when they miss relative to decks that don’t need as much sequencing.”
Q: Do Skills always have to be banished after playing, or could that change?
A: Glenn “The banish is tied to the skill card type. It’s plausible we could extend it to allow for something like an End of Turn trigger instead of an On Reveal, but it’s a fairly small shift so I’d have to be convinced by some designs that they’d truly be better off not resolving on reveal.”
Q: How do you balance the addition of new features versus updating old ones?
A: Glenn “Shortly after Deadpool’s Diner, we’ve aimed to try and ‘run fast’ and learn as much as we could as quickly as we could, working towards figuring out the ideal future state for a variety of elements of SNAP. That has led to less “v2″ iterations for features as we pushed on new ones, but we will be updating more and more of those as we solidify our live service.”
Q: Does using the report a bug button in settings actually do anything?
A: Griffin “Bug reports absolutely help! They send us a ping which greatly helps us investigate the issue. Fixing those issues once identified can take varying amounts of time and have to be prioritized against other pressing issues too.”
Q: Why is the daily webshop credit amount still 200? I thought it was supposed to drop to 100 this season?
A: Griffin “Due to the Web Shop issues at the weekly reset we had to pause some planned changes like the Daily Claim. It’ll be lowered to its planned amount of 100 Credits in the near future.”
Q: If you want people to buy the super premium pass, why be so conservative with the value?
A: Glenn “The Season Pass is purposefully the best deal in the game by far, a fairly common practice in games. We’ve aimed to make playing through a whole season fun, and the SP to make it more fun and more rewarding. It’s not implemented as a benchmark against which we judge all other paid rewards, it has a higher purpose.
The SPSP is intended to feel optional but appealing. Relative to other bundles, it’s competitive with them now, while before players were telling us that it wasn’t through their feedback (and purchases).”
Q: How do you decide names for cards to go with a character?
A: Glenn “We talk amongst ourselves and with Marvel. Sometimes we’ll consider whether there are aspects of their identity we’d like to reserve for a future card.”
Long Answers
Q: Why add a new card to super premium? Why not make that slot a Fantasticar variant so players could use their hard earned tokens on the card they wanted?
A: Glenn “Fantasticar will be available via tokens and Snap Packs like other Season Pass and LTGM cards. If you only want to spend tokens on cards, that’s always going to be an option, but not every release is immediately available for tokens—they weren’t all immediately available in Spotlight Caches, either.
We had a variant in this slot for quite a while, but few players seemed interested in it. Adding a card instead was a fairly popular idea for improving the offer among players we gathered feedback from, so we decided to try it. The Season Pass is the best bang for your buck at $10, and now the SPSP may be vying for second-best at $20.
As an advocate for improving the value that spend can provide, the negativity of the response here admittedly surprised me. Given our need to offer rewards beyond cosmetics and currency for spend, we’d be happy to hear ideas from players about what best fits that bill for them. Anyone is welcome to post those to the discussion/suggestion channel”
Q: How was Glenn surprised about player sentiment after such negative feedback around HV:O? Part of listening to the community should be communicating what actions are being taken to improve things. Is SD planning to increase communications to address player feedback?
A: Glenn “I certainly understand that the context, especially Kid Omega, affects the conversation. But it would be pretty dismissive of me to just blame Kid Omega for Fantasticar’s negative feedback, and it would also deprive me of an opportunity to engage with the community on Fantasticar and perhaps learn something new or generate another idea.
A lot of receiving feedback on our end is taking it, discussing it, and getting to work. Games are an iterative industry, and reliant on data and analysis. I personally just started diving into HV:OD’s data today, for example.
We might not know for sure next week or even next month what we’ve learned to do better–there’s tons of feedback, a lot of variation, and plenty of data to sift through. We could announce our next steps–but game design is iterative, and those steps could quickly be invalidated by new evolutions or directions.
I understand and respect wanting to see firm, decisive responses, but it’s just not always a practical affordance. Personally, I’d rather make no promise than one I don’t know I can keep–that’s just how I was raised, not an SD value or anything. But I’m happy to engage in good faith and as openly as I can.
And I am also trying to be more mindful of identifying opportunities to recognize where community feedback has led to live changes.”
Q: Why does it seem like the new features you add to the game aren’t about player feedback?
A: Glenn “On the contrary, one of the key factors we weigh in determining which features to implement in what order is the literal percentage of players we believe the feature can positively impact. There are many players, and each one of them would enjoy many possible features. But we have a finite amount of development resources to focus on each feature, in addition to ongoing live service.
How a feature could impact the business is also a weight, of course—but these exist at a similar level. If a hypothetical feature doesn’t contribute to both interests, it’s more likely to be deprioritized in favor of one that does—but that’s not a certainty. That’s where things like ‘ease to complete’ do start to come in as well.
We also don’t have some checklist of features to implement—we’ve been brainstorming and building pretty much everything since Conquest from scratch. We’re very much conceiving new features based on players’ live experience.”
Q: Why aren’t you sharing details about card acquisition in the new game mode?
A: Griffin “We’ve committed to communicating more ahead of time and we’re still committed to that. The event is still 3 weeks away.
As we stated, we’ll continue to iterate when it comes to how LTGMs play and also how we structure their rewards. I’ve been chatting a lot with the team about Grand Arena and I very much look forward to letting you all know more about Grand Arena as we get closer to its launch on July 24.
As I know concerns are at a high right now in regards to reward costs I’ll share this:
– Getting one of the two new cards will take a free-to-play player around 12* games per day, at a 50% win rate.
– Getting both new cards will take a free-to-play player around 31* games/day at 50% win rate.
**these numbers MAY change change slightly before launch*”
Q: How do you decide the order of card releases in a season, and which one is the season pass card?
A: Glenn “We usually pick the character and then work on the designs, though sometimes we make some swaps. For example, Dormammu was the Season Pass for last season at first, but traded places with Merlin eventually.
We select the card order based on a variety of factors, and those are unique each season. For example, starting with HERBIE gave players more time to learn all of his protocols ahead of Grand Arena.
Yes, we always figure out the season theme before starting design work. It might get tweaked, but that’s rare.”
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: Will imbalance patches like the Power Couples or the Avengers vs X-Men ever come back in a future season?
A: Glenn “We have some similar things in the works I am hoping to debut in 2025, but we aren’t planning to do exactly imbalance patches again. I am personally highly invested in finding the best way to showcase the kind of fun those events could provide, but they’re not especially practical to run the way we did before.”
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!
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