Table of Contents
Welcome back to this week’s Developer Update! This week’s edition comes after the launch of the new Series 5 card Chamber, a new season, and the latest OTA! If you haven’t seen what was changed with the balance update, be sure to check out the official patch notes!
If you don’t know if Chamber is worth Snap Packs or tokens, 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, and Questions From You!
See all individual questions and answers updated in real time!
Card Specific Questions
Q: With all of the new Skills you can add to decks, or with Merlin, are you satisfied with Agamotto and his shuffled Skills?
A: Glenn “Agamotto’s had ups and downs, but overall I’m fairly happy with him. He’s also a good example of a card that’s easy to grow over time with synergistic releases.”
Q: After Shang-Chi’s nerf, why didn’t you prepare a Sauron nerf? Now that deck is everywhere, especially in Sanctum Showdown.
A: Glenn “We make and discuss balance decisions in a given context: moments in time. We’re only concerned about making the best decisions for the balance of the game in the present and communicating our case for them.
Sometimes we’re right but something changes later, sometimes we’re wrong and figure out we should fix something else, we’re just humans doing a job. We’re not perfect, but I’m much happier to make these decisions based on new data and learnings, not old articles or metagames that aren’t as relevant to the issues of the day.
As for Sauron specifically, the deck wasn’t performing especially well prior to our last OTA, though it was good. But it’s improved recently, and Sanctum is also increasing its in-game popularity.”
Q: Skills have always acted consistently as “spells”, but gear seems to be all over the place. Cerebro is a character, Hulk Buster is a character that is “equipped” on another character but Flight harness is a skill (It should be more like Hulk Buster in my mind). Why this inconsistency?
A: Glenn “The early distribution of creative concepts didn’t take into account some directions we might’ve wanted to go into the future. No big deal, very common in CCGs. As a digital game, perhaps one day we’ll sort that out.
We did debate whether Prowler’s should be more action-oriented, because we knew we wanted them to be skills—as ‘normal’ cards, they’d both be repetitive with Kate Bishop and also gunk up movement for decks we liked him in. But naming them after actions captured less of the fantasy: ‘Kinetic Slam’ or whatever might be fine for the Gauntlets, but we were less excited about ‘Take Flight’ or ‘Mine Trap’ and decided to just use the item names.”
Q: Is it intended that Widow’s Bite can block Temporal Manipulation from drawing Agamotto?
A: Glenn “When you add a card from your deck to your hand, that’s a draw. Temporal Manipulation can add from many zones, hence the words it uses, but if Agamotto is in your deck then it counts as a draw. It wouldn’t stop Beast or Scorn, for example, because they come from zones other than the deck.”
Q: Is it intended that if Heimdall moves Ezekiel Sims to his location, Ezekiel will move again as if Heimdall was played at his beginning location?
A: Glenn “This is how these abilities are currently implemented in our game, which is that they trigger when a card resolves. So Heimdall finishes resolving, at which point every card looking for a recently played card triggers, such as Ezekiel Sims. Zeke sees that Heimdall was played middle and that Zeke himself is at middle, and triggers. Ezekiel doesn’t ‘remember’ where he was when Heimdall revealed, because there was nothing triggering Ezekiel’s ability at the time.”
Q: The shield is not buffing the captain america champion. Is this on purpose or a bug?
A: Glenn “That’s not working as intended. The team is investigating a fix.”
Q: With the Grand Arena Carnage deck, you can play Carnage’s skill at a full location, it will resolve and then Carnage will jump there. If you however play GA Captain America”s skill at a full location, it will just say “location full” and whizz out. Is this intended?
A: Glenn “Maximum Carnage has unique words relative to other skills specifying that it banishes itself before its action. By default, skills banish after they resolve. This interaction is as-intended with the current game rules and card text.”
Q: Why not add a revert to Storm’s nerf alongside War Machine’s nerf?
A: Glenn “As a general rule, and given our cadence for live balance, there’s fairly little upside to softening nerfs by buffing other cards. When you add more changes, you’re increasing the variables by definition–for example, you could miscalculate and fail to nerf a deck enough, or fail to rebuff the other card enough and need to change it again anyway, etc.
While I think these are fairly small risks in this particular case, it’s not always the case so our default is patience. The cost of getting better data is very low–maybe a few weeks of a card at the ‘wrong’ rate before an OTA corrects it. But a lot of the time it turns out the new ‘lower point’ is perfectly healthy, so we let it sit for a bit rather than upset the status quo and risk recreating an old problem.
The word ‘revert’ is popular, and I get it–it’s common for most games to balance at low frequency and for cards to have a kind of ‘base’ players learn. But Snap isn’t like that–we’re building the game for the moment it’s in now, and we balance acocrdingly.
For example, if we were going to change Storm, we wouldn’t add any additional weight to going back to 3/2 just because ‘that’s what it was’–we’d evaluate every stat option the same and pick the best one based on our goals for the metagame with that OTA.”
Q: Wade Wilson’s text says “When Destroyed”. Bucky’s text says “When this is destroyed”. Is there a desire to update Bucky to match Wade’s style instead?
A: Glenn “Yes, we intended to ship this global update concurrently but wound up sliding some dates around on the design side and missing the train.”
Q: Why did you decide to buff Spider Noir so quickly?
A: Glenn “The issue we saw with the card was that the quest was too hard for players to succeed in achieving it often enough to enjoy the card, not to mention too weak. Fixing both of those by improving the reward isn’t really feasible—we’d have to polarize the card to an even more extreme reward to ‘average out’ the right level of satisfaction, and it was already pretty high.
The reward didn’t need to be more desirable—everyone seemed pretty hype to try for it.”
Q: Are there any plans to give Thanos, or his stones, an indicator on how many more stones are left to be played? Or how many are left inside the player’s deck?
A: Glenn “I think that addition would make sense for Power Stone, at least. Maybe Mind Stone too.”
Other Questions
Q: Do you consider reverting nerfed cards back to their previous state once new counter cards are released?
A: Glenn “We don’t really think about changing cards in terms of reverting them. We think about which changes would accomplish our goals, regardless of how the card used to look. Sometimes that’s back the way it was, sometimes it’s not.”
Q: A while back Arishem was changed because of player perception and frustration of playing against it. How do you make decisions in these cases?
A: Glenn “I think you’re mixing up our message a little bit. In the Arishem case, while the winrate and cuberate weren’t especially high, the playrate was. Popularity is very much a ‘hard number’ we look at, because it efficiently describes an important experience of many players: how often they see the same decks.
Literal strength balance is only effective when it actually translates into metagame balance. If a game is balanced, but the players behave as though it’s not, then no one will feel like it’s balanced at all. Conversely, if a deck is too good but players haven’t really identified it yet, we’ll usually give it time to be discovered.
We don’t make ~any balance changes based solely on our perception of other humans’ perception. That would be inherently biased and unreliable, given how much data we have. But we do have ways of evaluating the audience’s experience so we can manage towards a healthier one, when necessary.”
Q: With Iron Man getting Hulk Buster and Iron Patriot as unique cards, will more of his suits become cards?
A: Glenn “I expect you’ll see some more Iron Man suits.”
Q: Why was TVA back in Sanctum Showdown?
A: Glenn “We’re looking into why this issue has recurred, it was not expected after our last fix.”
Q: Why have cards started to load as black images first, then loading into their image?
A: Glenn “The game recently shifted to a new Unity version, which does involve redownloading some assets that were previously downloaded for compatibility reasons.”
Q: Why does Stark Industries say “Split +8 Power among ALL cards here”, but sometimes only one player could get all 8 Power and the other gets none?
A: Glenn “We capitalize ‘all/any’ as a convention when referring to either player’s cards, as most locations use ‘you’ to refer to both players, but separate sides, such as Vormir: ‘The next card you play here is destroyed.’ Simply leaving off ‘you’ in the text, such as ‘Split 8+ Power among cards here’, didn’t prove to be clear enough–people assumed 8 on each side. So when we break convention, we generally add a word to help.
That said, I agree these words landed less clear than we’d like, and we may update the text to reflect the effect. We expected the implicit nature of it being impossible to divide 8 evenly by several potential card counts would be enough that players wouldn’t expect equity in the split, but we were wrong.
We wouldn’t update the effect in the manner you suggested, because that introduces a fairly substantial memory burden to the gameplay, plus some cyclical counting. Just some added insight into how we weight complexity. Plus, the purpose of the location is to add some Power-based variance, like a simpler X-Mansion.”
Q: What is the design space like for generated cards, like from Prowler or Kate Bishop?
A: Glenn “It’s fairly broad space–they do lots of things well. Break up the cost of effects over multiple turns has lots of balance dials, they enable mini-quests during deckbuilding and gameplay, create variance with a high degree of agency, tell compelling stories, etc. Their downsides are mostly stuff we do in moderation, like hand cap stress, novelty, complexity, and art costs.”
Q: What is the actual mission for it the {missing entry} alliance bounty?
A: Glenn “I believe it was ‘Play End of Turn cards’ “
Q: What is the status on global matchmaking? It was announced previously as delayed after the publisher changes.
A: Glenn “It’s still something we’d like to enable, but we’re not actively working on it right now after encountering some blockages and finding higher-priority assignments for engineering.”
Q: Has the team considered a promotion for players to offer a rematch after each match?
A: Glenn “No, that sort of feature can open a variety of concerns in a game revolving around stakes, plus it’s a potential enabler for toxic behavior.”
Q: I get a ton of great information from reading the updates in these forums, but I see a lot of frustration around some topics (most recently the changes to charms not giving XP in the battle pass) that aren’t communicated in game. Where do in-app communication channels fall on your list?
A: Glenn “We try to focus our in-game communications on what a vast majority of players might want to know or need to know. It would be easy to overdo it, and a most players don’t want to be checking their inboxes or reading long posts every time they log in to play. We rely on known other options for additional information, because that way players who want more information can find it or ask for it.”
Q: From a technical standpoint, can every character with a new costume variant be treated as a new card?
A: Glenn “From a technical standpoint, card art doesn’t have much to do with what could be a new card—see Team Clash. Philosophically, we think it’s more than ‘just clothes’ that merits another card, though.”
Q: Have you considered adding “featured” cards in Snap Packs that have higher chance of pulling than the other cards?
A: Glenn “I would say we have considered something lightly similar, but not exactly that.
While I can see its appeal to players, it’s a bit of a monkey’s paw. The less random card availability is, the more specific cards should cost—that’s booster pack design in a nutshell. So systems that increase targeting for all players are a threat to card pricing in a way that new player-specific aids are not, such as the new prebuilt decks.”
Q: What updates do you have on the long-delayed Japanese webshop?
A: Glenn “We wish we had more updates to share. The Web Shop team is hard at work, at the Japan Web Shop is on the list. We’re standing by our promise to deliver missed rewards based on in-game spend as we originally stated.
As for when we can deliver those missed rewards, I’ll reach out to the team to see if we can get that figured out in the meantime.
Thanks again for your patience.”
Q: Why does the webshop bonus show white fire borders, but we got wrapping paper?
A: Brady “wrapping paper is correct. I’ll notify the team that the web shop is incorrect, thanks for bringing this up”
Q: Has the team considered reselling old bundles at cheaper prices?
A: Griffin “Selling older bundles again has been discussed, but often times a lot of the ‘value’ comes from the currencies themselves in the bundles so large discounts can be tricky that way.
We have discussed ways to improve the Collector’s Vault to ease these issues but it’s not a top level priority at the moment.
The only place that that older SP Variants have shown up thus far is in the new Snap Pack modules. We don’t have any plans to put them elsewhere but that’s not by design. They could definitely appear somewhere new in the future.”
Q: Will we ever be able to deckbuild in Grand Arena again? And if so, will old Champions be avalible again?
A: Glenn “While I can’t promise every Grand Arena run will feature deckbuilding–we’re experimenting with all prebuilts for a reason–we do expect to continue offering Grand Arena with deckbuilding even if we sometimes offer it without. The champions aren’t restricted to one or the other, so future Grand Arena runs will continue to rotate through all our champions, new and old, with their offerings.”
Q: Since this Grand Arena is Cosmic Invasion themed, will these heroes be returning? And if so, will they retain their pixel variants later too?
A: Glenn “No, we expect to reuse these champions.
We’ve debated the art side, and come down both ways. In hindsight, we wish we’d done at least one Zombie Champion for last time, but we felt (during initial development) that the art concept would be dissonant. That learning has led to us relaxing what should and shouldn’t necessarily exist in Grand Arena moving forward, so I think we’ll lean toward a more diverse set of styles in the future. Whether that continues to include pixel or not, we’ll see!”
Q: With an increasing number of new cards that are the same as an old variant (Weapon X vs Wolverine’s Weapon X variant), is this growing problem something the team plans to address?
A: Glenn “Given how dramatically different the art on cards can be, it’s already often a surer bet to rely on the logo. And we’ve seen this to be the case in general–we get very few reports of players confusing multiple variants, with Headpool Deadpool outnumbering all of the rest combined, in my experience.
For now, we’re planning to address this issue by 1) being more diligent in our future variant selection for characters/mantles we’d like to repeat, and 2) using logos with significant enough differentiation from similarly-named cards.
I’m personally pretty reluctant to pursue the more “radical” fixes we see suggested from time to time, such as “relocating” specific variants to more appropriate cards. I’d really only want to even consider that if recognizing variations was proving to be a very real problem for most players, which hasn’t been the case so far.”
Q: Will webshop Milestone variants ever be avalible for purchase?
A: Griffin “Yes, most likely, but we don’t have any plans for how and when right now.”
Q: Can you shed some light on what the different teams SD has, and how our feedback gets “passed along to the team?”
A: Glenn “Most feedback is delivered to a generalized forum, where everyone can see it and comment on it, or tag anyone whose visibility might seem especially merited (such as the design lead for a season on a card interaction). Once the details are solid, it gets captured in a ticket and assigned to the team that will directly address it.
We have a fairly typical distribution of teams: marketing, design, product, QA, creative, engineering, production, etc. Sometimes those teams have subdivisions, or sometimes there are secondary teams formed from cross-team combinations of different roles, such as the team responsible for building and shipping Grand Arena.”
Q: How do you measure which cards you should prioritize buffing?
A: Glenn “We weight the winrate, playrate, Series, and other factors like upcoming media tie-ins or seasons to find buff candidates. Weak cards that are very popular are worse buff targets than ones that are very unpopular, for example.”
Q: Would you ever update a bulk of cards all at once that are old and have fallen out of the meta to make them relevant again?
A: Glenn “We like to keep a steady rate of change; more has proven it can be disruptive to players in negative ways. We keep an eye on all of the cards and constantly identify targets that could use some love, but that doesn’t mean any card having a dry spell will necessarily receive an update. We’re balancing many factors in identifying card changes, primarily prioritizing keeping the metagame fresh and fun, not just boosting all the cards that could be buffed.”
Q: Do you think higher Series cards should be stronger than early game Series 1, 2, or 3? Why should a Series 5 late game card be the same strength as a early game Series 2?
A: Glenn “No, we don’t believe that a card’s Series should cap its Power output. As for why, why shouldn’t players with smaller collections have powerful enough cards to compete?”
Q: Do you listen to community sentiment? If so, why do you reduce the rewards in these limited time modes? Is this the direction you want to take the game?
A: Glenn “Community sentiment isn’t the only criteria upon which we build reward systems, though we consider it. Players’ actual in-game behavior certainly carries more weight, for example.
We’re iterating on game modes and their rewards to find the right mix of rewards and play expectations to develop a sustainable ecosystem—that’s the goal. We’ve been more and less generous, and our changes reflect what we’re learning so that we can better distribute rewards across the game. For example, if an LTGM gave out a bunch of [reward A], and [reward A] didn’t change the mode’s performance relative to other modes or didn’t get claimed very often, we should probably put [reward A] somewhere people actually care about it, right?
Yes, we constantly monitor our ongoing acquisition and retention rates relative to changes. I’d be surprised to hear about a mobile game that didn’t.
We reconsider our reward and monetization strategies constantly—that’s what ~all your questions are about, that’s why they change from event to event. Our goal is to find a happy spot where change is substantially reduced, so the data/feedback we’re looking for isn’t complicated—an optimal combination of time spent, games played, rewards claimed, gold used, fun had, etc.
Yes, I think Snap is fun, fair, and rewarding. Players are a diverse audience with lots of different values that lead to a difference of opinions on what matters most for those criteria, but on the whole yup. Can it improve? Also yup.
I would say we’ve been objectively pretty transparent about Marvel Snap as game developers go. Our design goal remains the same: to make Marvel Snap a world-class F2P CCG experience that lasts a decade or more and celebrates the Marvel canon. If that sounds like a game you want to play, great! We appreciate your support.”
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: When Kang gains the text of infinity ultron, he is not considered to be infinity ultron. Is this intentional?
A: The devs have previously commented on a similar interaction with Thor/Beta Ray Bill and Copycat/ Iron Lad. In short, Kang doesn’t transform into Infinity Ultron, he just copies the text and remains “Kang”. The interaction you are hoping for will actually happen with Morph! If Morph becomes Infinity Ultron, the card is transformed and is no longer Morph, so the stones will interact with the newly transformed Infinity Ultron.
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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