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 Shang-Chi, Master of the Rings 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 Shang 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: Why don’t 0-Cost cards count as even cost with Dragon of the Moon?
A: Griffin “Zero cost cards SHOULD be considered even cost and be affected by Dragon of the Moon. I’ve reported this issue to the team to further investigate.”
Q: Why doesn’t Mjolnir also buff Jane Foster? Her name says “the mighy Thor” on the card and she’s holding Mjolnir.
A: Glenn “It would basically make Jane a Thor-only card, because we’d have to deduct enough Power from her to compensate for how consistently she can retrieve Mjolnir when it’s available to her. It’s fair to say that she’s already too weak in most other capacities though. So while I’ve been reluctant to make the change in the past, with a larger card pool and more variation her role may need to narrow and that’s one way we could do that.”
Q: Is the team intending to revisit the interaction with Shadow King and Luke Cage, or are you happy with how it works?
A: Glenn “We’re happy with how this currently works. Removing all Power modifiers and explicitly reducing the Power of a card are usefully distinct.”
Q: If Luke Cage won’t get changed, could his text be modified to “your cards ignore negative power” to reduce confusion?
A: Glenn “It would add vocabulary words, make the game less accessible/more verbose, and probably not meaningfully reduce the actual quantity of confusion–maybe by like 50%, optimistically? But the costs of the text change, while small, you basically pay forever, on all players, and on all similar cards. It’s just not a great trade either way, so given that I’ll take less words on the cards.”
Q: If Prodigy copies a card that has already used its activation, it can use the activation again. Is this intended behavior, or is it a bug?
A: Glenn “Intended. You can only activate a card once, but Prodigy has not yet been activated.”
Q: I was playing against a C3 deck and Hospice was one of the locations. They played Valkyrie into hospice and my cards weren’t “set” to 3 per se, but had their power reduced by double the amount it would’ve taken to get to 3. For instance, Giganto lost 26 power and went to negative 10, instead of being set to 3. Is this intentional? Or a bug?
A: Glenn “This is an oddity of Valkyrie’s specific function when combined with Hospice. It’s not a bug per se, in that we don’t currently have a way to apply stat modifiers that don’t use math to achieve their goal, but I agree it’s undesirable and on our list of areas to improve.”
Q: With a card like Lin Lie, how do you determine the Cost of the token it creates?
A: Glenn “We generally default to matching the Cost of the card that creates it, unless it’s being created in-hand or deck and we want to use that dial for balance.”
Q: Since spells were introduced, a lot of different interactions seem buggy or unintuitive. With some attached examples, are these bugs or intended behaviors?
-Cosmo ability to negate a skill, but Alioth not (I know it says characters in the Allioth text)
-Shanna summoning 1 cost spell (she does not specify characters)
-A specific interaction with Nico Minoru:
2 cases that have the same foundation, location A has a Cosmo from a previous turn, and a skill being thrown into the cosmo location just for the (2 cards played) Shou Lau condition/ hand size consideration.
1.Location A has Cosmo and Agony from a previous turn, in the current turn Nico is played with the transform into a demon effect in location B plus a random Merlin spell is played in Location A > Nico tries to transform the spell that didn’t work because of Cosmo, Agony then tries to merge with the skill and gets DELETED from existence, not showing in the graveyard or the banished pile.
2.Location A has Cosmo from a previous turn. In the current turn Nico is again played in location B with transform into a demon + a random merlin spell played in location A. Skill banishes with no effect as expected. Next turn Shou Lau is played in Location B, and fails to buff Nico even though it was the last Character played.
A: Glenn “We decided to approach this fairly conservatively, and start by only changing the things we knew needed to change, and addressing the rest as they come up. For example, Polymorphing wasn’t clearly one way or the other until we had skills that made it happen, so we decided to let it play out.
Many of the cards you list above simply do what they say–that’s not inconsistent, that’s just different. Arana moves things to the right, Iron Fist moves them to the left.
1. The Agony interaction is a result of Nico succeeding in changing the banished Skill to a Demon, and Agony now sees that the Skill is a character and can be merged with. That’s a bug, we should fix it.
2. As-is, Nico doesn’t get the buff from Shou because the banished Skill-Demon is the last character played. Fixing the bug above will also fix this.”
Q: man-spider gets big but he’s never had a reign of terror. Has he ever gotten close to problematic or has the tech vulnerability/draw dependency always kept him well within healthy metrics?
A: Glenn “He had some pretty high highs shortly after release, but calmed down as people became familiar with the deck.”
Q: Is Spider-Ham supposed to turn the card he hits into a pig? It seems like it only chances the text now.
A: Griffin “Spider-Ham SHOULD be changing the art to a Pig on all cards. You are correct, there is a bug where it only affects base card art right now. A fix is scheduled for a future build.”
Q: Why does Dragon Lord have so much more Power than Jubilee when their abilities are very similar?
A: Glenn “* 1 Energy is worth about ~3 Power when going from 4 to 5 Cost, so 5-Cost Jubilee would probably be around 5/4.
* Jubilee “draws” a card from your deck while Dragon Lord uses a card you already drew–that’s a difference that’s worth some Power, since it’s extra material.
* Dragon Lord’s advantage is that he lets you have some extra information and control on what gets put into play.”
Q: Did you intend to let Iron Man be a “counter” to Fin Fang Foom since he is a big Iron Man villian?
A: Glenn “I didn’t lead the season, but likely accidental. It’s the sort of thing we’d think was neat to notice, but not an originating point for the design.”
Q: Why does Stormbreaker have more power than Mjolnir? Is Mjolnir not more powerful than a rock?
A: Glenn “Mjolnir’s text indeed makes it quite a bit more powerful than a Rock.
We gave Stormbreaker more strength because the additional cost of Beta Ray Bill and the extra chance to draw it are both pretty significant downsides. I think we also released Beta Ray Bill at 4/5, so it pumped less.”
Q: If your opponent plays multiple cards that have more Power than your Avatar Drax in other lanes, how will Drax, Avatar of Life choose which card with greater Power to move to? (assuming he’d win the lane by moving there)
A: Brady “In the event this happens where Drax, Avatar of Life is forced to choose between multiple lanes, he will pick the location randomly.
#staysnappin “
Q: Can you detail which Guardians Major Victory can generate?
A: Griffin “From the blog:
‘Eligible Guardians: Star-Lord, Rocket Raccoon, Groot, Drax, Gamora, Mantis.'”
Q: So Magus wont use on-reveal, but what about Activate? If Magus copied, let’s say Kid Omega, will it be able to use Kid Omega ability next turn?
A: Glenn “Nope! Because he has already activated.”
Other Questions
Q: Is there a reason for not letting collection complete players buy the series packs from HV for the tokens? We can still use the tokens for future cards.
A: Griffin “The intention of the packs is to allow players use LTGM currency to catch-up their collections. They’re not intended as a way to grab Tokens. Limiting the latter lets us price the Snap Packs differently.”
Q: Why is there such a difference in content between the Chinese servers and global servers?
A: Griffin “The Chinese version of Marvel Snap is run by a different publisher and is a completely separate version of the game. It’s not simply just “separate servers”.
Not only do they have different features but they also have a different economy that is custom tailored to their specific audience.
We’re in communication with the team over there on a regular basis and always evaluating what could or couldn’t work for the global version of the game.”
Q: One design space that hasn’t been touched yet (unlike Hearthstone) is cards that benifit from deckbuilding restrictions. Is this something Snap could utilize?
A: Glenn “That design space was shallow for Hearthstone, a game with much more complex elements than ours. There might be a few cards worth making for us, but given how homogenizing those kinds of cards tend to be I’m not in a rush to find them.”
Q: Players have brought up issues that it’s harder to climb to infinite every season than it used to be. Do loss bots not exist anymore, or have you reduced the amount of bots injecting cubes into the ecosystem?
A: Glenn “The ‘loss’ bots you’re talking about do still exist, and were not reduced when we introduced the new bot. Our data team is always massaging their algorithm relative to the audience, but there was no sweeping change to these bots’ presence. (or their intelligence)
What we *did* do was replace our much-hated ‘Daredevil’ bot with our new bot, which plays much more human-like but doesn’t cheat (which was the only reason Daredevil bot could win at all). These bots are a better experience than Daredevil was on almost every feasible axis–they play normal decks, they snap more, they lose more, and they don’t have any knowledge of your plays so they’re much more fun to end games against.
We also haven’t injected more bots. In fact, we recently did make a change increasing wait times for players above some MMR thresholds, because their lower player population pre-Infinite was triggering more fallback bots and duplicate player pairings than we wanted. However, wait times can ebb and flow by hour and region, so there can be periods where players are more likely to encounter fallback bot matchups.
I’m not personally sure why there is so much new tension around the climb–caveat it is also not my area. As I’ve stated in the past, we’re not seeing any surprises in the data for benchmarks like the percentage of players reaching it each season. When I look at bot numbers then and bot numbers now, I haven’t see anything that makes me concerned about our new bots’ impact on the climb–they’re losing more. It wouldn’t surprise me if the increased presence of game modes, specifics of the metagame, players leveling up in skill, perceived deck quality, or even just the deeper discussion of our bot implementation have added to anxiety around the Infinite climb for many players.
That’s not to say what players are describing isn’t a very real feeling. But the discussion on it thus far hasn’t reflected the outcomes we’re seeing, and we’ve been looking much more closely given the feedback volume.”
Q: Are there any plans for a booster exchange system to make used of thousands of unneeded boosters?
A: Griffin “No plans for that at this time but ideas like these have been shared and discussed within the team.”
Q: Why isn’t Wonder Man the theme for next season since she show is releasing now?
A: Glenn “Our seasons are planned fairly far in advance, and by the time Wonder Man had landed firmly in its release date we didn’t really have a home for him or the runway to make one.”
Q: A lot of CCG/TCG have cards that add to/change the top card of your deck. With many SNAP cards caring about this (Surge, Jubilee, Iron Lad, Chavez to name a few), do you think we’ll ever get a card that creates a token, copy, etc on top of your deck?
A: Glenn “I’m sure we’ll do something in this space eventually, but probably not a lot. It’s mostly easier to just reduce rate and put the card in the player’s hand where they can use it immediately.
It’s pretty unlikely we’ll significantly dive into effects like Scry from Magic, since our decks are already so small and we want variety in games, not to mention the additional UI/UX burden where the game isn’t designed to have one.”
Q: Does Snap often have a deck that “secretly” is the best in the game, but rarely sees play?
A: Glenn “Pretty rarely, usually only for a week or two at most. Eventually everything usually makes it mainstream. I tend to think content creators do a good job of using data collection to surface that sort of thing.”
Q: The last season has had fewer new cards than in recent months. Is this the new normal?
A: Griffin “We’ll continue to try new things, including the number of seasonal cards. We definitely heard the feedback that some seasons simply had too many last year.
The total amount of cards does impact returning players and their experience is a part of the equation but it’s not a primary driver for the variation.”
Q: Is it intended that some cards like the new Shang show the opponent the card at match start, but other cards don’t? Is it a balance design?
A: Glenn “Some of the older animations just weren’t built to be easily displayed to the opponent, and our workflows for the new ones have been. We’ll catch them all up eventually, they’re in the backlog.”
Q: What ever happened to a new roadmap?
A: Griffin “I’m in the process of writing it right now. It takes a lot of back and forth conversations but progress is being made.”
Q: What’s the purpose of Sanctum Showdown’s ranking system? It doesn’t seem to do anything besides pop a visual now.
A: Griffin “We kept it just for Sanctum flavor. It doesn’t have any functional purpose anymore, as you point out.”
Q: The update a few days ago mentioned that level 1495 in Sanctum (on the free pass) rewards a mystery variant; however, the in-game reward currently shows 2 scrolls. I just wanted to double-check whether this will be changed in an upcoming OTA?
A: Griffin “Thanks for letting us know! This wasn’t an intentional change. The team is investigating solutions.”
Q: Are balance decisions explicitly are delayed until a relatively consistent period of time has passed, such that you can filter out the inherently unstable early data behind card releases?
A: Glenn “yes, we generally like to have at least 2 full weeks of data before we take a balance action, to ensure we get a large enough sample size once the metagame has had some time to adjust. Of course, we can and have made exceptions.”
Q: What card had the shortest time between any two iterations (balancing up or down) and what card had the most (of cards that still have actually been touched)?
A: Glenn “No idea, those aren’t things we track. I could check the commit for every card in the codebase, cross-reference the dates to find the smallest gap and also count entries for each one, but… I am not going to do that. So I’ll guess!
On the smallest gap, I think Enchantress? I recall us once buffing her to try and weaken Darkhawk in 2023, but it wound up just becoming the best card in Darkhawk mirrors instead so we rewound it quickly.
Thanos is probably a slam dunk for the most changes. In addition to tiny balance changes almost since the game came out and often touching more than one Stone, we also overhauled his kit which was several changes.”
Q: Have there been card designs that have been scrapped due to technical issues?
A: Glenn “Oh, definitely… tough to remember them, though. The most recent update to dynamic counting in card text unlocked plenty of ideas we’d often killed for being bad UI, and we’ve also overhauled pieces of the Energy system over the years to create more design space. We’ve even killed entire card types! But maybe they’ll come back…”
Q: It seems like having 2 limited time modes every season is making it harder to play alongside Conquest and ladder climbing. Is your data showing less players are engaging with so much content every month?
A: Glenn “If a second LTGM was contributing to decreased engagement, we wouldn’t be running them–the data strongly favors them. While they are popular, as I’ve stated elsewhere, we’re also looking at ways to create more synergy and symbiosis across all game modes.”
Q: Speaking of technical limitations, is it currently possible to have cards that permanently modify other card costs? Like if Cuckoo makes her generated card a real 3-Cost that’ll be buffed by Surfer?
A: Glenn “Not really, no–Cost modifiers are universally wiped while in play. We could change that, but I don’t really want to. It’s a solid rule that reduces confusion around tracking which modifiers exist where.”
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: Why does Negasonic’s text state “Once per game” when copies of her can also set off the ability after it’s been used?
A: When a card is copied, it becomes a new card. So the copies haven’t had their “once” yet since they weren’t in play yet.
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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