Developer Update for the Week of April 26, 2025: Post OTA Edition (25+ Questions)!

Welcome back to this week’s Developer Update! Here’s a round up of this week’s Marvel Snap news:

• This week’s edition comes after the launch of the new Series 5 card Strange Supreme! If you don’t know if Strange Supreme is worth Spotlight Caches, make sure to check out our Bonus Challenge guide for a post-release review of the card and new decklists!
• The latest OTA Balance Updates: If you haven’t seen what was changed with the balance update, be sure to check out the official patch notes and our analysis!
• Snap Packs are coming very soon, keep an eye out for more details in the coming days.
• Galactus Free Draw has been updated with lower Credits and different Card Borders.
• A new Marvel Snap Welcome Back Bundle will be available at this year’s PAX East.

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!

Card Specific Questions

Q: Why didn’t you make Infinity Ultron more like Thanos and shuffle stones into the deck?
A: Glenn “We wanted them to have meaningfully different gameplay to separate their creative overlap. This is similar to Symbiote Spider-Man and Spider-Man, Agent Venom and Venom, Sam Wilson and Falcon/Cap, etc. When the creative is aligned tightly, it’s important to carve out mechanically novel space.”

Q: Why was Dum Dum Dugan replaced with Toxie Doxie in High Voltage?
A: Griffin “It was always supposed to be Toxie Doxie. Definitely an error in communication on our end. We’re still adjusting to our new publishing procedures. This is a great example of the bumps we’ll inevitably hit as we move forward. Pardon our dust.”

Q: Why wasn’t Infinity Ultron’s stones adjusted with the OTA?
A: Glenn “We’re open to considering more Stone changes, but changes to the stones are considerably more complex to accurately target and predict with the card only out for such a short amount of time, so any changes in that vein will go through a more rigorous process internally.”

Q: When will we see more cards added to High Evolutionary’s kit?
A: Glenn “While we expect to release many more cards that interact with High Evo’s ‘kit,’ we don’t expect to make many  more cards for him to evolve. We’ll likely make a vanilla 7-Cost, and that’s probably it.”

Q: Why did you decide to make cards buffed by Toxie Doxie to be unplayable next turn?
A: Glenn “I’m fairly confident she’d be super-strong without some kind of a downside, but the downside is an also an important creative element for the character. If she is too weak, we’ll aim to balance in a way that maintains her novelty and story.”

Q: Why was Copycat’s vfx removed?
A: Addison “Copycat’s VFX were causing issues in the next major client release of the game. The disable was targeting that release (which comes out next week), but was inadvertently picked up as part of a handful of changes we wanted to include in the server patch and OTA that went out today for the currently live client. We’ll get her VFX restored as soon as we’re able.”

Q: If Toxie Doxie can no longer target Skills, why does her text still target “cards”?
A: Griffin “It will be changed in a future update! We just didn’t quite get it squeezed in to this one.”

Q: Why did I get a notification that Dum Dum Dugan is avalible in the Token Shop? Was this a mistake and it was supposed to say Toxie Doxie?
A: Griffin “Yep! Self-publishing growing pains. Pardon our dust.”

Other Questions

Q: Some album give keys as progression reward. Will unclaimed keys be converted to 3k tokens when packs come out?
A: Griffin “Yes.”

Q: Will we get more info on the future of Spotlight variants before the big update?
A: Griffin “Still no definitive plans for them. We won’t have any update on that by the time Snap Packs launches.”

Q: Why don’t you make any more Big Bad cards with unique mechanics?
A: Glenn “We no longer limit cards’ Series by declaring them ‘big bads.’ But even when we did, there wasn’t any explicit mechanical strength associated with that term.”

Q: Is there a new balance team, specifically around OTA changes?
A: Glenn “All of our design team still actively participates in the live balance component of the game, but we did add a designer to the team (Michael Majors) who is the new balance lead. I’m still designing just as much, but did make room for some other focuses of my own.”

Q: There are cost incentive cards (Zabu, Surfer, Ka-Zar, Surtur, or Skaar) for every Cost except 2 and 5 Cost cards. Is there a reason for that?
A: Glenn “5s are a bit challenging, because ‘capstone’ incentives make a lot more sense for 6s, and you typically only play one or two 5-Cost cards at all, which means that scaling rewards for them don’t line up as well.

Rather than something like Zabu or Surfer, where one enabler benefits multiple N-Cost cards, I’d expect such a theme for 5s to revolve around cards that get better if you have a 5-Cost card. Very simple example: 3/5 – You can move this if you have a 5-Cost card in play.

2-Costs would be pretty easy, we just haven’t done it.”

Q: Did the team ever consider keeping both systems and making a roll for Spotlight 3000 tokens?
A: Glenn “No. As we’ve detailed, we wanted to provide a more flexible system, and Spotlights didn’t let players target cards well enough.”

Q: With the upcoming patch and OTA schedule published, why is there is a one month gap between April 29th patch and May 29th OTA?
A: Griffin “We’ll be at a company offsite during the normal OTA week of the 15th. As always, we’ll be keeping an eye on things if a card get too ornery and needs something done.”

Q: Why did twitch drops start so late into High Voltage? I finished all of the rewards without even needing the rewards.
A: Griffin “We talked about it but we thought it was worth the experiment.”

Q: Has the team considered adding card rotations?
A: Glenn “We have a bit. The biggest downside is that people simply want to be able to play their cards, for a wide range of reasons, and a system that’s widely appealing needs more than that.”

Q: Why don’t Series 4 cards release with any variants?
A: Griffin “We know that some cards over the past year have released with limited or no Variants. We have plans to release Variants for those Series 4 cards later in the year.

Moving forward, our goal is to have ALL new cards release with multiple Variants available in their launch season or in the couple of months following.”

Q: Why did you nerf the Galactus Spin rewards?
A: Glenn “The initial increase to the rewards and availability of the ‘Galactus Spin’ was introduced during the US downtime ‘blip’ event in January.

After three months, we’ve reduced those back to a more sustainable level. We’re also preparing for a brand new Webshop to launch in the coming months as we continue our self-publishing journey.”

Q: Is there any part of the Marvel universe that the team has no interest in making cards with?
A: Glenn “Our focus is on identifying characters and themes we’re confident we can make into fun seasons. So we review the Marvel canon looking for what we believe players will be excited to see. We don’t explicitly cordon anything off, we just look for good opportunities.”

Q: With the huge popularity of Strange Supreme, did you do something differently when designing this card over the last few rough card releases? Can you re-create that strong design to upcoming card releases?
A: Glenn “It’s tempting to assume we found some bottled magic when we have a standout card, but the truth is more mundane. We go through roughly an identical process with every card. In fact, perfecting that process is a huge aspect of leading a design organization.

The only thing that really changes from card to card are the goals. We build those goals based on a variety of things–the character’s creative, the metagame, holes in our design space, future content we’d like to explore, the spread of strength within archetypes and the season, etc.”

Q: How do you identify holes in design space?
A: Glenn “We have documentation for card concepts, mechanical space, new keywords, game modes, all sorts of things like that. As we add things to these documents, we identify what might be the ‘right time’ to implement them, or (more often) the right *times*. For example, we had several potential creatives and mechanical executions for what would become skills, but Agamotto was a uniquely good opportunity to debut them.”

Q: Is there any reason why there is no SHIELD character that generates a 3-Cost card?
A: Glenn “Nope, just hasn’t come up yet”

Q: If a player still haven’t opened their outage compensation, what will happen to the rewards if they claim it after the new patch?
A: Griffin “It SHOULD convert to 6000 Tokens. If it causes anything weird, please report it to Customer Support and we can sort it.”

Q: With a lack of game modes, slow quality of life improvements, and persistent bugs, has Snap become the secondary project for Second Dinner over new games?
A: Addison “Not at all. The Snap team has grown quite a bit over the last year actually!

You mention a lack of game modes and mechanics but we’ve released Deadpool’s Diner, High Voltage, and Sanctum Showdown within that time as well as Activate and Spell card types (among all sorts of other interesting and weird new cards that fell under the original buckets but introduced weird behaviors, interactions, and mechanics).

In addition to the upcoming release of Snap Packs we’ve also worked on all sorts of quality of life improvements and new features just over the last year. From bigger initiatives like Card Customization, Alliances, and Mastery to smaller things like Undo End Turn, the Graveyard, Emotes, Reactions, Collectible Borders and Albums. Heck, even small QoL things like generated cards inheriting cosmetics from the original card have been worked on in recent months (shoutout to all my fellow Arishem players out there)!

That’s not to mention all of the weird under-the-hood stuff that we’ve done, in the last few months especially, to try to improve performance and reduce loading times (admittedly not without their hurdles).

We have a lot more stuff in the oven that you’ll get to see over the next several major client releases and our eyes are towards the future for many more releases to come!”

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: Have you made bots in ranked less frequent, or be removed entirely from high ranks like 90+?
A: Glenn “We haven’t removed bots from the 90s.

Bot encounter rates vary by players implicitly, because bot encounters are a tool to control queue times that vary with players’ matchmaking pools. Those pools are in turn a function of Collection Level, MMR, and Rank, as we seek fair matches between players.”

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!