Table of Contents
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 your Album questions, why did the Emotes change order, why do patches have to be locked in 4 weeks in advance, 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 Blob! If you aren’t sure if Blob is worth opening a Spotlight Cache for, make sure to check out our weekly Spotlight Cache guide! Also be sure to check out our Blob guide!
Answers and questions may be slightly rephrased for more clarity and ease of reading. This weeks topics will be divided into Card Specific questions and Other questions.
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: What’s the difference in America Chavez and High Evolutionary? You said players never play Chavez on the board, but players never play High Evolutionary either.
A: KentErik “Chavez was being played as explicitly ‘1 less card in your deck’ (aka ‘not a card’). You put her in your deck so you could not use her.
High Evo, however, is used to make 7 other cards in your collection essentially New Cards, and creates a deck building element of synergizing those new cards with other cards. You’re not putting High Evo in your deck to ignore him: you’re putting him in to upgrade other cards with new mechanics.”
Q: Why did you leave off the “end of turn” text for Alioth? His ability to remove all cards behind Invisible Woman feels more like a buff than a nerf.
A: Glenn “The intention was a nerf overall. Against specifically Invisible Woman he has been buffed, in part because the turn-limited interaction previously proved quite confusing to players when she was involved.”
Q: Could we ever see Luke Cage return to his global protection (undo his lane specific change) if he was increased to a 3 or 4 Cost card?
A: Glenn “I think 3 or 4 is a reasonable Cost point for Luke Cage’s previous global protection. Moving him to one of those Costs was among our considerations, but we felt it would tip the scales for a couple of decks that were already good quite a bit.”
Q: How does the team feel about Hazmat after Luke’s nerf?
A: Glenn “Luke was changed to affect one lane because he had a huge impact on the game when played on turn 2 in a variety of matchups, and was also a strong turn 5 or 6 play situationally. Hazmat doesn’t have the same flexibility, and requires you to player her on turns 5 and 6, where Energy is most valuable and the game is on the line. So while both cards are 2-Costs, they don’t actually have the same opportunity cost, which is a very important difference.
We suspected Luke being playable in so many decks was probably worse for Hazmat than Luke being stronger in the Hazmat deck itself, and that weakening Luke would either be neutral or slightly positive for Hazmat’s numbers. The early data suggests that assumption was correct.”
Q: What do your metrics show about Elsa?
A: Glenn “The additional Power wasn’t enough compensation for limiting her to one lane, so we’ll likely improve her in the future.”
Q: If Elsa’s buff timing window as changed to match player expectations, why not make her timing window both effects?
A: Glenn “They’re different timing windows. If they both worked, she’d buff cards you just played normally twice, unless we added an exception. Either way, it would complicate how she interacted with other cards and locations, because the timing of the buff can matter there and there would be two timings. Learning when and why is way above our bar for complexity.
We also don’t have clean words to differentiate this “dual window” from the two existing ones. In fact, what we learned was the two existing ones were already too hard to tell apart!
Spider-Man was great with her, but he’s one card—and a fairly unusual card at that. We’re much more likely to make more cards like Brood over time.”
Q: Was Blob’s immovable ability made into an ongoing ability so he couldn’t be used in Sauron decks?
A: Glenn “The Sauron element wasn’t purposefully sought—we started with an Ongoing because ‘just being big’ isn’t quite novel enough. But we didn’t mind it; Taskmaster-based decks are difficult to design around generally, so slicing the ways you could use Taskmaster with Blob up a bit was helpful.”
Q: Did Blob’s existence effect Chavez’s change?
A: Glenn “Not at all, we’ve wanted to change Chavez since before Blob existed. The accompanying notes were clear on the motivations.”
Q: When I play Blob, I see unique card effects on him. Is this a bug showing new split possibilities?
A: Addison “I believe what you’re seeing is likely a bug that we’re actively investigating.
There’s an issue right now with Blob where when he pulls cards from your deck the VFX for the split variants aren’t being cleaned up appropriately and are persisting on-screen. This has a number of knock-on effects beyond it just looking funky such as those VFX preventing tapping through or interacting with the location or cards underneath as well as contributing to memory usage related crashes.
We have a fix in the works for this that I’m hoping we’ll have out and available by early next week at the latest if everything goes well.
All that being said, having like 8 particle effects on one card is kinda cool looking!”
Other Questions
Q: Is the team working on any UI or Graphics to improve card frame effects visibility?
A: Daniela “We may or may not be freshening up some split effects soon. Stay tuned! 👀”
Q: How does the team use the statistics of played win rates of cards when balancing?
A: Glenn “We basically don’t weigh played winrate at all. It’s an inherently biased statistic.”
Q: Why did you swap the default position for emotes?
A: KentErik “upon prepping for new emotes being able to appear in-game, we had to re-arrange the way emotes are laid out. I think we could have done a better job trying to respect the original placement of hte old emotes, but we view that panel as one that will morph over time.”
Q: What causes you to need to lock in a patch 4 weeks in advance?
A: Glenn “It’s a combination of factors. The ‘big’ ones are QA, localization, and app store validation, with a buffer to address emergent issues.”
Q: Are there any plans to change the debuff archetype in the future now that Luke Cage no longer protects your own cards reliably?
A: KentErik “We think the ‘afflict’ or -1 power mechanic is interesting, and there’s more design space to explore there. As for hazmat, no current plans for her as of this morning, but we’re always keeping an eye on the meta game 🙂”
Q: Why are some players getting to see new variants a day before others?
A: Addison “We had to update the release date for some of the variants that got changed for testing purposes in order to surface them back in the shop properly for players. This is because their initial release window (at least on the backend) had already passed so the store didn’t view them as “new”. That particular update just barely missed the shop refresh time yesterday which is why some folks who refreshed a bit later in the day were seeing all the variants highlighted while others who refreshed beforehand were not. Ideally those who didn’t see them yesterday saw a selection of them today.”
Q: Any update on when we will get Series Drop news?
A: KentErik “We’re hoping to have an announcement about them before the end of the year.”
Q: As the number of cards grows and the number of splits players have for cards in their collection grows, collection bloat will continue to compound. Does the team have any ideas on how to potentially make engaging with this aspect of collecting better or more interesting?
A: KentErik “Yep, we feel you on this. We have some ideas that are brewing baking cooking <insert food preparation metaphor here>, but need more time to design before we can commit and announce.”
Q: When using the autofill feature, none of my favorited variants are being selected, and I am having to manually change every card. Is this a small glitch in the autofill feature?
A: Stephen “It’s a bug. It will pull your favorites in our next update”
Q: Will players get to choose previously unlocked borders of cards in the future?
A: Stephen “Yes a feature to customize a card based off your previously unlocked splits and borders is in development!”
Q: Will we ever see a Midnight Suns / Tarot card album?
A: Stephen “We will add an album for tarot cards in the future”
Q: Has the team ever thought about changing the amount of credits or boosters it takes to level cards?
A: Stephen “Before the game launched we iterated on those numbers a ton. We feel good about where it landed keeping each upgrade feeling achievable but still enables setting goals to reach it.”
Q: Will there be “arena” background or board customisation? For example a winter forest for winter season.
A: Stephen “We want to do it eventually. It is not a high priority for us right now.”
Q: Why did the team only launch 4 albums to begin with?
A: Stephen “We started with four primarily not to make it feel overwhelming. We felt four was a good number to help folks receive some free rewards and learn how albums work. I acknowledge based off the feedback that I missed the mark on the number of albums we should have launched with. We are working on spinning up more albums than we had previously planned as a result. Many of the new ones we will add will be easier to complete as well (pixels, more dan hipp, etc).
We are also working on tech to have albums contain 6-12 variants instead of only 12 to open up album sets for variant styles will less than 12 variants.”
Q: How does the auto deck builder work? Does it have anything to do with the current meta?
A: Stephen “Our awesome data science team built an algorithm based off the current meta that will help you build a competitive deck with whatever card or cards you select to kick it off. As the meta shifts over time, deck builder will give different recommendations”
Q: When a new card launches, how does the auto deck builder know what deck to make with that card?
A: Stephen “We pre populate it for new cards when they come out based off our internal testing”
Q: With the team focusing down on low cost cards abilities to affect 1 location (such as with Luke and Elsa), will we see similar treatment for 3 cost cards or is 2 cost a boundary for the limit?
A: Glenn “2-Cost is a unique line. We expect the effects to mix a lot at 3-4, depending on the strength of the effect in question. For example, Cosmo and Shang-Chi are clearly appropriate at one location, while Cerebro and Patriot are clearly not.
Even the 2-Cost line will be slightly fuzzed from time to time–for example, Scorpion can be played on-curve and theoretically apply his benefits to multiple locations, but your opponent gets a lot of control in that respect. But effects as powerful as Luke’s used to be should cos the opportunity of a more impactful turn than 2.”
Q: Why does the Hellfire Gala album have a cardback instead of an emote?
A: Glenn “We debated between having the final reward be the Capt Marvel emote or the card back. We wanted to learn feedback exactly like this around whether card backs were an appropriate reward at the end of an album. The decision to have it be a card back had already been made before the launch of albums because it has to be built into the game ahead of time.”
Q: With so many Hipp variants in the game, will there be any more albums? Why only do 12?
A: Stephen “We plan to add multiple albums for styles with lots of variants. For example, Dan Hipp will have many albums. Staying Hipp will not be the only Dan Hipp album. Eventually we will add the concept of a parent album for those styles with lots of variants / sub albums if players continue to show interest in the feature.
Albums are setup in 12s for now to make similar in size to a deck and due to technical constraints. We plan to create smaller albums for variant sets with less than 12 cards in the future.”
Q: How high of a priority is improving the auto deckbuilder?
A: KentErik “it’s a priority to us to improve the deckbuilder. we’ve also had some similarly unexpected outcomes with it, and aim to make improvements. no timelines to announce on when though”
Q: Would you ever put special card effects as a reward for albums?
A: Stephen “It’s possible but we don’t have that planned in the near future”
Q: How soon as newly released variants added to random reward pools like mystery variants or reserves?
A: Stephen “New rare variants are immediately available in all sources. New super rare variants are immediately available in premium mystery variants which includes in the shop and spotlights”
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 Deadpool is destroyed with Negative power, he reverts to his original power and doubles from there. Why is that?
A: If Deadpool gains negative power from a location or ongoing ability (like soul stone), destroying him doesn’t keep that negative power. He only keeps the negative power when permanently reduced by cards like Scorpion or Evolved Cyclops. If you think that this isn’t what is happening in your match, report it as a bug in game so developers can see exactly what happened and fix any possible issues.
Q: I had a question about Albums!
A: Many of you asked Album related questions lately. Many questions in the above portion of the article addresses many of these questions. If you still have questions after reading through this week’s edition, leave a comment below and I will try to get further answers from the dev team for you.
Q: Will we be getting seasons based on past MCU projects like Moon Knight and Shang-Chi?
A: Nicki Broderick “We plan our themes for seasons many months ahead! We have a huge backlog of ideas and themes we want to explore that are a mix of comic inspired, Marvel’s show/movie schedule, etc. There’s a variety of factors that influence the theme, but we typically look at things like new characters to introduce, an artistic glue that can hold stuff together, an opportunity for cool/unique designs, etc.”
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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