Table of Contents
Welcome back to this week’s Developer Update! This week’s edition comes after the launch of the new Serieswi 5 card Weapon H! If you don’t know if it’s 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: Is it intended for Spider Noir (or similar cards) to target Skills and completely negate the ability?
A: Glenn “Intended to be a deckbuilding decision/opt-in risk. Otherwise, playing lots of skills would likely eventually risk being able to hunt for specific cards too efficiently.”
Q: In the last Grand Arena, did the team’s testing see that Black Panther was stronger than the other champions? Or did your test indicate all were evenly balanced?
A: Glenn “I didn’t directly work on this iteration, but I can speak to our goals. Releasing a perfect metagame certainly wasn’t a realistic goal—we lack the manpower to out-test planet Earth. So our goals were to land all of the decks within a reasonably fun range, ~45% to ~55%.
I’m sure some of the decks seemed clearly to lean one way or the other, as is often the case in playtesting, but we finalized them hoping to land inside our goalposts. From what I’ve seen—I’m not diving deep here, just personal perspective—it looks like Black Panther landed too high and Thanos too low, but the rest aren’t far off the target.
We may have underestimated how significant the complexity gap could be. For example, Black Panther being the strongest and easier to play than Annihilus is likely warping the winrates a bit relative to our competitive playtesting team’s experience.”
Q: Do you have plans to support Namor and Orca to make them more viable? It’s way too easy to negate their mediocre abilities.
A: Glenn “Not in the near-term. They’re not a large enough or popular enough faction to value for their identity as much as for the roles their individual cards serve. But you can expect to see a bit more Namor in the future, at least.”
Q: Is the “banish this” phrasing from the Carnage and Rocket champion skills being considered as a balance dial if Adamantium Infusion ends up being too weak?
A: Glenn “Yeah, we’d consider it.”
Q: While Jessica Jones is a flavorful design, is there any plans on redesigning her to be more playable?
A: Glenn “Given the current card’s primary role is in the new user experience, we’re more likely to make a new Jessica than rework this one.”
Q: What about Rescue? While Jessica Jones is Series 1, Rescue is Series 3 and never sees play.
A: Glenn “There’s a higher chance we rework Rescue, but probably still a higher chance we make a new one later on.”
Q: What if you shifted Jessica Jones from “don’t play here to gain Power” to starting with 10 Power and “don’t play here or lose 5 Power”?
A: Glenn “I think it’s a slightly more confusing version of the card, and gains very little gameplay. It’s not like Surtur has been historically low on partners, the biggest upside would be Cosmo in the early game experience I think. But generally we prefer “do quest, get reward” as a structure, as opposed to do “make mistake, lose what you’ve got.” Not always, but especially moreso on early game cards.”
Q: Could we ever see Galactus (the original) as a champion in Grand Arena?
A: Glenn “Not while I’m in charge! Even if we would’ve, recent feedback around Thanos indicated ‘powerful things that are hard to do consistently’ aren’t appealing enough to GA players.”
Other Questions
Q: Why do some skills banish themselves before the on reveal happens (like Absolute Carnage), but others skills remain on the board as their on reveal triggers (Shield Throw)?
A: Glenn “We’re considering wrapping a larger-scale change to skills in a future update. At least for now, we expect to keep the same defaults and vary when we want or need the gameplay value.
Notably, a reason that hasn’t been mentioned for Carnage banishing the skill first is because otherwise he would eat it, so either way we had to change something in that case.”
Q: If feedback isnt improtant to you guys, how was the in-game behavior during this year’s Deadpool’s Diner? Not profitable I assume?
A: Glenn “One reason we lower the weight placed on social media feedback is its tendency for hyperbole and misinformation. For example, I replied to another post citing that we weigh in-game behavior more than community sentiment—which are both forms of feedback—and now I’m replying to a question reacting to my post implying they aren’t and that ‘feedback isn’t important [to us.]’ 🤷
As for the questions, we were happy with a lot about the revamped Diner, including how much more players enjoyed it. We do have things we want to fix, and it was also developed concurrently with our event pass systems. We’ve since seen players really enjoy the event passes, so incorporating that learnings is on our agenda. I’m not sure what metric you’re inquiring about with regard to profit, but we don’t discuss the performance of our modes relative to revenue in public settings.”
Q: With cards that now care about front and back rows of cards, could we see cards that care about left and right columns?
A: Glenn “Never say never, but I don’t have any desire to explore that space right now. It doesn’t seem to offer much novelty.”
Q: How do you design “quest” cards like Dormammu to not feel too gimmicky?
A: Glenn “Mostly a combination of experience and iteration. For something like Thena, we knew the pattern would work based on just knowing the game, so we just had to find the right rate. A card like Phoenix Force is tougher—the card we printed could just as easily have wound up discarded for a different design, but we were able to playtest it and gain confidence.”
Q: Do you think cards with too big of a quest are too challenging to balance?
A: Glenn “I don’t think they’re too difficult to balance, but harsh binaries just usually aren’t as fun, since it’s all or nothing. We tend to prefer softening the ceiling and raising the floor. For a similar example, it’s better for the game that Mister Negative can lose when it plays Negative on turn 3, and can win when it didn’t play Negative at all, even if those events are both rare.”
Q: You previously mentioned “When we ‘burn’ rewards without actually improving a game mode’s appeal or performance, we devalue those rewards and every other system that uses them. This is a basic principle of inflation.”
Is this why Conquest’s rewards are so bad and have remained unchanged, both in rewards and gameplay? Because it’s hard to find the right balance between fun and rewards?
A: Glenn “I’d say it’s related, but not directly why. Conquest was initially developed as a F2P mode in a world with no other game modes or Alliances, so maintaining it as F2P while creating space for more things had some pressures like that.
But the larger reason is it’s just not that popular, so we don’t want to gate high-desirability rewards behind something with a niche audience. We have seen players will choose to do things they don’t enjoy if the rewards are high enough, and it’s not a scenario we aim to create.”
Q: If the team knows Conquest isn’t popular, why do you force Gold Tickets into the rewards track?
A: Glenn “What I was speaking to in the post is why we don’t put bigger rewards into Conquest. Popularity matters a lot there, because if we did, players might feel compelled to burn resources to chase them. Giving away gold tickets has the exact opposite effect—it ensures no one has to burn resources to earn the rewards that are there, and enables people to try the mode at higher levels.
We don’t have any plans to remove those rewards, but we are working on creating better rewards and systems for them, so the future may hold a change.”
Q: In your response you said “while I get it’s not obvious, rewards being too generous is bad for everyone.”
I can see how it’s bad for you guys but how exactly is that bad for us?
A: Glenn “As I said in the post, inflation among game rewards damages the underlying systems of those games. Rewards serve an obvious purpose—they’re a vector for monetization—but they also encourage doing fun things and enjoying the game. So it’s only bad for you if you like playing Marvel Snap.
For example, we don’t directly profit from 7-day login rewards or the free side of Season/Event Passes; they’re a cost. We pay it because it encourages play, and some play becomes spend—that’s F2P gaming. If free rewards become too abundant, they both fail to motivate play and eliminate reasons for spend, two things every F2P game needs.
That’s not to say we oppose having generous rewards from time to time. We’ve done them, and we’ll do them more. The occasional awesome thing has value unto itself. I’m referring to the core balance of the systems.
This is a large topic and I’ve tried to chop it down to a bite-size piece, but I hope it’s added some clarity.”
Q: With game crashes and performance being an issue, isn’t adding all of the new content adding to the problem?
A: Glenn “Well ‘not adding content to the game’ isn’t really an option. But yes, the game does grow over time, most do. Work like refactoring the code to reduce size and finding more efficient ways to build things are the major ways to account for that. One of our engineers just helped eliminate well over 100,000 lines of code last week, actually.
A variety of factors can contribute to breakage, but one major element for our recent update was the update to a new version of Unity. It’s trickier than one would think, not like updating an OS on one’s PC, and it can even impact things like how files are stored.”
Q: Has the team looked into more support for Thor/ Beta Ray Bill and their hammer gameplay?
A: Glenn “It is, and I expect we’ll have additions as we figure out seasons that make sense to hook into. Personally, I’m campaigning hard for the Thor Corps one day 🙂”
Q: How do you know when to rework a card versus adding a new card to support it (like Bullsye making Daken relevant)?
A: Glenn “Often it’s just knowing what questions to ask.
For example, what cards would make Noir better? We’ve already got great targets like Iron Man or Gorr to hit, and good enablers like Mister Sinister or just Zoo cards. So the issue seemed more clearly to be the polarity of the quest.
Daken’s another story. There wasn’t really a deck successfully discarding Muramasa Shard at all, implying an enabler was missing. Stuff like Moon Girl or Frigga would still require multiple discards too, and while MODOK wasn’t getting the job done, there were glimpses of what the strength could be—having no ability to play Zola or Taskmaster was the real issue there. So we knew we needed a card that would discard multiple Shards, but not discard synergy pieces.”
Q: What was the reasoning behind no tech cards in this Grand Arena?
A: Glenn “One of the primary complaints we saw with previous runs was the presence of tech cards. In fact, it was commonly linked to being an issue created by custom decks. We decided to test both in one run, since we didn’t have any interest in doing all the different permutations.”
Q: Was there any takeaways or things you learned with the prebuilt decks in Grand Arena?
A: Glenn “My read is that there’s an audience for prebuilt-only game modes, but (as predicted) that audience is meaningfully smaller than the general Snap player pool. That’s a handy learning, and I have some ideas about how to explore that more.
While the balance was worse than we wanted, it’s hard to say exactly how much that impacted the mode’s performance. One of our best gauges is using the first day or two relative to other runs’ first day or two, since the balance issues weren’t immediately known by the entire audience and that we we get apples to applies.
As for more specific learnings, there were two fairly clear ones:
1. We buffed Wakanda Forever too much too late after seeing the BP deck struggle, and as a doubler reward that was excessively risky.
2. We thought Thanos being a “semi-Champion” with his Stones already would make it fine to experiment with a weaker and splashier skill, but that was received pretty negatively.”
Q: What ever happened to previous variants from the first variant voting competition? The other variants were never released.
A: Griffin “No decision on where or how to use the other Variants has been made nor planned. We’ll eventually find the right place for all of the Variants we create!”
Q: What happened to pride variants for 2025?
A: Griffin “The team hasn’t forgotten! While I haven’t done a great job at keeping everyone updated, it’s been scheduled to be included in the final patch of the year (next week!) since October.
We’ll have a promo code for it coming shortly after. We greatly appreciate your patience.”
Q: Why was the Black Panther GA deck nerfed so harshly? Was it that much better than other decks?
A: Glenn “Yes, it was. Given how dominant it was within the mode, we didn’t want to risk a lighter nerf failing to pull it down—that would defeat the purpose of balancing anything. We’d much rather over-nerf than under in this spot, to ensure some of the decks it was suppressing get to shine before the mode ends.”
Q: What locations were hard for you to make bug-free due to it’s complexity?
A: Glenn “After a couple incidents with some ambitious designs, we just stopped making risky locations altogether. The gains are really low relative to the potential to damage 50% of games when we debut one.”
Q: Do you ever take player perception into consideration when balancing? Especially concerning bots, matchmaking, ect?
A: Glenn “Certainly–perception of balance is actually more important than true balance. However, just because an imbalanced game *can* be perceived as balanced doesn’t mean that it will be! In the absence of strong indicators to that effect I wouldn’t advise taking those kinds of shots because you can easily wind up in a much worse state.
The elements you called out are also common player concerns across the gaming category–I can’t recall playing a game with bots, matchmaking, or matchups that doesn’t have vocal groups complaining about them. That’s **not** me saying such complaints are invalid by default–except for deck-based matchmaking, that one has a ridiculous premise. But it does mean valid concerns get mixed with lots of noise, and actual data really helps cut through that noise.”
Q: If Grand Arena can have fast balance changes, why can’t the bugs be fixed just as quick?
A: Glenn “Bugs require investigation, reproduction, fixes, and verification. It’s a process that involves multiple teams, and in the case of localization external vendors. Some fixes may require a new client or “patch” in order to be truly (or at least safely) resolved.
Updating prebuilt decklists in a game mode requires 3 people and less than an hour of their attention. It’s like the difference between filling a flat tire at home and towing the car to a shop when its transmission dies.”
Q: Is the team aware of the “red dot” notification bug that has been around for months now?
A: Griffin “Yep. We’re aware of the bug and the team is working on a fix.”
Q: Is it possible to design a card that gains Power by being alone in a location, but they take up more location slots?
A: Glenn “Kind of, in that we explored “double-wide” cards, specifically for Rocket & Groot in Rivals season. I like double-wide more than double-tall quite a bit. It’s a shape that suits two-page comic art spreads, it’s compositionally easier to commission art for, and it also plays organically with our existing front-row/back-row dynamics.
It proved too technically difficult at the time, but maybe one day!”
Q: How can bugs be persistent for long amounts of time without being fixed?
A: Glenn “Variety of reasons can result in reported bugs persisting. They may not be reproducible, they may simply be triaged below other things, they may be technically more complex than they seem to resolve, they may be very device-specific, and they may also not actually be bugs.”
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: Are we able to see a card that allows you to peak at your opponents hand?
A: Glenn “It’s a lot stronger than it is fun, and would require an inordinate amount of work on the UI end to display intuitively. We hit about as much of this space as we want to with effects like Daily Bugle and Mirage.”
Q: Is there any concern about so many animations that prolong games?
A: The team is aware and wanting to improve the “fast forward” feature for things like this. Here’s a comment from Glenn talking about the difficulties of improving the feature:
Glenn “Fast forward is in a very awkward spot. We can’t simply remove it—its function is important to avoiding 5-minute loops, but we don’t have many alternate options on how to execute it.—the games architecture wasn’t really conceived with fast forward in mind.
So while we want to improve it, it’s sort of unraveling a larger series of issues to do so. For now, our approach is to exempt cards from it that are chasing problems while we actively review the game’s architecture. That’s among my current work right now.”
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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