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 Maverick, the launch of Team clash, the latest patch, and the latest OTA (phew!) 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 Maverick 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! Also, the weekly variant competition has returned! Share your favorite variants for a chance to win a season pass for the current or upcoming season!
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: Did you consider letting Storm be one of the central X-Men in team clash?
A: Glenn “One of the design limitations of Team Clash we agree to was to avoid redesigning VFX for the cards. It would increase the work and add more potential for bugs and other strangeness. Storm’s particular effect and VFX aren’t very malleable–designing a new location for her effect would’ve made her the most costly card in the game mode from a resource standpoint.
We wound up using some “default” VFX for cards that did substantially change, like Spider-Man 2099. But those cards were added later in the process when we failed to find a substitute card or appropriate effect that worked for what we wanted to achieve. X-Men didn’t have that problem, so we had no reason to reconsider including Storm at that point.”
Q: Why can your opponent play a stolen Zombi Galactus card, and it gives your opponent the transformation for free when you play out ZG?
A: Glenn “That’s just how these two things interact, similar to your opponent drawing cards you may have buffed with Okoye. “
Q: Why is Scarlet Spider’s clone in team clash a 4-Cost, but the base card is 3-Cost?
A: Glenn “We elected not to add a new record for the Clone after changing the Cost later in development. I agree this situation’s not ideal, and I expect we’ll tweak it for a future run.”
Q: Is Super Skrull not coded to Copy Cyclops’ new Ongoing text?
A: Glenn “Cyclops’s effect is a bit novel, in that he has a hidden ability that actually tracks the Energy you’ve gained. Since Super-Skrull doesn’t grab that bit, he copies the ability but gives himself +0 Power.”
Q: I noticed when you copy Cyclops with Mystique, she only updates her power at the start of the next turn, meaning it doesn’t work if you play her on the last turn. Is this intentional?
A: Glenn “It was the only execution available to us at the time, so I would say “intentional but undesirable.” We have a backend update to how Energy works that will resolve this for future runs.”
Q: When will the card come to the token shop and will it be series 4 or 5?
A: Griffin “Fastball Special hits S4 packs on Jan 18.”
Q: With Shocker getting a needed buff, could we see Evolved Shocker also get a change?
A: Glenn “No, as we wanted one of the cheaper cards to be flexible across more archetypes rather than locked into one.”
Q: I’ve noticed some issues with Team Clash Anti-Venom, namely that his “set power to 0” ability overrides all other sources of added power (including Ongoing power). This is drastically different from the normal Anti-Venom’s ability. What caused the team to make this change?
A: Glenn “This is purposeful, because the card is meaningfully different. We didn’t want the best combos to remain stuff like low-Power cards that get buffed, but to make players engage with the Spider-Verse quest.”
Q: Would you ever give the vanilla cards actual abilities, and rework High Evo?
A: Glenn “No, that’s not the role they serve within the game.”
Q: Why did you add Armor to the X-Men deck when Wolverine is there?
A: Glenn “This was my call, and I’m open to it being the wrong one. But the actual best-performing card in Team Clash by a mile was Elektra, and that’s part of why the X-Men deck was underperforming–it was too reliant on Sunspot. We can’t really fix that on such short notice.
Additionally, Wolverine moving when you don’t want him to is a thing with this deck, so I’m hoping the combination of giving him ‘an extra’ proc by starting him at 2/3 and the potential for controlling his location will offset the very real need for Sunspot protection.
So yes, I agree it is a weird choice. I imagine when we return to the X-Men in a future Team Clash, you’ll see some updates to make this weirdness go away.”
Q: Is it intended that if you float energy and Team Clash Wolverine triggers, he doesn’t regenerate without another X-Man on the board?
A: Glenn “Correct. He must be brought back in from the cold.”
Q: What made you put Jim Hammond, a non X-Man, into the prebuilt X-Men team?
A: Glenn “We wanted to put non-teammates in some of the prebuilt decks because we saw a consistent and harmful misunderstanding among first-time playtesters that the custom decks couldn’t use cards from other teams, and this easily fixed that misunderstanding. Jim seemed like such a clean match for what the X-Men wanted to be doing without costing much tempo, but we might swap him out for the next run now that the mode’s deckbuilding expectations are more established.
Q: Did Adamantium Infusion get quietly updated to banish itself before triggering its revive?
A: Glenn “Yes, it looks like that update missed the notes but we have made that change. It was mostly because of weird interactions that weren’t intended, like tricking something into eating Infusion in a timing window for Firehair.”
Other Questions
Q: Why aren’t there any comic tie ins for Season themes? Also, why do some MCU shows ger dedicated seasons, but others don’t?
A: Glenn “We have tied into a couple comic runs, but they aren’t as mainstream and more often serve to limit what we can do with the season rather than expand it. We want to capitalize on audience excitement in exchange for restricting the content’s focus to a specific source material, and while we think comics are dope a majority of our players are not regular readers.
As for why some shows, depends a lot on timing, the specifics of the opportunity, and what our partners would like to do.”
Q: With Silver Sable being the latest 1-Cost On Reveal (released in September 2024), are there plans to add new 1-Cost characters to work with bounce?
A: Glenn “Not a specific plan, no. As we work to support other mechanics and archetypes, they’ve just been a lower priority given how many of them already exist and how strong some of them are. Plus, skills overlap a good bit of their space and tend to go in a wider variety of decks.”
Q: With the most casual way to play Snap being only avalible after a long grind to Infinite, can we ever expect to see a dedicated casual mode?
A: Griffin “We’ve definitely heard this feedback and the team has had conversations about how to improve that experience. There aren’t any plans to bring such a mode in the short term but we’ll continue to evaluate those possibilities against other priorities.”
Q: Would you ever adjust Proving Grounds to be a true, 1 match game for everyone? This could act as a casual mode.
A: Griffin “Changes to Proving Grounds and/or Conquest as a whole are being discussed. No definitely direction has been decided, though.”
Q: What factors influence the number of cards from a specific character family or theme, like Spider-Men multiversal variants instead symbiotes?
A: Glenn “Mix of things, including the characters granted to us, perceived desire for the characters, available seasons they thematically suit, etc. Generally speaking, we’re looking for reasons to include most characters, not to exclude them.”
Q: Why are rewards being given out as webshop codes now instead of in-app rewards?
A: Glenn “The cut developers pay Apple/Google on mobile shops is a substantial amount relative to making direct purchases through the webshop. Connecting rewards like this is one of the ways we raise awareness of the webshop, along with additional rewards to thank players who take that extra step to support us.”
Q: Why did you add the option to hide your CL? Is it to avoid confusion about CL and matchmaking?
A: Glenn “I just think it’s an appropriate thing to give players agency over disclosing–it’s their CL, they can share it if they like.
I’m not sure what theories you’re referring to. I’ve said before that CL proximity is one of the factors we use in matchmaking. It’s weighted less heavily than MMR, but it’s still weighted.”
Q: New modes have experimented with changing the core gameplay of Snap: number of cubes, how snapping works, how to win (two locations), the number of locations and, number of turns (and their timers). Are there any plans to make some of those new ideas into permanent changes to the core game?
A: Glenn “We’ve talked about some things like that. Not much more I can say about it.”
Q: With certain cards having different text in team clash, on your end, would this be an interesting way to test reworks for cards?
A: Glenn “Not specifically the goal, but it’s possible we wind up making some changes afterward.”
Q: Why is the number of tickets capped at 9? What is the reason behind that exact number?
A: Griffin “As with all economic decisions in the game, it’s based upon data. As we’ve said before, we’re always trying new things to find the best balance of player engagement and player satisfaction.”
Q: With the patch yesterday, the game on PC is completely unplayable with multiple crashes per match. Has the team playtested the game to see for those obvious bugs before releasing patches?
A: Glenn “The patch yesterday did come with some unexpected redownloading of a large number of assets. We’ve seen that in many cases, time is sufficient to resolve the issues (though the download speed has many user-specific variables). We did know about this ahead of time, but there wasn’t anything we could do to mitigate it–it’s related to the Unity 6 updates.
If time doesn’t help you, please file a bug report manually and we can backtrace to see what might be causing additional problems. It’s certainly easy for an unknown issue to hide underneath a known one sometimes, and being able to reproduce them is critical to resolving them.”
Q: Why hasn’t the “missing entry” bounty been fixed yet?
A: Glenn “It’s already been fixed in a future patch, it missed the cut for this one.”
Q: You previously mentioned you got rid of the cheater “Daredevil” bot. What bots actually remain, and can they see my cards? Sometimes the bot plays around my plays to make sure they lose.
A: Glenn “We essentially have two kinds of bots:
– Lossbots: Pretty self-explanatory. They exist to add cubes to the system and ensure players move towards their seasonal goals. These bots can “see” enough to ensure they’ll lose.
– Fallback bots: Bots we’ve trained to play Snap. These bots play Snap like humans, using their knowledge of the metagame and their own deck to make good decisions based on the matchups. It’ll always play well, but we weaken it by tweaking parameters like the quality of decks available to it and its snapping/retreating principles.
This can result in the occasional false positive, such as a ‘bad snap’ convincing a player to retreat when they shouldn’t or a weak card being good in a specific situation. But on the whole these adaptations work well and this fallback bot doesn’t have a positive winrate against any MMR range.”
Q: What makes you decide to make a card’s effect global (Death) versus only your own (Hydra Stomper)? Is
A: Glenn “It’s both a balance dial and an incentive structure. Sometimes that’s to create tension, but mostly it’s to reward the kinds of cards we expect the target deck to play. It’s almost never related to flavor (and I’m only saying almost because maybe I forgot some small instance).”
Q: Why has the team stopped using the Steam News to showcase blogs and patch notes?
A: Griffin “Steam has made some changes to how you can import blogs and news that have GREATLY increased the necessary efforts. We’re still working through how to best overcome those issues.”
Q: Since Snap’s timer in game for limited modes is a bit confusing, can the team confirm the full playable dates for the mode, and extended time for the shop?
A: Griffin “Team Clash is playable from today, the 18th until the 28th at daily reset. The Shop will remain open for 48 more hours (the 28th at reset until the 30th and reset).”
Q: Have you considered just monetizing cosmetics and just giving players the cards?
A: Glenn “There are no sustainable F2P live service CCGs that have exclusively monetized cosmetics. We would love to have made history that way, but the game simply would not survive under that model. Maybe someone will figure it out one day, but so far it’s worked out pretty poorly for everyone who has tried.
Our game remains 100% free to play if that’s how you’d like to enjoy it, but we really appreciate players supporting the game!”
Q: Will we get any new game modes that don’t rely on tickets to play?
A: Glenn “It’s been a consideration, but every new model we develop opens a lot of complex problems to solve. The more things we change the less we can rely on previous learnings to identify what will work.”
Q: Were Thunderbolts really the best team? If so, has the balance changes made any noticeable shifts?
A: Glenn “Yes, Thunderbolts was top of the heap in both prebuilts and custom, though Avengers was a competitive second in prebuilts (and a not-competitive second in customs).
We had to do some specific pulls to get the mode-specific breakdown as fast as we did, and I won’t be pulling that again until I’m back at work in Monday, so we’ll see how it worked out then.”
Q: Is Team Clash a text for more “High Evo” style cards that warp cards into a team format?
A: Glenn “I wouldn’t call it specifically a test—it’s its own fun thing I’ve wanted to make for a long time. Could we learn things from it and decide to apply them elsewhere? Sure, we’re open to that possibility.”
Q: Would you ever make special variants for the new Team Clash characters, like Grand Arena champions?
A: Glenn “We’d certainly like to in the future, but developing 30+ art pieces with a consistent style wasn’t feasible to do alongside our other art demands during this development period. I’m not sure if/how we’d make them available—part of why we make unique art in GA is for clarity, and in Team Clash that’s even more valuable.”
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!
Last week didn’t have many questions, so be sure to leave your questions for the developers in the comments this week, and I’ll try my best to get you an answer! The upcoming holidays may impact the release date of our next edition if the devs aren’t active, but we will return with the next edition as soon as the developers are answering questions again!
Happy Holidays!
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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