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 questions such as: why isn’t Black Swan a 2/3, how many cards are planned in advance, why were datamine abilities removed from updates, 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 cards Supergiant and Black Swan! If you don’t know if Supergiant is worth a Spotlight Cache, make sure to check out our weekly Spotlight guide, as well as our Supergiant guide! This week also comes after the launch of the newest season and the newest patch! Be sure to check out the patch notes if you haven’t seen them yet.
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!
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: Why is Black Swan a 3/5? I thought that was a more premium statline for cards that have downsides?
A: Glenn “We committed last year to testing Season Pass cards more rigorously for competitive play. That process determined Black Swan merited additional rate, in large part because the decks she fuels wielding lots of 1-Cost cards are a little low on stats themselves. Recall how commonly Bounce decks use something like Werewolf or Darkhawk—they need the beef, and a 3/4 wasn’t necessarily strong enough to earn its slot. We’re more confident a 3/5 is.”
Q: Would you consider making Black Swan a 2/3 again?
A: Glenn “We played both versions, and our testing indicated 2/3 was fine but 3/5 was stronger and within bound. We want the decks she’s fueling, including Zoo, to benefit from that strength.”
Q: Does Corvus Glaive require you discard 2 cards to get the extra energy?
A: Glenn “Correct, you need to discard 2 cards.”
Q: Is Adam Warlock possibly getting a buff or a rework?
A: Glenn “He’s on our radar.”
Q: Previously you said that Black Swan warranted a premium statline because decks that run 1 costs often don’t have enough power as is. However, Black Swan’s ability reads like an enabler for those stat sticks that those decks like. Playing Swan on 3 into Werewolf on 4 and a bunch of 1 cost on reveals,
A: Glenn “Playing Swan costs Energy you could otherwise use creating Power and consumes a board slot. Those are both in demand for these decks. She is an enabler, but you only have 12 cards and 12 slots and that’s very competitive for decks with Infinity Stones or Hood and Mysterio.”
Q: Ben mentions in the developer update that Cull Obsidian has “the most unbreakable skin”; although he dies to Shang Chi. I think that there’s some missing flavor there.
A: Glenn “I love flavorful designs and building top-down, but gameplay trumps flavor.”
Q: Was the 2/3 statline for Black Swan deemed too strong, so she was changed to a 3/5?
A: Glenn “The opposite; it was tested and deemed too weak.”
Q: Will Proxima Midnight jump into Bar with No Name if it’s the lowest-power location, or will she recognize that as a lose-condition?
A: Glenn “She doesn’t look for locations you’re losing, so she can hop to the Bar.”
Q: Why did you make ghost cost 3 if nobody played her at 1 cost?
A: Glenn “Because one of the reasons Ghost was weak was providing a small amount of Power. Increasing the Cost let us increase the Power more substantially, and the effect is most important on turns 5 and 6 anyway.”
Q: Why is the card named Cull Obsidian (like MCU) and not Black Dwarf? Black Swan and Supergiant are unknown to MCU audiences so I don’t understand the need to appease that audience (if that was the intention) when there are already characters this season they wouldn’t know?
A: Glenn “We often take our cues from the MCU when there’s a decision to be made, as a larger percentage of our potential audience is familiar with the films than the comics. The fact that some other characters might already be ‘deep cuts’ is a reason to care about accessibility more, not less.”
Q: After you increased Gladiator’s power by 1 his play rate skyrocketed. Is this a concern that raising a power by the lowest amount can have a large impact on the meta?
A: Glenn “Gladiator’s jump was also a symptom of his play environment changing a fair bit, as the metagame shifted. I wouldn’t call it concerning, but certainly it demonstrates that 1 Power is a real value to gain and lose.”
Q: Why did you give Cull Obsidian a 4/10 statline when his ability has very little downside compared to Typhoid Mary or Sentry?
A: Glenn “We balance the cards based on our playtesting. Cull Obsidian we played a fair bit at 9, and the feedback told us that 10–in part for Skaar synergy–was the better number for him. While having a 1-Cost may not seem too difficult, you can miss. Having a 1-Cost and also wanting Cull at its location is another element–I’m sure we’ve all played a game where we wished Sentry could be played right, for example.”
Q: Would Noir Spider-Man be well known enough to be his own card, or more of a variant?
A: Glenn “He seems likely worthy of his own card if we make him.”
Q: Players thought Dracula got worse after his change to a 4/1 since he couldn’t negate negative effects, but did he actually get better in discard decks?
A: Glenn “Yes, he got better.”
Q: What happens to Cull Obsidian if the 1-Cost card is destroyed before Cull Obsidian reveals?
A: Glenn “It’s a requirement for dragging him from your hand to the location. Once he’s been staged, the 1-Cost card doesn’t matter.”
Q: I’m seeing a lot of talk around the comparison between Corvus Glaive / Electro and Cull Obsidian / Crossbones. In your mind and design philosophy, what makes these cards meaningfully different and what do you say to people who are calling these new cards “power creep”?
A: Glenn “They’re different cards with different gameplay and deckbuilding costs; their text makes them different. I don’t think cutting Electro from all of your decks for Corvus Glaive is going to be default correct, for example.
Crossbones has been among the weaker 4-Cost cards in the game for a long time (something has to be). That has nothing to do with Cull. If people thought that Cull was better than Darkhawk, Sentry, Ms. Marvel, etc. that would be worth looking at more closely.”
Q: Why didn’t you buff Elsa like you said you would?
A: Glenn “I said she was in a future patch ~a week ago. We locked this patch in early January.”
Q: Was Alioth changed a while back to make Supergiant more effective when she released?
A: Glenn “We found Supergiant powerful enough to have an impact even without Alioth, so weakening that combo wouldn’t buy us much more strength.”
Q: How was the Beast change a sideways change when it directly weakened bounce decks, which already get outpowered in the meta?
A: Glenn “We felt this Beast might be stronger or weaker, but not certain enough to compensate for either. As always, we have OTAs if Beast needs help.”
Q: Why is Ronan the only card who shows his Ongoing power in hand after the patch?
A: Glenn “We’re still developing this feature using Ronan as a test case, and he was inadvertently set live. We’ll be reverting that, but hope to integrate the work into a future patch soon once we’ve playtested it more fully.”
Q: Will the upcoming Elsa buff require a patch, or will she be an OTA?
A: Glenn “We are currently targeting Elsa’s update for a patch because the change involves adjusting her VFX and that is relatively untested waters for OTA adjustments”
Q: Absolutely loving the new x23 vfx . Anything planned for our special little big power one drop, Deadpool?
A: KentErik “👀”
Q: Is it a bug or intended that Omega Red continues his ability if Dracula discards and wins the location?
A: Glenn “That’s a bug, we’re in progress on it.”
Q: Could White Queen see a buff?
A: Glenn “White Queen is on our radar, but we view her as something of a ‘canary in a coal mine’ and are examining some options with that in mind.”
Q: Can you explain more how White Queen is a “canary”?
A: Glenn “I mean that White Queen being a weak card is indicative of an inaccuracy in Costing and Power more generally. I’ve previously discussed how Black Swan isn’t as pure upside as some have said, given the deckbuilding has a fairly real opportunity cost and 1-Costs need support to thrive. White Queen isn’t the case; a 4/7 White Queen would be purely upside, but I’m also not sure a 4/7 is playable. That’s weird.”
Q: Did Black Swans release effect your decision to rework Beast?
A: Glenn “We decided we wanted to change Beast to work like this in late October, when we were hitting the issue in a variety of future-facing work.
After looking at the timeline, we decided to align it with Black Swan because that gave the change a longer runway (maybe something changes our minds) while also ensuring 1-Cost-based decks received an interesting option to help them adapt.
Generally, when I have to weaken a card, I like to try and find ways to ensure the game is changing in interesting ways for decks that were using the card. That way there’s a new puzzle, rather than just a missing piece.”
Q: Was Cerebro intentionally designed to have an entire deck based around it, or was it meant to be an ongoing Forge? Will Cerebro ever be reworked to not be effected by Monster Island since it completely negates Cerebro?
A: KentErik “yep, it was def. intended to work it way it does! and yep, monster island is definitely the bane of every Cerebro player ever, but that is true of almost every deck archetype, having a location or five that disrupts its gameplan”
Other Questions
Q: How many cards do you have planned in advance?
A: Glenn “We’re about to start working on cards for October, which is standard for our process. So 40+ at any given time in some shape or another.”
Addison “To piggyback off of Glenn’s answer, at the start of a new season I’ll have friends ask me questions about just-released cards and I’ll have to remind them that I’m like 4+ months in the future. I often need a refresher on what actually released and what the final ability/numbers are because they’ll be referencing something that I’ll have completely forgotten about sometimes.”
Q: Are there any “rogue” cards created that aren’t associated with a season but kind of just waiting in a “vault” to release whenever you come up with a season that makes sense to release it in?
A: Glenn “We have a few of those, ideas we want to make waiting for the right season or card.”
Q: Will any upcoming albums be less than 12 variants required?
A: Chris “One of the albums releasing in February will indeed have less than 12 variants”
Q: Why don’t you want to share the odds of a location appearing to the public?
A: Glenn “There are a variety of reasons, but ultimately locations are numerous enough that it’s not meaningfully assistive to gameplay and changes so often (new location every week) that communicating it isn’t a good use of time or effort.”
Q: How can cards that were not changed in a patch become bugged after an update? Like when Daredevil became bugged without any changes?
A: Glenn “Sometimes, a change we make elsewhere can have an unintended consequence—that’s tech development sometimes. Daredevil’s issue resulted from a bug fix related to another issue with unrevealed cards, for example.”
Q: With new emotes releasing weekly now, will there be an auto-mute function added?
A: Stephen “We believe a core part of games where you engage with other players is something called relatedness. It means you have a connection with another human or game object. Emotes and reactions are the only way for players to communicate in Snap, and the moments when people give you a fist bump or they make a mistake and use the Deadpool emote result in the game feeling alive and engaging. Those moments are worth the sometimes negative ones that some players employ and that’s why we provide the mute functionality in those instances. Auto mute would remove all interaction effectively making snap a single player game, which is not our intent. We want to replicate the feeling of sitting at a table playing a card game against another person in a safe way and we feel the emotes and reactions achieve that.”
Q: In the past, you have announced when a location’s frequency was changed. Do you change these frequencies often, and will you ever change them more often?
A: Glenn “We report frequency changes in the notes. It’s not something we want to update frequently, as the impact (both real and perceived) is small relative to the effort.”
Q: Why did you remove the ability to datamine upcoming spotlight caches when players use them to effectively plan their caches?
A: Tucker “Happy to explain our thinking here:
The short answer: The datamined Spotlight schedules were often works-in-progress or otherwise subject to further change, so we couldn’t guarantee they were going to be the finalized version, and we don’t want to disappoint players when the final release doesn’t match the datamine.
—
The longer behind-the-scenes answer: Spotlight Caches are a bit of a puzzle on the live ops side; we want Spotlight Caches to have roughly equal appeal from week to week, so there’s quite a few situations where we’ve wanted to swap Spotlight Cache compositions around. For example, when:
– A card has gained or lost some prominence in the meta
– Playtesting has revealed a cool combo between certain S4/S5 cards that we want highlighted in the Spotlight Cache
– An issue pops up with an unreleased card and we have to delay it
It’s tough to make one swap that balances everything out, so if we want to make one swap, chances are we’ll either need a few swaps to really balance out everything, or we should remove a card and replace it with one that’s ‘on the bench’. And both of those lead to a strong potential to wreck plans and disappoint players looking for that one card we happened to change.”
Q: With the new bundle that gives 50 tokens (for players who has a 50 token balance), will players be stuck with a 50 token balance if they buy this who weren’t previously stuck with a balance of 50?
A: Tucker “We’ll have a few bundles with the token count ending in 50, so don’t worry about it permanently getting you stuck in 50-land”
Q: What card balance design would you enjoy the most from a player perspective, that you know better than to implement from a designer’s perspective?
A: Addison “As not a member of the design team I don’t know if I ‘know better,’ but I often dream of a day where Korg and Rockslide send rocks to the opponent’s hand directly rather than their deck. Think of the ludicrous possibilities!
‘Enjoy your three rocks, two sentinels, and a Widow's Bite!’
Ronan fans would be eatin’ good.”
Q: How do you pick which cards get vfx first? Is it based on popularity, need for a vfx cue, which vfx would look the best, or a combination?
A: Glenn “A combination. We have a backlog that’s triaged and worked through based on time available.”
Q: I got Agatha from Daily Bugle and it ended my turn for me super quickly. Is this new change intended for players who didn’t want Agatha?
A: Glenn “The intent for the timer adjustment was that it’s only active if the player included Agatha in their starting deck. We’re investigating some wrinkles.”
Q: Marvel Snap has been out for a while. Sometimes, when you’re working on a project for a long time, your dreams start to reflect that. Have any of you found yourselves dreaming of your job, Marvel Snap, or any of the Marvel characters since you’ve started work on this project?
A: Glenn “Oddly enough, I completely stopped dreaming shortly after high school and haven’t for over a decade now. I do often wake up with card designs (and occasionally entire games) in my brain though, so something’s going on up there. If memory serves, the structure for Phoenix Force and Grand Master were both conceived this way.”
Q: How do you choose which cards to buff, when you have cards like Kang and Crossbones who see no play at all?
A: Glenn “We change cards based on a variety of factors–how fun the design is now, how popular the character is, what we’d like to change about the metagame, how good our idea is, how much time we have to execute or test it, etc. Kang is a tricky one, as we have a lot of work sunk into him and he has a very strong in-game identity. Ideally, we would like to find a change that maintains both as much as we can, but nothing has worked out yet.”
Q: Will there be a spending track for the webshop this month?
A: Stephen “We have been monitoring how the community has engaged with the milestone rewards and have decided to pause it for now and reallocate those rewards into other places. The Vibranium Powered Rewards are one of the new areas we are exploring and plan to try other experiments on the web shop in the future too. We’ll monitor the impact and feedback about the milestone rewards, vibranium powered rewards, and future web shop experiments. Please share your thoughts on these! Its super helpful to us as we decide what goes into each season.”
Q: What is the possibility we see more symbiotes in the game soon?
A: Stephen “We have to resupply our coffers of brains and chocolate before we can bring in more symbiotes, but I am pretty sure we have a shipment on the way. We’ll share more in the future when that shipment comes in.”
Q: What is the difference between card that copy or remove “text” vs copy or remove “ability”?
A: Glenn “They are synonymous; it’s inconsistent, in part because we’re not 100% sure which is clearer. We use text more often now, though.”
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: Is there a rough timetable we could know about the release of Character Mastery?
A: No direct answer for you, but the roadmaps have been fairly consistent: Character Mastery falls into the “coming soon” section, which means it is almost ready to launch. Usually these come pretty soon after the announcement (like within 3 months). The “in development” section would be content with a less predictable timeline.
Q: Will you add variants for tokens that created by cards? It feels wired when buying a card variant and the token remains default looking.
A: There have been a token art created for Korg’s rocks, as well as Squirrel Girl’s tokens. They were for bundles though and aren’t set to return. More token art has been suggested to be in the works by the devs, but as Glenn has stated, tokens are “resourse intensive” to develop, so I wouldn’t expect them to appear in the regular variant pool.
Q: Why doesn’t the team lower the costs for move cards?
A: As Glenn stated in last week’s edition, “move cards at lower Costs are already fairly successful”. The team is making these cards higher costs in an ongoing effort to build a move archetype that uses big cards. The Spider-man 2099 change was “a test” according to Glenn, so if that test fails, they can try new ideas.
The team also has expressed concerns on move decks becoming too strong due to being unpredictable. Making more move cards be cheap might increase this issue in their playtesting. Glenn explains more here: “The threat [move decks] poses isn’t 100% one of game balance. Part of the core fun of SNAP is making the placement of cards on locations an important choice, and move decks (for the pilot and the opponent) can negatively affect that. It’s similar to why we don’t make it easy to disable locations.”
Q: Why didn’t my question get answered?
A: First of all, thank you for all of your questions each week! While many of you ask questions, not all of them get answers for different reasons. Many of your questions are considered “suggestions” or “feedback” and get removed from the q/a channel. Other questions don’t get new answers because an old answer already exists that is deemed relevant (that’s where I try to answer for you with context from previous developer answers.)
With all of your great questions each week, I don’t want you to think your questions are being ignored or missed. Keep your questions coming in the comments, and we will see you in the next edition!
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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