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 DRAX Avatar of Life, the latest patch, and the latest OTA! 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 DRAX Avatar of Life 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!
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: Seeing how popular Dragon Lord has been since release, are you happy with him? Or do you think he’s seeing too much or too little play?
A: Glenn “I think it landed just about where we expected.”
Q: Fin Fang Foom is supposed to be balanced as a “location winning card” since he costs 7 energy. Did you consider this balance element when used in High Voltage, where it’s significantly easier to play him?
A: Glenn “If we weren’t taking things like Star-Lord into account, he wouldn’t cost 7 Energy; the ability to play him as an element of balance. As for High Voltage, we dint account for it significantly in our seasonal development of cards. If something proves problematic, we consider banning it. But rarely would we start with that assumption or nerf a card to make it healthier for High Voltage specifically, at its expense in other modes.”
Q: Angela was once returned to her original 2/0 stats with +3, but was reverted quickly after once data showed she was too strong. Now with more counters like Shadow King, Deafening Cord, and even Fin Fang Foom, would you consider giving her stronger version another chance?
A: Glenn “We have, but an aspect of Angela’s strength is also how it affects the new user experience. It’s easy for ‘the best Angela deck’ to become the dominant strategy when she’s too strong, because many of the checks/competitors are not available to those players.”
Q: With so many cards getting a 1 Power buff, including Domino, why is Quick Silver still a 1/2?
A: Glenn “Quicksilver has found some roles at his current statline, such as Wiccan. We definitely wouldn’t want a world where many decks consider playing Quicksilver rather than more interesting 1-Costs that introduce diversity and variance into the game, so we’re leaving him be for a minute.”
Other Questions
Q: Is there any reason why there are no characters or skills that can discard cards in play?
A: Glenn “Discard is an action defined as moving from the player’s hand to the “graveyard” in our game system, so cards in play can never qualify.”
Q: Do you think it’s healthy game design for decks to skip an energy each turn in order to have an explosive turn 6?
A: Glenn “Certainly I don’t think we would want the dominant play pattern of the game to be everyone passing turn, but it’s fine to have as a variation and provides some unique texture.”
Q: Since many cards abilities are designed around a character first, what card ability would you like to see in the game one day if character was a factor?
A: Glenn “I’d love to have something in the space of Hearthstone’s Zephrys the Great that can vary its own result based on an intelligent understanding of the game state. But the hurdles to making it are in implementation, definitely not the creative elements–plenty of options there.”
Q: Are borders something players engaged in the game want as rewards?
A: Glenn “Yep. Borders are often among the most popular rewards in LTGMs (cards being the top, of course).”
Q: How are you collecting “engagement data” to suggest players like borders as rewards?
A: Glenn “We have several ways to monitor their desirability. Ownership rates/use, gold purchases, bundle accessories, redemption in LTGM shops, etc. We don’t collect a lot of direct feedback around them, but we do sample some—that kind of feedback is just harder to get a good sample on and more often biased by its source origin, relative to hard data.”
Q: A huge majority of the meta revolves around either Shou-Lau or the new Star-Lord. Even after seeing cards like the original Zabu dominate the game on release, why do you continue to release broken season pass cards?
A: Glenn “Your observation doesn’t align with what’s actually going on in the game. Nor are either of these cards at all comparable to Zabu in strength or dominance–nothing ever has been, and I don’t foresee that changing.
I’ve talked at length in the past about how and why we endeavor to release impactful Season Pass cards. In the long run, they support a larger variety of decks by virtue of having enough strength to stand apart, and in the short-term they ensure the metagame changes. It’s never our goal to make a given card so strong we’ll need to nerf it, but ensuring a card will ‘hit’appropriately does run a higher risk. Season Passes carry more weight than releases like Dragon Lord or Moonstone, which are ‘safe’ but also don’t create much change in the game.
TL;DR: Weak, boring cards are worse than strong, exciting ones, and the target is hard to hit perfectly.”
Q: Could share the number of hours per day the team is looking to get out of a player?
A: Glenn “We don’t have an explicit target for that. If we did, it certainly wouldn’t be measured in hours! I’m sure plenty of people enjoy playing Snap at that volume, and we’re happy to provide enough content to supply them–but they’re outliers vs. the average interest level of all active players.
We do measure what our average sessions, games per session, and minutes per session are under different conditions. This is important so that when we observe rises and falls, we can better understand what players find engaging when, and why. That lets us better shape our content, and has guided many changes around LTGMs over the last several months.
To head off the natural follow-up, I won’t be sharing those averages–that’s proprietary and relevant to other market interests.”
Q: Does the team actually play the live game? It might help balancing decisions instead of just relying on metrics.
A: Glenn “We all play the live game quite a lot, in addition to internal builds. Metrics certainly aren’t the only thing we look at–we read Discord, talk to players and creators, and factor in our own intuition and experience.
But me spending an hour playing a deck for 20-30 games isn’t going to receive the same kind of weight as looking at the results from every version of that deck for thousands of games a day at every MMR level. (Nor should it–that would be a very silly way to balance a game.)”
Q: Patches used to be a huge excitement point for the game with new features and announcements debuted. Since we haven’t had that in a while, can we get information like that again?
A: Griffin “We’ll be sharing more about our plans for 2026 soon (I’m working on it now!) but our patches won’t be the place where we announce major updates. We’ll be sure to share those details in stand-alone blogs or via other avenues.”
Q: Has there been any movement on distribution of the missing Sanctum rewards that some players have already received”
A: Griffin “We identified all impacted and set out rewards via inbox. If you feel like you were missed or some error occured, please reach out to CS who can assist you further.”
https://marvelsnap.helpshift.com/
Q: Snap Packs initially launched with the promise of adding themed packs with archetypes, designed to boost playstyles for players missing key cards. Do you plan on keeping that promise?
A: Griffin “We’ve been trying lots of different options in Featured Sets to see what’s popular. So far, the themed Variant Featured Sets have been a hit but we do have plans to bring back archetype sets in the coming weeks.”
Q: The final reward in High Voltage is double the requirement of the PMV in the second to last reward. It seems like nobody is reaching that goal, so do you intend to lower it?
A: Griffin “The final reward is intended as a stretch goal. That’s why the PMV is the second to last reward. I won’t share exact stats, but your assumption that few reach the final milestone would be correct. We do want players who really enjoy HV to have something to keep playing for if they finish the rest of the track quickly.
Would we consider reducing the requirements? We’re always taking a look and making adjustments to those type of things.”
Q: I received a random inbox reward for 3 rainbow refraction borders. Why were these sent out?
A: Griffin “There was a brief moment at the start of the season that some players who purchased the Season Pass on the Web Shop did not receive the 3 Rainbow Refraction borders alongside the S5 Pack in the Web Shop Bonus. We delivered those missing rewards to all we indentified were impacted.”
Q: Given the recent news of Discord changing their verification systems, are there any plans for you to change your communication methods?
A: Griffin “No plans for such a thing right now.”
Q: Is there a world in the near future where the team stops limiting themselves to 3 lines of text per card and fixes Galactus’s awkward, one-of-a-kind self-referential textbox?
A: Glenn “Having a novel template is not in and of itself something we consider problematic; plenty of other CCGs have examples of an unusual template choice on a high-profile card. We’ll prioritize updating text that we think is misleading or fails to match the in-game effect, but as Galactus is also fairly novel in what he’s doing there’s less risk of that.
And no, we don’t have any intention of using more than 3 lines of text at this time. Something that’s easy to forget is that our game is localized in several languages, and one of the reasons we keep it shorter in English is to ensure it can remain legible in those languages.”
Q: Is the red dot notification too powerful to be patched out? It has been an issue forever.
A: Griffin “The dreaded Red Pip! As far as I’m aware, the only remaining issue with the red pip notification is on the “Game Mode” tab on mobile. That issue has been fixed internally and is slated for a future release.
The other Red Pips should be clearable once investigated/interacted with. If there are other issues beyond what’s stated above, please share the bug with us and we’ll get it investigated.”
Q: Is it possible to repurpose art from skills into variants for characters?
A: Glenn “While we could possibly do that in some cases, we wouldn’t. Using the same art for mechanically distinct cards isn’t a line we want to cross.”
Q: Will Grand Arena’s shop still be open for an extra 48 hours?
A: Griffin “Yes! It will remain open until Feb 21 at daily reset.”
Q: Today’s patch and OTA update have been released. However, it feels like every time a patch goes live, new bugs are introduced. Even after today’s update, new issues have appeared and are causing inconvenience. Why does this continue to happen without exception?
A: Griffin “This is the reality of game and software development. While we do our best to test and QA every update, within minutes after launch the player base has already put in more hours of play than we could ever achieve. Therefore it’s inevitable that bugs will make it through our testing and go live without being discovered.
That said, we’re working on improving many elements of Snap that should help us reduce these issues long term.
Q: You mentioned that you are still collecting data. Is it possible to share that data transparently with players?
A: Griffin “Probably not, but that’s up to the design team to get into what they’re comfortable sharing and what they’re not. I can’t see a scenario where we’ll ever be sharing data at high and specific level due to many factors including the fact that it would take a lot of the team’s time.
That said, you can search through team-answers and previous OTA blogs where Glenn and the team have shared lots of interesting data points.
Q: Wouldn’t open communication and a willingness to improve together be better for the long-term health of the game?
A: Griffin “We agree! That’s why we’re here every week and provide balance updates twice a month which is quite unique for a game like SNAP.
As always, keep your feedback coming. If you feel like a card is too strong, let us know!
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: Whenever we “report a bug”, is there any way to check on the status of that report, or see if the devs looked in to it at all?
A: While I doubt you will get any personal response to your specific bug report, the Snap discord has a “bug report” channel where devs do respond and update on many reported bugs.
Q: Why do we still have the same rocky stone play location?
A: Game boards/ playmats / backgrounds have been talked about before, and have been added alongside limited time modes already! While the ranked and Conquest quest modes keep the “asteroid” look, this could potentially change since the tech is already implemented. If the devs give any further information on this question, I will definitely update / include in the next edition.
Q: Why is the fallback reward for PMV with all variants owned just 200 gold?
A: Just recently, Griffin responded to another player asking a similar question regarding fallback rewards for “rare variant complete” players:
Griffin “You definitely are an outlier but that doesn’t mean your feedback or experience is worth any less.
While this has been the case for a while, I’ll pass this feedback on to the team to discuss further!”
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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