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: will we see more events like Power Couples, what is the purpose of Series 4 and 5 cards, why don’t new cards get new variants, 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 of the Power Couples Valentine’s Week event (the first Imbalance Patch) and the new Series 5 card Cull Obsidian! If you don’t know if this card is worth a Spotlight Cache, make sure to check out our weekly Spotlight guide, our Cull Obsidian guide, and how it’s performing so far with out Bonus Challenge guide!
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: With the recent change to Beast and the functionality of Black Swan, are ongoing cost reduction cards like Zabu, Sera, and Revonna going to get changed to On Reveals?
A: Glenn “It’s an available dial for cards. It’s neither something we’re updating all old cards to match nor something we expect to use exclusively in the future, just more often than we had.”
Q: Why did you pair Daredevil with She Hulk instead of Elektra for the power couples?
A: Glenn “We recently buffed Elektra by 1 Power, and she’s a significant card for new users, so changing her multiple times in a short span of time is undesirable for us. Plus, they have very little synergy with one another, while She-Hulk and Daredevil are a little more useful.”
Q: Why aren’t Thor/ Jane Foster or Jean / Cyclops power couples?
A: Glenn “We liked the idea of Jean/Cyclops/Wolverine as a triangle, but for our first attempt here we decided to keep things simpler. We also wanted to select a manageable mix in quantity (10 couples) and didn’t want to substantially augment already existing strong decks too much (Thor and Jane are already strong enough together).”
Q: Was Cull Obsidian supposed to be a Series 4 card since the notification said it was a Series 4 card?
A: Glenn “Cull is a Series 5 card, the notification was in error.”
Q: Why does the Power Couple bonus still apply if the card was leeched?
A: Glenn “If you play a qualifying card before Leech goes off, the Power Couple bonus sticks because it was already earned. This is no different than other triggered effects–the output isn’t dependent on the ability remaining on the card once it’s been triggered.”
Q: How has the Hulkbuster change effected destroy decks?
A: Glenn “It’s hard to say how much the impact the Hulkbuster change specifically had–there are many variables–but Deadpool decks got slightly worse and Hulkbuster got (very) slightly better overall, which were our goals.”
Q: Why does Alioth exist as a card? Isn’t it bad for the game to have a deck that races for priority just to remove your final turn?
A: Glenn “Prior to Alioth, the dominant strategies in SNAP were by far based around throwing priority and either Shang’ing all your opponent’s big cards or attacking two lanes ‘from the shadows’ with a lot of Power hiding in your hand. The most successful ‘proactive’ decks tended to either be Lockdown, Shuri, or Galactus. Except for Galactus, even those decks would often prefer to throw priority.
We wanted to create more tactical diversity than that metagame offered, and Alioth was one of the ways we decided to do that. Alioth has had a massive impact, including preying upon some of the above decks and creating room for more decks based on strong 4 and 5-Cost cards, or even fragile synergies like Phoenix and Jane Foster.”
Q: Why was there no power couple for Luke Cage and Jessica Jones?
A: Glenn “We had to draw a line somewhere, they just didn’t happen to make that cut.”
Q: Are you able to talk about Captain Marvel’s metrics? Has she performed well, or may she could return to being a 4/5?
A: Glenn “I think it’s more likely than not we’ll see 4/5 Captain Marvel again.”
Q: How has Spider-Man 2099’s performance been after his change to 5/9?
A: Glenn “2099 has been decidedly stronger at 5/9 than he was at 4/6, and his play rate is a bit better.”
Q: I recently got Disctrict X as a location, and my turn timer rapidly ended. Did the new Agatha change make this happen despite her not being in my hand?
A: Glenn “Yes; this is a bug we’re resolving.”
Q: If you were a Marvel Snap card, what would your text be?
A: Nicki Broderick “Senior Producer – 3/3
Randomly add 1 to 3 ‘Meeting’ tokens to your opponent’s side of this location.
(“Meeting” token removes 1 energy from your total Energy).”
Addison “Addison [2/4]
‘Sometimes this is a 2/6. Sometimes this is a Rock. Most of the time it’s a 2/4. On rare occasions this will change sides when played.'”
Other Questions
Q: Are we not getting an OTA this week?
A: Glenn “No; we’ll resume our normal OTA schedule on 2/29.”
Q: Are there any plans on changing the random Series 4/5 section of Spotlight caches? New players who don’t have many Series 4 or 5 can still get duplicates and get only 1,000 tokens despite having a small collection.
A: Stephen “The random 4/5 is definitely on our watch list of things we would like to change. I have no ETA for a change at this time and we aren’t ready to share details on what the change would be yet.”
Q: Does the auto deck builder take CL into account?
A: Glenn “No; I’m not sure why your CL would meaningfully affect the way you should build a deck.”
Q: How do you decide on the music for a season; how do you create the theme? And how did you get into music?
A: TheChrisAlan “I always start by taking a look at the art and style of the season, the new cards, cardbacks, everything really and just try to get a good sense of what the overall tone is. I’ll then look for references, is this season a reference to a specific movie or does the season pass card have a show, stuff like that to see if there is any music I can reference. It’s nice when there are references I can study and pay homage to as well, however that isn’t always the case.
I have a background in guitar, but I learned piano as well, which is very important for writing these new songs! I use a lot of different instruments, whatever the music calls for! This season specifically felt like it called for some intergalactic synthesizers based on the visual stylings!”
Q: Have you considered adding a new keyword “trigger” for cards that don’t fall into the category of on reveal?
A: Glenn “We have. One of the biggest reasons we’ve avoided it is that word doesn’t align with our philosophy around accessible language that’s easy for people who aren’t already CCG veterans to quickly learn and understand.”
Q: With the super positive feedback of the couples event, do you have plans for more events like it?
A: Glenn “It’s quite a bit early to ‘call it’ but we do intend to use this event to evaluate the potential for future events.”
Q: Did the event changes apply to all players and regions? If so, will you use this to test if new keywords work well with new players?
A: Glenn “The event is everywhere. We’re going to monitor its impact for a variety of player cohorts, including newer players.”
Q: With the live couples event happening, who is your favorite marvel couple?
A: Glenn “I’ve always been a sucker for Daredevil and Elektra, personally–just a very rich history with a lot of interesting conflict.
Spider-Man and Black Cat are up there for me too. They’re a very entertaining pairing and I really enjoyed them in the original animated series as a kid.”
Q: When you play a card effected by power Couple, there is a minor vfx that plays. Will future events like these have vfx effects to match the theme?
A: Glenn “For this first event, we committed to a smaller scope in order to better evaluate arranging future events. Assuming we continue doing them, we expect to make them better experiences every time, including via VFX.”
Q: Will you use the data from the Power Couples event to evaluate possible buffs for cards?
A: Glenn “We’re not using this event to evaluate future balance changes, though it could wind up informing them incidentally.”
Q: Could we see Power Couples be a permanent thing?
A: Glenn “We have some ideas about other temporary event structures, but this precise execution isn’t on the table to be permanent.”
Q: Does the team ever edit splits on released cards? The new Thanos split doesn’t seem to like up quite right in the lettering.
A: KentErik “we do go back sometimes and re-adjust splits. we’ll take a look at this one”
Q: When looking at the metagame, do you only look at archetypes when looking at decks/deck variations? Or do you slice along larger classifications?
A: Glenn “Our data clusters the decks based on content, performance, timing, and player cohorts. It’s the design team’s job to evaluate more nuanced similarities and differences relative to our own goals.”
Q: What is the purpose of Series 4 and Series 5?
A: Stephen “This is an awesome question and one that has been part of many of our conversations over the past 6+ months since spotlight caches released. The original design intent of Series 4 vs. 5 was to make cards more accessible over time. After the Token shop launched with the exception of a few cards on initial Token shop launch all new cards launched as Series 5. After a specific period of time they would decrease to Series 4 then another period of time decrease to Series 3. So the core purpose of Series 4 has always been to make a card cheaper and more accessible. It is still achieving that design goal due to its token cost primarily.
We have discussed combining series 4 and 5 or adding another series between Series 3 and Series 4 many times, but the complexity of making those changes in a live game environment have outweighed the benefits to the players or the game so far. In general we are hoping to avoid major economy redesigns because the response to those so far have been quite negative even if they provide access to more cards faster and cheaper. We do hope to make improvements to the spotlight cache itself at some point in the future to give more exciting reasons to want to open it each week.”
Q: Why are new cards releasing without new variants (except for the spotlight variant)?
A: Stephen “We would love to include an additional variant in the shop for new card releases. This is a function of how quickly we can make variants and how many variants we need to make sure the Spotlight Caches work as expected. We hope to include more variants on initial card launch in the shop again over the next few months.”
Q: Is there a character out there in the Marvel multiverse that you *don’t* plan on adding for a very long time?
A: Glenn “Yes, but I could only really disappoint someone by naming such a character, so I won’t.”
Q: Have you ever thought of making your own original character, or is that outside of the realm you can achieve?
A: Glenn “That would be cool, I’d be psyched about such an opportunity.”
Q: What does the team consider to be the most complex card for players to understand?
A: Glenn “I think Phoenix Force is probably our most complicated card, or at least among them. It requires a lot of game knowledge to understand how to maximize it, and even more to understand nuanced gameplay synergies.
Q: What was a mechanic that was looked into, but determined to be above Snap’s Complexity threshold?
A: Glenn “Most of our complexity discards are a result of text length or the ability just getting too twisted to intuit its function. We did recently experiment with some designs trying to ‘craft a card’ that proved too difficult for playtesters to understand within our text constraints.”
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 it intentional that the hammers specifically buff Thor and BRB, even when Iron Lad copied the text?
A: Yes, Iron Lad copies the ability to shuffle a hammer into your deck. The Hammers both state they buff Thor /BRB. Iron Lad copies the text, not the name of the character. On the other hand, if you play Morph that becomes Thor or BRB, the “Morph” is now Thor / BRB and will get the buff from the hammer.
Q: Wouldsecond dinner be open minded to helping players reach their goal of collecting variants from specific artists, including from past bundles, if players were willing to spend the resources to do so?
A: Stephen “In general our philosophy is not to bring them back just like a clothes collection in a retail store shifts over time. We have not re-run a variant bundle yet and have no plans to at this time.”
Q: Why did Kraven get a boost in power after Valkyrie activated, even though the cards were moved before her On Reveal triggered?
A: Glenn “Moved cards’ locations are changed immediately, regardless of the order they’re moved in. However, any effects caused by that movement resolve in the order in which cards were moved and/or staged from hand, such as the triggers of Dagger and Vulture.
Think of it as analogous to playing a card from your hand. They all show up staged face down, then are revealed in order and resolve any effects at that time. Moved cards all show up staged at their new location, then resolve in order.”
Q:Shang Chi has been a metagame tyrant ever since launch, what would it take metagame wise for him to receive an America Chavez like rework?
A: The amount of weekly Shang-Chi balance questions that are asked on any given week are pretty high, but the devs have made their thoughts clear on the matter. Shang is an important balance knob in the game to keep decks in check that aim to snowball power early (see Lockjaw Thanos for example). If you take away that balance check, you remove not only a counter, but a tension point of a match. Currently the meta favors big cards, so Shang-Chi is much more common in decks to counter these decks. The devs have nerfed Shang destroy 10 Power (instead of 9), but Shang will likely never see a total rework without other cards to take his place as a tech card.
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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