Developer Update for the Week of February 24, 2024: Corvus Glaive Edition (35+ Questions)!

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 are developers avoiding a new economy, will power couple events return, do complaints factor in to buffs or nerfs, 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 card Corvus Glaive! If you don’t know if this card is worth a Spotlight Cache, make sure to check out our weekly Spotlight guide, as well as our Corvus Glaive 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: Is there a card that you think is very unlikely to ever change?
A: Glenn “Rock is probably the safest bet.”

Q: Do you know why more people are playing Hela lately? And is she becoming problematic?
A: Glenn “I think the weakening of Professor X, combined with strong decks either being linear with no counters or being excessively reliant on counters Hela can ignore, has given Hela a window. Internally, our data doesn’t suggest Hela wins a lot more often (small increase recently) but its higher cube rate does imply it’s a deck players don’t like retreating against.”

Q: Now that Corvus Glaive is out, he is a better version of Hellcow. Are there any plans to buff Hellcow like adding targeted discard?
A: Glenn “We’re fairly unlikely to push harder on targeted discard without making it highly specific, as it’s already strong enough to fuel multiple decks.”

Q: Is there any chance Archangel could get his own card, maybe like to Bucky? Similarly, could we ever get a Bucky Cap or Rachel Summers Phoenix?
A: Glenn “There’s certainly a chance for all three of these, but no promises. Of these options, Rachel seems the most likely to me.”

Q: What is a card you think is most unappreciated and wish players would experiment with more?
A: Glenn “The answer right now is probably Spider-Man 2099, who has the lowest games played among cards with a positive winrate. Another one like that is Attuma, but he’s played about *5 times as much* as 2099.”

Q: What Cerebro deck is currently the best?
A: Glenn “Right now, 2 and 3 are fairly close–there’s even a fun-looking deck that splits the difference by playing Bast and Valkyrie in a deck that’s otherwise C2.”

Q: Was there another spell that you tried with Nico, but didn’t make the cut?
A: Glenn “We tried a version that added Energy on the following turn, but it was too awkward.”

Q: Why did you settle on the “useless” card being identified as a rock?
A: Glenn “I don’t know, since I wasn’t here. I thought it was weird, but rocks are everywhere, so it kind of makes sense given the range of locations we have. Vormir has rocks, Knowhere has Rocks, everywhere’s got some rocks.”

Other Questions

Q: Since you say there won’t be card rotations like other CCG’s, do you see events like the valentine’s day event as a replacement for rotations?
A: Glenn “I do think OTAs, events, and other innovations are all ways we can mitigate or eliminate our need for rotation. However, we’re not really evaluating rotation right now, just how we can make the game even better.”

Q: Do player complaints and reactions factor into if a card gets a nerf or buff?
A: Glenn ” ‘Sentiment’ feedback as we refer to it, doesn’t guide whether or not we take balance actions. It can impact how we prioritize that action, and it might help us pick exactly what kinds of action to take. But we have a variety of thresholds based on card performance to determine when something needs a balance change.”

Q: Why is the infinite tier of Conquest locked until the end of the season?
A: Glenn “Infinite Conquest opens at the end of each season. This helps make it exciting–like ‘the playoffs’–and also bolsters the matchmaking queue for a competition that can be fairly difficult to access.”

Q: With Black Swan being a 3/5 with an upside, does this say to you that you should reconsider the power arc 3-Cost cards?
A: Glenn “Technically, I think Black Swan herself says more about 1-Cost cards than 3-Cost cards, but we’re exploring ideas about both.”

Q: Do you plan to add avatars for ultimate variants?
A: Stephen “We plan to add them in the future when we improve the value that Ultimate variants provide (unique vfx, etc)”

Q: What is the status of ultimate variant revamp? I was looking forward to it, but it went down in priority on the latest roadmap.
A: Stephen “We still plan to improve Ultimate variants but decided to prioritize clans, events, mastery, and another game mode over it.  I want it as bad as you do!  We assess all potential features based off how many players it will excite, its cost to develop, and our confidence in how it will be received.  They fell below other features for now but there is still a ton of excitement at SD to do it.”

Q: Will you add the ability to purchase titles and Avatars? If so, what price will they be?
A: Stephen “Yes we are working on adding a section in the shop for them.  Price is still being iterated on”

Q: Will the “I survived nexus events” ever be corrected? I love it but the grammar annoys me.
A: Stephen “It is in reference to a feature we released during beta that was in reference to the Loki show.  It is primarily a joke at ourselves for the feature from beta.  It is one of my favorite titles too since I survived Nexus Events 😂”

Q: Are there any plans to add a “clear all notifications” button for all of those annoying red dots?
A: KentErik “Yea, in general the red pips for the collection on notifying cards is more-or-less meaningless as you get higher and deeper into collecting. we’ve got some ideas, but haven’t actioned on them yet.”

Q: Do you have any plans to ever change a variant’s rarity?
A: Stephen “We have no plans at this time to change a variant’s rarity”

Q: While it’s a running joke that “random” abilities aren’t always so random (like Sif discarding Hela always). Has there ever been a time when random events were accidentally coded to always happen a specific way?
A: Glenn “There was a bug the community helped us find a while back, that Black Bolt always discarded the card on the same side of the hand whenever there was a tie. This was because sorting the list of cards in-hand by Cost left it secondarily sorted by the turn it was drawn.”

Q: With the power couples event officially over, how satisfied are you with the event?
A: Glenn “Our goals were to introduce something interesting that players could enjoy opting into without necessarily feeling required to do so. First and foremost, we wanted to know if events like this were something exciting to players. We think it hit the mark pretty well in that regard.

We’re still evaluating next steps, but you can expect us to try some future events testing the space differently.”

Q: Stephen previously mentioned you want to avoid major economy redesigns due to negative feedback, despite positive results. Can you elaborate on that?
A: Glenn “Spotlight caches are substantially more generous than the token shop but have largely been met with negativity since its release.  Spotlight caches hit a rough spot where they are more generous, harder for us to create enough content to sustain (Spotlight variants), and seen more negatively.  It is challenging to make big changes to the system or give out more free rewards because of the generosity of spotlight caches.  Our economic design space is somewhat limited by them.  Our hope is to try to iron out the edges that feel bad and consider options to make it easier for us to create enough content to sustain it while finding other ways to open economic design space.”

Q: Why did you make the discard album only 9 cards when you have 3 other pixel discard cards that were left out?
A: Glenn “Albums are a new feature, and experimenting with variations is one of the ways we learn what players most enjoy. Turning a feature from good to great requires this sort of work.”

Q: Would you ever have a game mode that makes everything bigger like having bigger deck sizes, more rounds, more locations?
A: Glenn “It’s on the white board, so to speak”

Q: What is a statistic that would surprise people reading this?
A: Glenn “Since we adjusted Hulk, High Evo has never once been the best deck on any given week.”

Q: Opposite of the last question, is there a statistic that would be really obvious once you read it, like “yeah, obviously that would happen” moments?
A: Glenn “This is a fun ‘yeah, obviously’ one: The week we released White Palace, Agatha saw about a 12% winrate increase (mostly on the back of a single day). It’s the largest single-card winrate increase in that time frame we’ve ever had by far; next-best was probably The Thing when Gunny Patriot first emerged, which was around 8%.”

Q: Is there a deck that you or your team only knows off that nobody is really playing that has an absurd win-rate but it’s so unpopular you don’t bother adjusting it?
A: Glenn “Not right now”

Q: Was there ever a deck you knew was good, but didn’t adjust it? If so, what was it?
A: Glenn “Certainly, but they don’t last–usually, we just know first, and it becomes public over time. We never act to adjust a deck until it’s had time to shine, because one of our goals is to provide a space for emergent strategies. If we kill them before anyone gets to discover them, we lose out on the fun of harvesting what we’ve seeded.

Some of those decks would be original Black Bolt-Stature, Shuri-Kitty, the first Thanos decks, Bounce with Annihilus, and Jane Foster + Hit-Monkey. That last one turned out to just be me and some person I played against, but counts!

Q: Has your own testing for a deck ever made you realize it was so powerful that you had to nerf it before it got in the hands of the players?
A: Glenn “Yeah, that’s a lot of what we do. When you test content, it’s almost always correct to start strong so that you gain an understanding of whether the card is fun when it’s successful. Sometimes, you learn the real problem is something else–such as when playing Evolved Abomination with Death and She-Hulk taught us that the original functionality for Wave would threaten the long-term design space of Cost discounts.”

Q: What is the philosophy behind making cards with negative power?
A: Glenn “Negative Power is an unusual idea in and of itself. Most players expect their cards to provide Power. Because it’s weird, we deploy it sparingly and only in places where we feel it’s especially appropriate to the story the card is telling. We don’t consider it a ‘standard’ balance dial–for example, if we wanted to nerf Darkhawk, we wouldn’t make it a 4/-2.”

Q: What is your favorite deck to play?
A: Glenn “Nico and Phoenix Force are two of my favorite cards, so I’ve been playing that deck a lot lately (almost exclusively on my trip to Infinite). I took a break to try out a lot of Corvus brews, but I’m excited about doing that more once Proxima releases!”

Q: What is your least favorite cards are to play?
A: Glenn “Hm… my least favorite cards tend to be the ones that challenge SNAP’s fundamental fun, since making these cards weak is typically correct, but if they’re too weak you lose a lot of the excitement value gained from being transgressive in the first place. Adam Warlock, original Crystal, and Rhino are all in that space. Compare them to something like Agatha or Morph, who are weak but novel enough to make the trade.”

Q: If you were to release a new card mechanic, how would you introduce it without the first card(s) being awkward as a single release? Would you release a bundle of cards? Or use card reworks?
A: Glenn “I think with most mechanics, you start off with versatile and interesting enablers, then develop payoffs over time. However, using card reworks is certainly on the table, if we have creatively strong matches to the mechanic that aren’t succeeding with their current execution.

Never say never, but I don’t expect us to pursue large multi-card releases in the near future. In addition to it not being what we want to do philosophically, we’d have to reshape almost the entire content development pipeline to handle that kind of work.”

Q: Were there any previous designs for cards currently in the game that were found to be too complex?
A: Glenn “Definitely, we spend a lot of time exploring that line. We tried a variety of ‘reflective’ Echo designs before giving up, as the space was mostly weak but making it strong enough got weird.”

Q: Did any designs move from one card originally to a different card that is now in the game?
A: Glenn “I know this happened a fair bit before the game went live–for example, Captain America, Patriot, and Blue Marvel could’ve all been swapped around.”

Q: Why did you decide on 10hp for Conquest games?
A: Glenn “At 8 cubes, the game can be over in a single go, which is not the vision for Conquest as a game mode–ranked already offers that. We wanted a number that made snapping meaningful in a unique way. But we also wanted a game length that aligned with our vision for the pace of SNAP as a game. It turned out a very small amount of additional health sufficed for all of that.”

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: If we want to become an variant artist, what should we do?
A: Stephen “Hit up impulse139 on Twitter.”

Q: Any plans to add more ways to get emotes in the future?
A: Stephen “I am sure we will do this either as part of premium season pass or a bundle at some point.”

Q: Will you add more albums?
A: Stephen “More albums coming soon! …we are trying to get more in the game sooner than later.  Stay tuned.”

Q: Has the team ever thought about using the space from the Conquest mode variant (acquired after purchases) to become a completely new card?
A: No direct answer, but the devs have stated the additional card in Spotlight Caches are already increasing their workload. Adding another new card to the mix would likely be too much strain on development.

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!