Developer Update for the Week of February 3, 2024: Beta Ray Bill Edition (55+ 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: Was that Hulkbuster change a buff or a nerf, was Venom almost nerfed, will Character Mastery count your bundle 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 new card Beta Ray Bill! If you don’t know if this card is worth a Spotlight Cache, make sure to check out our weekly Spotlight cache guide, as well as our Beta Ray Bill guide! This edition also comes after the latest OTA. If you missed what has changed, check out the OTA notes first as they are heavily mentioned in this edition.

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: Did you set Grand Master to 0 Power because he was too strong in internal playtests?
A: Glenn “We liked 0 Power because it opened up some interesting options for Ravonna and Mister Negative, while also being emblematic of his MCU portrayal as a guy whose presence seems fairly harmless but is somehow very dangerous. I would say it’s still too early to put a lot of stock in his metrics.”

Q: Is there a reason why rocks are a 1 Cost card?
A: Glenn “Yeah, they are supposed to feel meaningfully damaging to have.”

Q: With Dracula now being used in Destroy decks to target Knull, what are your thoughts on this interaction? Is Knull still in the process of being adjusted as an Ongoing card with unique interactions with other cards?
A: Glenn “Yes, our adjustment to Knull’s functionality is in active development. It is fairly complex, since we want to be able to use it in a variety of cases.”

Q: Why does Nico not create a spell when created by Shanna?
A: Glenn “Nico needs to be in your hand or deck to trigger her spell-setting effect each turn. Shanna adds her directly to the board from nowhere.”

Q: What are the designer’s thoughts on Shang Chi? Are there any plans to shake things up in the “power counter” space with balance changes or new cards, or is he just seen as a “necessary evil” or a cursed problem?
A: Glenn “Shang-Chi is certainly not a cursed problem (one of my favorite GDC talks). For readers uninterested in the video, a cursed problem is a design conflict rooted in two opposing goals–a single card can’t actually fit that description, it’s largely systemic or structural. One could perhaps ask whether single cards being able to make location-winning amounts of Power in a game built around the fun of incrementally improving your locations creates a cursed problem… but that answer is clearly ‘no,’ in part because of Shang-Chi. ‘Necessary evil’ could be an accurate descriptor, depending on how you define evil.

Shang-Chi’s play rate is noteworthy, but his ownership % also dwarfs all the competitors as a Series 2 card. He has a popularity advantage those cards wouldn’t surmount even if they were equally strong. But Shang-Chi is purposefully stronger, so that players with lower collection levels have a tool they can use against the wide range of strong cards beyond their reach and thus remain competitive.

It’s telling that Shang-Chi has an almost flat winrate and a cube rate outside the Top 50 (and yes, we remove mirror matches for those). His presence is a key element of gameplay to consider, but it’s not insurmountable. Shang’s efficacy isn’t as broad as you suggest, with tons of decks capable of ignoring him, ducking priority to avoid him, or taking priority to counter him with some other play.”

Q: How has Blob performed after his OTA change?
A: Glenn “Blob’s still performing well, but a far cry from his previous metrics. His cube rate was reduced by over 50%, and his winrate is in a competitive mix rather than standing alone atop the mountain.”

Q: Does the team consider the current Leech to be as problematic as the old Magik? Is there any intent in returning him to an On Reveal so he can have a counter?
A: Glenn “Not really, though I suppose there are some passing similarities. Magik’s issue was that the ever-present threat of extending the game punished players for a default good play, which was filling the locations on turn 6. It gave a player the ability to play the final turn (7) with perfect information too often. Leech doesn’t offer that—you don’t know which cards have been affected, or which card your opponent may have drawn, and those can matter with cards like Infinaut around.

We wouldn’t return to an On Reveal without a rework, as resolving Leech early in the game proved to be both strong and very frustrating.”

Q: Is there any chance, that someday Loki transforms the copied opponents cards into random variants (or the opponent’s) instead of just base cards?
A: Glenn “Yes, we would prefer it work that way.”

Q: Is Ultron on your radar for a 6-Cost card that never sees play?
A: Glenn “He’s on our radar.”

Q: With talks of a possible Elsa buff, can we get any confirmation about it while she is in the featured spotlight cache?
A: Glenn “Yes, we have an improvement to Elsa already implemented in a future patch.”

Q: As a four cost, the bounce potential with Werewolf is fairly limited. Would it be out of the question to make Werewolf By Night a 3 cost again but with zero power?
A: Glenn “He is currently bouncing around our Top 25 cards on winrate, so I’m inclined to leave him where he is.”

Q: With the current meta state in a generally good place, do you think this is due to the balance process being fine tuned? Have you evaluated what makes the meta land in a good place?
A: Glenn “While public perception can vary, we have achieved states of balance measurably equivalent to the period we’re enjoying right now multiple times. We don’t aim to actively maintain specific states, but to allow (and in some cases, propel) the metagame to fluctuate within tolerable limits. That will necessarily find calm waters from time to time, until the next wave swells.”

Q: Will Taskmaster get the Dracula treatment? Their abilities were very similar before Dracula’s change (they both copied a card’s power)
A: Glenn “I don’t expect to do that. Taskmaster’s fantasy is about mirroring someone’s strengths perfectly, and the card isn’t a buff candidate.”

Q: Why is Stormbreaker a 1 power, but Mjolnir is a 0 power? Will Mjolnir see a buff to 1 power?
A: Glenn “No, we made the change in part to explicitly differentiate the weapons and in part because it seemed like a fun way to nod at some MCU moments about which weapon is better.”

Q: Is the Spider-man 2099 change a buff or a nerf?
A: Glenn “We’re not certain if or how much of an improvement it is, but it’s meaningfully different and (as you note) the previous card was already underplayed. There’s not a lot lower to go, but we’d like to learn what a change like this might do, so we’re running the experiment.”

Q: Why wasn’t Luke Cage made a 3/2 or a 3/3 to keep his playability in Cerebro?
A: Glenn “We’re trying new things–that’s one of our goals with OTAs.”

Q: Why did you change Kingpin if you are making Luke Cage global again?
A: Glenn “Our OTA changes and balance philosophy value changes that create flux in the metagame. That will reward and punish different cards at different times.”

Q: How is the Hulkbuster change considered a nerf to Deadpool when it opens up more flexibility?
A: Glenn “We recognize the 2/3 Hulkbuster is more efficient, but don’t believe that offsets the lost Power. If we’re wrong, we’ll likely revert and change something else.”

Q: Do you think you’ll ever add a card that has synergy with Domino and Quicksilver to give them some play in matches beyond early games? Maybe something like an ongoing card that gets +2 power for every turn where you spent all available energy.
A: Glenn “Stay Tuned”

Q: Why not make Spider-man 2099 like Gladiator and be a 3/8 that destroys a card?
A: KentErik “but unlike gladiator, he’s destroying a card a player spent energy for. we’ll keep an eye on him post OTA and see how things shake out”

Q: Are High Evo decks too popular?
A: KentErik “looking at our data, it’s currently well within our accepted limits. but random is random (in the terms of matchmaking into random opponents), and you can definitely hit long streaks of one type of deck”

Q: Was the change to Ghost a buff or a nerf?
A: Glenn “This is a buff. A 3/5 is generally a good bit stronger than a 1/2, and Ghost’s effect doesn’t meaningfully contradict that.”

Q: Why does Kang have a cost at all?
A: Glenn “If you can play Kang the turn you draw him, he nets you a free card draw–this is a very strong bonus that would see play in most if not every deck. An Energy cost restricts which turns Kang can be drawn and converted into a free card.”

Q: The patch notes on marvelsnap.com list a Venom change from 3/3 to 4/5 but the Server Updates notes and the changes in-game don’t reflect this. Was this an oversight or are there plans to implement this change with next week’s patch?
A: Glenn “Sometimes, we prepare more changes for a given OTA than we may ultimately publish, because it takes time to localize the notes and QA the updates. This allows us to gather the maximum amount of data while remaining flexible on what changes will go live.

In this case, the notes for a change we prepared and removed just slipped through onto one of our postings briefly. It isn’t currently planned for any future patches or OTAs, though we may consider it again.”

Q: Are there any plans to make more 0 cost cards?
A: Glenn “I imagine we’ll make more, but we don’t set out trying to. The design space is very shallow and tends to contribute to negative patterns.

Fun fact: Martyr was a 0/3 at one point.”

Q: You mentioned Martyr was once a 0/3. Why not return her to 0/3 to increase the risk reward of playing her?
A: Glenn “It didn’t turn out to be interesting. One of the elements of the effect we liked was that Martyr being in play could be dynamic for the opponent, the way Captain Marvel can be. At 0-Cost that disappeared unless we added another ability to avoid playing Martyr on turn 6, and even with that it was mostly gone.

I’m cool with saying I think we missed with Martyr. I don’t think recosting the effect is a fix.”

Q: With the unreleased Venom change, did you consider the damage it would cause to Phoenix Force?
A: Glenn “The damage it would do to Phoenix was a consideration, yes. We viewed that as a cost we’d pay to address a larger issue.”

Q: In the trailer, there are two zero power locations and she goes to the leftmost. In the case of a tie, does she choose randomly or go from left to right when “choosing?”
A: Glenn “If the locations are equivalent, she picks at random.”

Q: As far as I know, a vanilla 3-cost card’s power is 4, 4-cost is 6. In the latest Black Order trailer, we can see Black Swan is 3/5 and Proxima Midnight is 4/7. However, this two cards has zero downside. What was the design choice in these power levels?
A: Glenn “The vanilla stat line in any game should be worse than stat lines you actually make when combined with their effect. In the case of 3/4 and 4/6, we believe both of those are (relatively) farther from playable than other stats. We expect to make future changes based on this premise, but in the interim cards like these will be fun to play with and help explore different ranges.”

Q: Does Cull Obsidian require that a 1-cost card be in play from the prior turn, or can you play a 1-cost plus Cull Obsidian in the same turn on the same location that doesn’t already have a 1-cost card in play?
A: Glenn “You can stage a 1-Cost on the same turn as Cull.”

Q: How does Hit Monkey interact with Supergiant?
A: Glenn “Hit-Monkey cares about the cards that were staged and revealed on the turn that his On Reveal triggers, so he’ll only see cards staged on turn 6. The interaction is identical to his current behavior with Invisible Woman.”

Other Questions

Q: Any plans to add synergy between characters and locations that they relate to?
A: Glenn “We like to add that kind of synergy mechanically, not explicitly. We don’t want to load cards up with lots of abilities, usually just one clean one.”

Q: Will you bring back the webshop event with the free credits and progressing deals?
A: Stephen “Because of the positive feedback about it we plan to bring similar bundles back in Feb and March.  We are still working on dates”

Q: Have you ever approached a card’s design with a mode-specific goal?
A: Glenn “We consider different modes as we work, but we don’t generally start with the premise of ‘design a card for ladder or Conquest.’ We just aim for fun, useful cards and evaluate them in the context of other modes.”

Q: What is the reason you use no ability cards for new players, when they ultimately will get abandoned until Patriot or High Evolutionary make them useful?
A: Glenn “Those cards exist to make the game easier to play and learn early on, as including them in the starting deck dramatically reduces the reading and memorization burden for players’ first few games. We expect players to abandon them as their collection grows and their deckbuilding grows more sophisticated.

This phenomenon with ‘vanilla’ cards is common in every card game–in fact, it’s the presence of things like Patriot and High Evolutionary as legitimate endgame strategies that is atypical for the genre.”

Q: If the upcoming Character Mastery should progress for a character if you own more variants for a card, does that include variants from bundles, season passes, or webshop rewards? Or is it strictly 700 and 1,200 gold variants?
A: Stephen “It includes all variants  for that character from all sources”

Q: Why does Ego behave erraticly like Agatha and not like a normal bot?
A: Glenn “If Ego played well, he would be a lot more like Ruins and a lot less novel. He is a purposeful (and infrequent) source of variance.”

Q: Do you use data for cards during featured location days?
A: Glenn “We remove featured location days from most of our analysis.”

Q: Why was the decision made not to use Elo, and what about your system makes it more suitable for snap?
A: Glenn “Is a little above my head, but my peers have worked in other games and designed different matchmaking systems and bring that experience with them. A meaningful element I do know about is the ability for seasonal MMR to “drift” from true MMR and provide players with an experience that’s more heavily based on what they’ve been doing lately, while ELO is basically always counting everything in a sense.

Q: On several occasions, I have a won a game for as many as 4 cubes, but still lost SP, something that is mathematically impossible with Elo. What causes this, and is it intended?
A: Glenn “You’re likely not losing SP in these instances; we have a visual bug created by the client failing to communicate with the server fast enough between the end of the game and postgame screen being created. This leads to the client grabbing a previous postgame screen repeating it. You can verify this is the case yourself by restarting the game and checking your SP in Ranked Rewards, where you should find it actually went up.”

Q: Is destroy nearing your thresholds for what’s deemed too strong or too common?
A: Glenn “Destroy has been the strongest deck since we nerfed Blob, and was the second-strongest deck during most of his rein. It’s held the perch a little too long and a little too well.”

Q: Glenn mentioned his favorite GDC talks in a previous question. Could you share more of your less popular favorite talks are?
A: Glenn “Sure, here are a handful of accessible ones:

Balancing Cards in Clash Royale, Stefan Engblom: https://youtu.be/bHLQQh8Ctu4?si=u6bMUMNMeqkD-Ucn

Building Games That Can be Understood at a Glance, Zach Gage: https://youtu.be/YISKcRDcDJg?si=gUkbnkIXnc-v-1TB

Designing Race for the Galaxy: Making a Strategic Card Game, Tom Lehmann: https://youtu.be/JcyyeAww2wc?si=ZHi85oSNpwh2GOQr

Designing Two Tasty Cores Three Times Over: The Case of Brawl Stars, Antti Summala: https://youtu.be/VSVAmf5LCuo?si=QpsFJvI7XHVM7vcO “

Q: Is the team satisfied with several “Skip, Skip, Magik, Big Card” decks? They don’t have much interaction early game, but just extend the game and slam down big cards.
A: Glenn “It’s a valid strategy; there are several. We’re happy with its general balance–Magik herself is especially disruptable given the popularity of Nico Minoru.”

Q: With talks of Destroy getting planned nerfs, is the game moving away from decks that are consistent, and more towards decks that could be good one week and bad the next?
A: Glenn “We have balance thresholds for decks and cards that determine outliers in performance. When something distinguishes itself as an outlier over a meaningful sample of time, we take measured action–that’s the key to our corrective balance strategy, and fairly typical of most live balance.

Another purpose of our balance changes is to create flux and change in order to ensure the metagame doesn’t just remain diverse, but also remains interesting every week. We don’t view this as chaotic, but it is purposefully disruptive. It is also purposefully impermanent–if we make a change and wind up disliking the results, we’re always willing to revert it or try something else. Both of these elements set SNAP apart from many other games in the genre.

We’re not predicting the future, just making educated guesses, but we prefer to make our guesses, learn, and let the results–even the “bad ones”–contribute to a dynamic play experience. Over time, we hope to reduce our regrets, of course.”

Q: Why nerf strong decks and cards when you could buff weaker ones to balance the meta?
A: Glenn “Balancing cards by constantly improving weaker ones isn’t a viable strategy for long-term metagame health–it just puts you on an endless path to power creep.

While elements of our process has changed, our core strategy for balance has not. It is based on a combination of objective analysis and playtesting experiences. We detailed it in this excerpt from a balance patch in 2023:

*Let’s talk about our general process for balancing SNAP. Every week, our design group looks at metrics for both individual cards and ‘clusters,’ the groups of cards that most commonly make up various decks.

For individual cards, we focus on win percentage when drawn, popularity, and cube contribution, the number of cubes a card yields.
For clusters, we focus on win percentage against the field, average cubes per game, the percentage of all games using that cluster, and its matchups.

Each of these values has tolerances, and that’s what determines whether we make a balance change. Exceeding one tolerance doesn’t mandate a buff or a nerf, but it does build the ‘watchlist’ you may have heard about. When a card goes on watch, we discuss potential changes and begin playtesting them, just in case. If things don’t improve on the live game, that’s when we’ll make the change.

But which change to make? Our goal is to find a version of each card that makes the game more fun, not just turn strong cards into weak ones. If one of our adjustments prevents too many players from enjoying their card, we’ll revisit it later.*”

Q: Other games usually give patch notes at least a day or two in advance. Is there a reasoning for you to announce these things right before they go live?
A: Glenn “My personal concern is that it can confuse players (announcing card changes that aren’t live) and will probably require double the notification (advance notice and live push). That, combined with our frequency, doesn’t seem like an improvement.”

Q: Would you ever make a card that gives you energy the same turn it was played?
A: Glenn “A good heuristic for game designers is ‘don’t make objects that create resources but cost none.’ I expect we’ll stick to that.”

Q: How often have you changed an OTA outcome like Venom before launch?
A: Glenn “I don’t think we’ve ever removed more than a single change, and only a handful of times. We’re fairly diligent in evaluating anything that we go to the effort of implementing in the first place.”

Q: Is the playerbase missing something? Why are you costing new move cards or move changes so high?
A: Glenn “Move decks built around smaller cards are already fairly successful, and have lots of great options with some additional future design space we’ve identified. We want to find more diversity, similar to Destroy having Deadpool, Phoenix, and Nimrod, or Discard having Apocalypse, Hela, and Black Knight. Most high-Cost payoff designs we like support would only be supported by the small stuff, but we want to create more decks than that.”

Q: Will there ever be an option to buy conquest infinite borders for cards?
A: Glenn “Those borders are a prestige reward for an achievement of meaningful skill. While we may make other borders for sale in the future, I wouldn’t want to sell the ones for Infinite Conquest—it would devalue the accomplishment they represent.”

Q: Are there any plans to add a claim all button for the collection track?
A: Stephen “We have plans to add this but no ETA right now.”

Q: Will there ever be a way to “recycle” unwanted splits?
A: Stephen “The way the split and variant systems works, if you removed an unwanted one you would be able to roll it again.  As a result, we want to add a way to condense the collection in the future to not show all of your unwanted splits or variants instead.  Custom Card (a new feature coming in an upcoming release) will eventually be used as a way to condense down the collection but that functionality will not be part of its initial release.”

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: Will there be a new card or rework made to help Apocalypse discard decks with Chavez no longer avaliable as a finisher?
A: KentErik “We think there’s exciting design space to explore to help bring back things like the Dracula+Apoc interactions and how Chavez empowered those, so we’ll be exploring those in the future.

Q: Any updates or things to show about the new splits?
A: Questions like these get asked a lot. After the latest roadmap was published, devs have answered these questions with simply “Stay tuned” or moderators referring questions to those previous answers. We likely won’t see more about splits until the patch they are included in is locked and ready for deployment.

Q:Do you ever plan on bringing back previous infinite level-reward card backs?
A: Stephen has commented that they “have no plans to revisit cardbacks”. The only exception to this is the Shield and Hydra cardbacks from the beta season. Nicki Broderick stated that “We’re still looking for a fair way to give players a chance to get the ranked rewards from our beta seasons.”

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!