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 Joaquin Torres Falcon and the launch of the new season! Coming along with the new season is a new game mode, Sanctum Showdown! Many questions reference this mode’s trailer, so be sure to check that out before reading.
If you don’t know if Joaquin Torres is worth Spotlight Caches, 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, Sanctum Showdown Questions, and Questions From You!
See all individual questions and answers updated in real time!
Card Specific Questions
Q: Is Gambit doing well or on your “cards to watch” list?
A: Glenn “No, he’s not performing particularly well. Certainly enjoying a high point, though.”
Q: The last OTA notes in other languages showed cards like Hela getting a nerf, but they never went live. Why did you cancel the changes?
A: Glenn “We ultimately made the changes we thought were best suited to the metagame of the given week, as we always do–if we thought a change was necessary, we would’ve made it. We always evaluate each OTA on its own merits.
Hela is actually a fairly novel case. We were happy with the Hela rework internally, and felt confident it wasn’t a lot stronger but was a much better design. However, we’re only human–we also couldn’t be sure we’d found the best possible ‘new Hela’ deck, and we needed to lock changes earlier than usual. So we prepared a nerf, just in case players surprised us with a lean green machine that had to be stopped. That didn’t happen, so there was no need to implement the change.”
Q: Are early game cards destined to he power-creeped, or do you plan to do a large OTA to bring those cards up to current standards?
A: Glenn “Similar to how most CCGs have starter decks, we have Series 1 and Series 2 to teach the game and its dynamics in a unique metagame. ‘Starter deck cards’ in CCGs are rarely designed or expected to keep par with new or even contemporary competitive content. Our Series 1 (and a lot of 2) content is the same in this regard–though we have several that do keep up, like Iron Man, Blade, Armor, etc.”
Q: Since U.S. Agent was a Captain America stand in, did the devs consider having Cap's Shield work with him as well?
A: Glenn “No–he’s not Captain America.”
Q: What Spider-Man characters can be summoned by Uncle Ben getting destroyed?
A: Glenn “Just Spider-Man, the 2/4 card.”
Q: How did you decide to make Cap's Shield start on the board? Did you ever consider it to be an On Reveal?
A: Glenn “We did try a variety of Sam and Shield combos, including On Reveal. There were a handful of factors that led us here. One was certainly novelty—we’ve all seen Maria Hill and Kate Bishop, so Game Start was a unique mechanical expression.
But the flavor was a lot of the draw for me. Sam’s story in the MCU is about coming to terms with what it means to pick up the Shield—using an On Reveal effect lost some nuance of that, because the Shield was coming from Sam once he was already in play. By starting with the Shield, there’s a vibe of it waiting for him to wield it that I personally loved, and it also offers a kind of mini-story when you play Captain America to the Shield before drawing Sam.”
Q: Did you consider making Redwing synergize with Falcon(s)?
A: Glenn “We did, but we wound up finding there was already a lot of support and that we were overdoing it a bit. The design we released was very popular internally—it actually started on a different card—so we moved it to Redwing when we decided to diversify the season’s gameplay more significantly across all the cards.”
Q: Why does the Brood in the latest bundle not show the token variants when played?
A: Glenn “A bug (ahem) and we’ll correct it. The intent is a matching token.”
Q: Is it intended that if you have both Sam and Cap's Shield on the Madame web location, then moving Sam disables the shields ability to move, or moving the Shield prevents you from moving Sam using Madame Web?
A: Glenn “It’s not intended, we’re looking into it.”
Q: Is it intended for Bullseye to not proc after he’s been scanned by Zola?
A: Glenn “Yes. I’m assuming you’re asking about activating after you stage Zola. Zola destroys the original and you didn’t activate the copies, so they won’t proc.”
Other Questions
Q: If you work on seasons several months in advance, how many new cards are being developed at a time? With 4-7 new cards a season, would you be working on around 20 at a time?
A: Glenn “We start work on seasons about 6 months before each season releases, so it’s considerably more–40 to 50.”
Q: Why did Move get target to hard for nerfs in the OTA, but Discard runs rampant based on data trackers?
A: Glenn “While we do target OTAs as close to their implementation as we can, there is still a meaningful delay. In this case, we locked the candidates for the OTA an additional week early, to accommodate Lunar New Year among some of our partners, which predated Bullseye’s release.
We expected Bullseye to boost a new Discard deck, and he did, But it’s also balanced, right now. Very popular, certainly–new cards can affect play rates significantly, but also temporarily. Neither the win rate nor the cube rate of the discard decks in vogue right now are concerning to us.
While we don’t favor decks, we do target ranges based on some characteristics of decks. But that’s not what happened here–we nerfed Move because it was the best deck by a clear margin, had been the best deck for several weeks, and the gap was widening.
Keep in mind that player-sourced data is also filtered by the kinds of players contributing it, creating a bias. No deck has ever exceeded 25% of any metagame in my recollection, and Discard is no exception.”
Q: How deep do you look into an archetype when you see it is doing too well?
A: Glenn “Once we know an archetype is overperforming, the primary pieces of data we look at in those cases are a) its best and worst matchups and b) its best-performing cards. The former helps us evaluate where and how the metagame is reacting to the deck–sometimes we can buff different decks to even the odds. But b) is more relevant, informing us which cards contribute most to the deck’s performance. We prefer to target nerfs at a given deck’s strongest cards.
That said, we also play a lot of SNAP and consume plenty of content, so we do often start with a frame of reference about what we think is going on. But we also always look at the data above.”
Q: Do you have any new cards with shared effects like Luna Snow or Crystal?
A: Glenn “Not explicitly planned, but as we find fun designs we’ll certainly consider them.”
Q: Are you aware some non-US players recieved the larger US based compensation because they used a VPN?
A: Glenn “We opted to distribute compensation with our primary priority being ensuring anyone affected by the outage would be compensated, rather than that players unaffected receive the correct compensation. If it were feasible to separate each group with 100% accuracy we’d have done that, but since that wasn’t the case we cast a wide net with the expectation that we’d be awarding some false positives in order to avoid false negatives.”
Q: Could we see a play history added to the game, or a way to see the opponent’s cards in hand that have been revealed?
A: Glenn “We’re working on a variety of in-game UI/UX improvement, including some logging.”
Q: Could we ever see a bounce card that sends your opponent’s card back to their hand?
A: Glenn “It’s much stronger in our game than most, since on turn 6 it removes the card entirely. We’ll probably make some, in the same way that we make a few cards like Shang-Chi, but not very many.”
Q: Why do new cards from events not match the theme of the current season, but rather match old seasons?
A: Glenn “We’ve been very agile with our development of game modes, and to support that effort Design has been working on extra cards for each season theme to ensure we had a surplus. This has also given us the flexibility of deciding which cards we want to release with each season as Series 5, rather than being locked in. I’m optimistic that as we continue improving our game modes’ live ops we’ll be able to do more uniquely suited collectibles.”
Q: Are we still getting a new roadmap soon?
A: Griffin “We’re definitely talking about our next iteration of the roadmap. The publishing changes have put a pause on that but we look forward to sharing more.”
Q: Why do I drop 700-800 CR after each season? Can I improve my MMR?
A: Glenn “We normalize SNAP points each season, with the goal being to both take into account players’ progress and growth while also creating a satisfying season journey. This reset is based on your MMR, which is internal and tracks your lifetime progress—it’s not identical to SNAP Points. MMR can be improved, but only through sustained improvement in performance.”
Q: Is a Series Drop still coming in Q1 of this year?
A: Griffin “Confirmed, its still coming.”
Q: Can you clarify if Madripoor is highest-cost or highest costed? Thank you.
A: Glenn “Like Silver Surfer and other effects checking cards in play, Madripoor checks for the base Cost of the card and ignores modifiers.”
Q: Are there any updates on when Snap will be back in the galaxy store?
A: Addison “I don’t know that we made a post elsewhere yet, but the game should be once again available on the Samsung app store as of today!”
Sanctum Showdown Questions
Q: Will the new game mode have banned cards?
A: Glenn “Yes, we’ll have a good bit more in fact. For example, anything like Captain Marvel that cares about ‘the end of the game’ basically won’t work, since the winner being decided is what will end the game in the mode.
A few other cards we deemed risks to the fun of the gameplay, so we’ve also preemptively removed them for the first run of the game mode: Debrii is the poster child on that count, along with some other clog cards and locations that are hard to play cards on.”
Q: Can you unlock every new event card? And is there a limit on the number of games you can play?
A: Glenn “It’s certainly feasible, but we built the Sanctum Showdown shop to be super robust and afford players with an excess of options. As for how many games you can play, we look forward to sharing more on that count soon–but as a hint, it’s kind of up to you!”
Q: Is there a limit on the number of turns in the new mode?
A: Glenn “We have a hard cap at 15 for technical reasons, but we don’t really expect anyone to hit it unless both players are trying to.”
Q: Will Juggernaut be banned since he can automatically win a location?
A: Glenn “He wouldn’t automatically win a location–there are plenty of ways to get 3 Power somewhere without playing a card. But yes, we did ban Juggernaut for this first run because we felt he would be too much of a staple.”
Q: Will the Sanctum Showdown board mat be avalible to use in other modes?
A: Glenn “At least for now, this board is unique to the game mode.”
Q: Can I still get Series 5 cards from the rewards if I own every Series 4 card?
A: Glenn “You can open Series 5 cards if you’re Series 4 complete, it just cares about whether you’re missing cards from either Series. However, there are only 4 to redeem.”
Q: Will the Series 4/5 reward avoid cards that you own a variant for, but not the base? Such as the winter Elsa Bloodstone variant?
A: Griffin “No, since the system is looking for base cards that you don’t own. Therefore, those are ‘Unowned Cards’.”
Q: If I am collection complete and redeem the Series 4/5 card reward, what will be the fallback reward?
A: Glenn “The current expectation is that these will use a PMV fallback reward. While things could change before the mode goes live, for now please be careful to ensure you’re redeeming the expected reward.”
Q: Is it possible for a free to play player to get all 7 cards from the new mode rewards?
A: Glenn “I would describe it as only *technically* possible that a F2P player earn 7 cards from Sanctum Showdown. I don’t personally expect anyone to do it, but I’d be super excited to see it. As I’ve said elsewhere, the shop is built to emphasize options.”
Q: What was the design process for the new mode?
A: Glenn “SNAP released before I joined the team, so I spent a lot of time thinking about it critically on my own—where it was strong, where it was weak, things I might’ve done differently, etc. I enjoyed locations like Asgard that twist players’ incentives without being as rigid as Crimson Cosmos and the like, because they get more interesting and exciting as you combine them together, not less. Once I was in the building, I sketched together a version of the game that used points to make turn-to-turn dynamics. It was fun, but we weren’t focusing on game modes at the time, so I shelved it—until I was tasked with designing a game mode.
I do believe the core gameplay of Showdown is robust enough to support its own game, with card and location designs more suited to it. I hope to design some of those for future runs!”
Q: Since the 3 new cards will be avaliable later as Series 4 cards, will the new variants and emotes be avalible again?
A: Glenn “They’ll be available in other places eventually. I don’t personally know that we’ve planned when or how yet, 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: I love the custom cards but they kinda clog up the collection screen sometimes. Any chance we can get a show/hide button for those?
A: You can favorite a variant for each card, then filter your collection by “favorites” to show only 1 copy of each card. The team is aware of collection bloat issues caused by splits and custom cards.
Q: Could we see a play history added to the game, or a way to see the opponent’s cards in hand that have been revealed? Like a deck tracker?
A: Glenn “We’re working on a variety of in-game UI/UX improvement, including some logging.”
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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