Developer Update for the Week of January 11, 2023: New Card Downgrade Edition!

Hello all! Welcome back to this week’s breakdown of what’s happening over on the Marvel Snap official Discord! 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! For further information on what’s coming to Marvel Snap, check out the Development Roadmap:

Marvel Snap Development Roadmap 2023 – Future Updates

This week’s edition comes after the announcement of the new patch and how new cards will downgrade in series! A lot of the questions here reference the latest news drop about card downgrades, so make sure to read that announcement if you haven’t!

Marvel Snap Series Drop January 2023: First Edition Badge and Token Shop Improvement Announcement

In this edition, we get clarification on how downgrading will work. We also find out why Orka was delayed, how season pass cards will downgrade, if Series 4 cards will get First edition badges, and more! Answers to questions will be prefaced with the developer who said it. Answers and questions may be slightly rephrased for more clarity and ease of reading.

This Week’s Questions

Q: How does downgrading to Pool 3 effect token acquisition?

A: Ben Brode “All players open 100 Tokens. The 200-600 boxes are the fallback for when you have all of Series 3 unlocked. So in this case you’d get a card instead of tokens. (Until you’re S3 complete again)”

Q: What if I don‘t open my Collector’s Reserves till 31st of January? Will my unopened Reserves get updated to the new chances after the patch?

A: Ben Brode “Yes, correct. We only split pre and post token shop collector reserves. We are likely to change boxes to generate their contents when you unlock them but we don’t do that now.”

Q: If I pin a card in the Token Shop and it gets downgraded, will the pricing adapt or will I need to unpin and cycle it again?

A: Stephen “Pricing will adapt”

Q: With so many new cards and variants, and new variants confirmed to be dropping regularly, will the variant shop ever expand to more than 6 cards?

A: Stephen “Our plan is to make the variant shop smarter instead of larger. We will share more in the future.”

Q: If I don’t plan to buy the pro bundle, is there a way to hide it?

A: Stephen “We plan to move it to the bottom of the shop in a future update”

Q: For those of us curious, mind sharing what the issue with Orka was?

A: Ben Brode “IIRC, he was not marked as ‘collectable’ so if you purchased him, he wouldn’t actually show up in your collection. I believe we fixed it AND added a ‘unit test’ so that we can’t have this bug occur in the future with other cards.”

Q: Snapping at the last second of the turn timer is often optimal because it limits your opponent’s time to react. It also prevents your opponent from changing their play if they already pressed end turn. Is the team planning on addressing this strategy or is it intended?

A: Ben Brode “It’s apparently quite technically challenging to allow the ability to un-end the turn, but we agree that would be a great solve for this. We’ll keep trying to see what can be done here.”

Q: Will future bundles have collector tokens? Also will future season passes have collector tokens?

A: Ben Brode “I don’t know the deets about bundles off hand, but I will say that adding tokens to season pass is challenging because it’s available to all players, but the token shop and tokens don’t unlock until players hit CL500. In a way, credits and boosters convert into tokens by giving players more CL (which gives more tokens)”

Q: Wil cards released to Series 4 also get first edition badges? The announcement specifically mentions Series 5 will get it, but what about cards that were released in Series 4 for the first time?

A: Ben Brode “No, they will not receive 1st edition badges”

Q: Since Black Panther will go to Series 4 next month, can we expect the other season cards to get the same treatment? Basically, will every season pass card drop to Series 4 after 3 months?

A: Stephen “Yes Silver surfer will follow the same path next month”

Q: Will the season pass cards also get the first edition badge if you get it in the pass?

A: Stephen “Yes”

Q: Since you are already developing controller support, are you considering porting the game to consoles?

A: Stephen “It’s definitely something we are considering”

Q: Will there be an end date to the Pro Bundle?

A: Stephen “It has no end date at this time.”

Q: Do you guys plan on adding a special animation to Thanos?

A: Nicki Broderick “Yes, we’re working on this!”

Q: For clarification on how the new ‘200-600’ token system will work in reserves, will it be ‘you will ALWAYS gain 400 tokens over each bucket of 10 caches’ or does it mean ‘you should have ON AVERAGE keep gaining 400 token per cache if you track your token drops’?

A: Ben Brode “It’s the latter. For example we take 200, 300, 400, 500, and 600 and shuffle them up. I think we actually take multiples of them so there might be 2 or 3 copies each in there. So if they drop every 4 boxes, then you will have averaged exactly 400 tokens after 32 or something boxes”

Q: Were there any interesting iterations of the core gameplay that you were playtesting early on? I’m sure the game went through a lot of prototypes.

A: Ben Brode “Yeah we tried equipment that you could equip to the characters for a while. That sucked. We tries so many versions of the bluffing mechanic. We tried a lot of ‘face-down’ card designs. Haha there were more things but I’ll probably do a video at some point detailing them all”

Q: Is there ever going to be an option to be able to select rarity for each card within a deck, or is it hard coded?

A: Ben Brode “No current plans for this but we know folks want it and are kicking around some ideas. Not currently prioritized though”

Q: Can there be any new Signature Variants from the actors that played the character? Such as the Nick Fury variant?

A: Stephen “It would be cool and you never know. SLJ is amazing and did such an incredible job on our ad. We feel super fortunate to have him be part of Marvel Snap’s journey”

That’s all for this week’s update! Be sure to check back here at MarvelSnapZone for next week’s update!

If you have a question for the developers, be sure to submit it in their official Discord in the “#ask-the-team” channel and you might see your question in the next update!