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 Lin Lie Iron Fist and the latest OTA! If you haven’t seen what was changed with the balance update, be sure to check out the official patch notes!
If you don’t know if Lin Lie is worth Snap Packs or tokens, 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, and Questions From You!
See all individual questions and answers updated in real time!
Card Specific Questions
Q: If my opponent plays Peni Parker and the location gives me Peni, is it intended that my opponent can then play Man-Spider and pull Peni back to their side to merge?
A: Glenn “Peni is both your card and the last card they played. Man-Spider doesn’t specify the current owner of the card in its effect, and doesn’t check that information.”
Q: If Man-Spider intentionally acts this way, why doesn’t First Steps Galactus still track your card if it switches sides?
A: Glenn “We decided that made substantially less sense. We already have interactions like the Man-Spider one—Ghost-Spider has been slinging Green Goblin around for years. In both cases, the last card you dragged out of your hand will be affected, that’s what the cards say they do.
But neither the Herald losing nor the Herald successfully opposing Galactus make sense with the flow of the game for GFS—he wants his Herald winning for him. I’m sure players will vary on which of the 3 outcomes we should’ve done, which is a reason to more confidently use one that aligns with the creative fantasy of the card.”
Q: Is there a reason why you went to soft on a nerf for Merlin? Nobody cares about his Power since that’s not why you play him.
A: Glenn “Every card is played for its potential to generate Power. Power is the only axis upon which you can win the game.
While a single point of Power may not seem like much sometimes, we’ve never taken a point of Power off a card and seen its winrate not go down. Cards with more variation in their strength, like Mister Fantastic or Merlin, can make the impact harder to predict–but it will be negative.
Given we rarely want to over-nerf a card, and often want to preserve its existing role(s), you can expect us to continue starting with measured shots on fun cards like Merlin when they prove to be too strong.”
Q: Are you concerned about buffing cards like Zombi Galacti when there are unfixed bugs like Nico not showing she will be transformed?
A: Glenn “If we have troublesome bug that impacts a card heavily, we’ll often avoid buffing it assuming we have a fix planned, to reduce the potential dissatisfaction. Neither of these issues quite cross the threshold to be really concerning, though I’d like to take care of them of course.”
Other Questions
Q: Hey team! I was wondering if you’ve ever considered doing a community vote in-game (like the Winterverse variant vote), where players can vote from hand-picked potential seasons/characters to come into the game?
A: Griffin “We’ve actually thrown this idea around! We’d love to do it but it takes a good amount of forethought and planning as seasons and characters are planned far in advance.”
Q: Why not allow players to purchase S3 Collector’s Packs in the Shop even if they are S3 Complete?
A: Griffin “It’s meant as a way for new or lower CL players to use their event currency to grab cards. It’s not meant as a way to grab Tokens as a fallback reward. To balance that, we made the decision to lock it for S3 complete players.”
Q: What hurdles or challenges do you face because of Snap having both players simultaneously?
A: Glenn “Priority itself is still a pretty rough one. It’s not a very fun thing to make as important as it is, an having cards range from strong to not functional based on what often feels like a coin flip (but also rarely is) isn’t the best distribution of tension. Usually, you want tense things to feel really satisfying when they go right and provide solid feedback when they go wrong, but priority is difficult to master and not easily surfaced since decisions on turn 1 can matter for turn 6.
The game also has very little downtime, which can contribute to the grinding sensation. In a game like Hearthstone you can kind of take a break during your opponent’s turn and wait for your action, but in Snap there’s very little of that.
It’s also limiting in that mechanics like Move, Bounce, or various combos would be a lot easier to line up and do often. Because we need boards to be more stable, we don’t like to set up for a ton of the board to change on a dime, but in a turn-based game you’d get to react to changes so that would be fine.
This isn’t specific to simultaneous turns, but there is a pressure to control how games end that’s trickier in simultaneous world too, since players are constantly threatening and defending. Snap went with the hard stop, but I’ve played and tried other games with other conditions, and they can get weird and sometimes make the outcome of the game feel too random.”
Q: Why were alliance rewards decreased? (Update)
A: Griffin “As 2025 came to a close, the team has been evaluating how and where to focus our efforts for 2026. When evaluating Alliances, the data shows a clear picture that the majority of SNAP players are not members of one and an even larger percentage of them aren’t participating in completing Bounties weekly if they are members. The Alliances feature is not where we want it to be and it deserves a larger update, however it’s not at the front of our list of priorities at the moment.
In November, we made changes to Alliance Bounty frequency with the goal to make them a bit easier to complete:
Move Cards – Decreased
Activate Cards – Increased
Win Location w/ 4 Cards – Decreased
Fill All Locations – Decreased
Win Location w/ 30 Power – Added to Pool
Win Location w/ Low Power – Decreased
Destroy 6 Cards – Decreased
Move 5 Cards – Decreased
Discard 5 Cards – Decreased
Spend Energy – Decreased
Until we can commit to dedicating more time to improving the feature, we’ve reduced the weekly rewards to better match its player engagement level. The goal being to distribute those rewards’ value elsewhere in the game in order to get it into more players hands without requiring players to utilize a feature we’ve put on ice for now.
We realize that this is a ‘chicken or the egg’ scenario where engagement in Alliances is partially dependent on its rewards but we don’t feel like simply increasing the rewards is the answer either. The team has some ideas for how to bring Alliances to life in the future and we’ll continue to read and digest your feedback on the feature.”
Q: Where did the alliance rewards resources shift to?
A: Griffin “For December, the Winterverse rewards is good example.
We didn’t state that reducing the rewards fixes the issue.”
Q: If you are aiming to make “good actions” with the community, why nerf alliance missions?
A: Glenn “Improving a game for the long haul isn’t always an exercise in exclusively well-received changes. Many changes initially received negatively can have positive outcomes, and vice-versa. Games are ecosystems, and we are working to build a better overall ecosystem with a longer-lasting future.
We made a change that exclusively reduced a reward vector—we don’t expect to get positive feedback around that change. If we gave everyone a 10,000 gold, feedback would probably all be positive but the impact on the longevity of the game would be bad. Responsible stewardship is about more than making players happy in a given moment.
We certainly care about negative feedback—it sucks when players are frustrated. Actions like these aren’t fun, but they aren’t purposeless. We aim to make careful choices—when we know a choice won’t be popular, we exercise additional care in verifying it’s the right thing to do, often with the consultation of players and creators.”
Q: If Alliances aren’t your top priority, what is?
A: Griffn “We’re working on sharing that info with everyone.”
Q: Why quietly nerf alliance rewards and not have the positive change with it? Was your timing between good and bad poorly timed?
A: Glenn “I personally believe we could’ve handled communication around this change better. I’m not as directly invovled with it, so I can’t speak to the specifics, but I think that’s a valid takeaway for us.
I can speak to one reason it’s not always correct to introduce a negative thing alongside a positive thing, which is that the former can damage or even overwhelm the latter. If we were debuting a new feature with a lot of oomph this week–something like Team Clash or draft–it wouldn’t be ideal to have a large chunk of the conversation focused on Alliance rewards changes.
And similarly, positive changes we expected to be offset by Alliances may already have debuted. I can’t speak to the specific weight and measures–not only am I not directly involved in trading these horses, but we also work on the sums of the system, not making 1:1 transitions, and tracing the systems updates isn’t something I have the bandwidth for.”
Q: Why are some modes in Snap treated like a zero-sum game? Why do you have to remove one reward to add another?
A: Glenn “Mobile games are balanced economies, and they can be subject to negative (and positive) inflationary effects. Also, Snap is not zero-sum–plenty of players out there are enjoying a free game on us. Being able to offer opportunities and rewards worthy of players’ spend is how we keep the lights on.
Adding rewards doesn’t necessarily have to come from another piece of the game. But they have to draw value from something because rewards need value, either for motivation or spend. When you oversupply a reward, you devalue it which reduces engagement and spend–two things necessary to sustaining Snap.
LTGMs justify much of their significant reward distribution based on their capacity to engage new, existing, and previous users beyond the existing game, which we established with data after initial estimates.”
Q: What did you have envisioned for Alliances before deciding to step back from it for now?
A: Glenn “A lot of our initial announcements for Alliances detailed the early goals. I was working on gameplay deeply throughout its development, so I don’t have any added insight really–a competitive element was always interesting to us. Certainly we aimed Alliances to have a strong positive impact on retention, connect some percentage of players, coordinate socially, play bounties, etc.”
Q: Are the exclusive variants in the limited time bundles considered Spotlight variants since they release alongside the new card?
A: Griffin “The featured Variant for the newest Series 5 card of the week are not “Spotlight Variants” as the Spotlight system no longer exists.
The Spotlight Variants in the Card Shop are a rotating bunch that used to be available for Tokens in the previous system.
The new exclusive Variants will become widely available in the future. That timeframe has not been determined yet.”
Q: Can you talk about the design space for cards that base around only moving once (ie. Redwing or Spider-Man 2099)?
A: Glenn “Same kind of thinking as On Reveals vs. abilities you can trigger all game, just for a different condition. Those effects can be stronger and more special, since they are a narrower range that’s less polar, but still has enough variation.”
Q: When you answer a question about xyz, you can only answer from what’s your *intent* with xyz, not how it might actually work, right? Because no one can have a full overview over how all code actually executes. A bug there, a legacy forgotten code snippet here, or just some interaction no one could ever foresee.
A: Glenn “Technically yes, practically no. In addition to being able to read relevant code–I often check code directly when questioned–we also have thousands upon thousands of tests that mock different client scenarios and run “headless” games in those environments, confirming the expected functions. If I’m ever asked a question not covered by my ability to read the code or an existing test, I simply make the test and add it to the library.”
Q: If you measure player engagement, could it be lower because players count is down as Steam shows?
A: Glenn “Steam’s player audience is a very small percentage of our total player audience–smaller than most people think, because mobile is a truly massive audience. I don’t use Steam-specific data at all in my day-to-day work unless someone happens to ask a Steam-specific question or a bug similarly arises.”
Q: Why do you bother answering questions that seem to intentionally fan the flame of a situation?
A: Griffin “Sometimes it’s hard to tell but we do want to provide clarity where and when we can.”
A: Glenn “I try to give more benefit of the doubt in this forum than I might elsewhere, because sometimes a dialect or language barrier is all that’s going on. Anyone posting here expects to be read, so it biases towards better faith overall. But even when it might not be the case, correcting misunderstandings
/misinformation further reinforces the actual message, as Griffin notes.
If I think a user is certainly asking in bad faith and/or that correcting them has no public utility, I just ignore it.
In either case, I don’t think it really affects anyone’s willingness to be rude on the internet or my own mental.”
Q: Will you be making more cards that build on the “banished” archetype?
A: Glenn “Banishment’s purpose is to be a very separate kind of place, so I don’t expect we’ll ever explore a “full kit” relative to what other zones have received, though the occasional card may care about it from time to time.”
Q: Why does the tournament deck pack offer a card for 4k tokens, when I can just by that card for 3k tokens outright?
A: Brady “Hi, I would not recommend that you purchase this pack if you’re only missing, say, Deafening Chord. It isn’t going to be a great value for all players and that’s ok. It’s just an unfortunate possibility when we mix different series of cards into the same pack, especially since the contents are decided by the winner of the tournament!
Some players will get a great deal if they’re only missing Series 5, and some players won’t have anything at all to purchase depending on their collection.
The intent behind the pack is more about celebrating the win by Omalas, and offering players the ability to target the key pieces of the deck that was used to win our Snowball Showdown Tournament. It can be really difficult for newer players to really target competitive decks and we wanted to bring this forward to see if players enjoy it.
On a personal anecdote, when I play TCGs, I enjoy having the ability to buy singles or specific cards to update my deck to be the most competitive it can be. I love just jumping into the endgame and I wanted to offer that chance to players in SNAP.
Hope that helps provide a bit of context. Sorry we didn’t get you a great value this time around but always down to hear some more feedback on what you think of the overall idea! We’d love to create more opportunities like this in the future for players of all collection and ability levels.”
Q: Can I still buy the premium event pass after the mode ended, but before the shop closes?
A: Griffin “Yes, you can purchase the Premium Event Pass while the Shop remains open after the gameplay has ended.”
Q: If you can pick 1 stat about the game that you could get a 6 month glimpse into fhe future at, what stat would you pick?
A: Glenn “I’ll pick new player retention, since it’s a deeper time cut on a relatively recently updated feature with the new prebuilt decks.”
Q: Have you considered making more dev blogs, perhaps detailing things like the struggles you face self-publishing?
A: Glenn “I like writing dev blogs in theory, but frankly neither I nor many of my coworkers have the time to write them, and they are more work than most people tend to expect. We’re flying about as fast as we can over here, which is why something we can do in spurts like Discord tends to work better for us.”
A: Brady “As the person responsible for the majority of blog production… there’s certainly some circumstances that warrant me pulling time from a game designer to share an important message. Big events like new game modes need a lot of space and energy and they need to paint a full picture for players.
If a dev has a passion project they want to write about we encourage that, but mostly devs need to be doing rather than talking about doing.
That said, I constantly evaluate the information that we do put out and I know there is room for improvement. Hopefully we can pack in some good changes soon to the seasonal blogs, create some new efficiencies, and then maybe set aside some time for more conversational thought pieces.”
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 have a question for the people who run this site:
With a lot of new cards being iterations of existing characters, e.g. Invisible Woman First Steps, etc., why whenever you guys link to a card in your writing, you link to the original Invisible Woman instead of the First Steps card?
A: Hey there! So unfortunately, SD decided to duplicate characters long after the site was coded. It would be incredibly time consuming to hyperlink every card each time they get mentioned, so we do have an auto assist coded into the site to help us with that. What that means though is the code sees the old card name and completes the task, which means it didn’t see there are 2 cards with the same kind of name. We agree it is frustrating to interact with though and will look to fix the issue very soon.
Thank you very much for your feedback to us!
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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