Table of Contents
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 will Collector Reserves be changed, why are gold tickets even a reserve reward, is the new card balance process devs promised even working, 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 Miek! If you aren’t sure if this card is worth a Spotlight Cache, make sure to check out our weekly Spotlight Cache guide, as well as our Miek guide! This week also comes after the latest OTA changes. As many questions reference these changes, be sure to check those out if you aren’t familiar.
Answers and questions may be slightly rephrased for more clarity and ease of reading. This weeks topics will be divided into Card Specific questions and Other questions.
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 the team aware that after the latest patch, Skaar gets additional discounts from Wave, like how she used to work?
A: Glenn “We’re reviewing this one, it’s a bit weird–he was adjusted to work with Throne Room and the like, but that put him on the same ‘layer’ as Wave.
Q: If you were to add a 7-Cost vanilla card, would you update High Evolutionary to give it an ability? And would that card launch directly into Series 3?
A: Glenn “My current answer is ‘probably’ for High Evo. I wouldn’t expect such a card to release directly to Series 3.”
Q: Could America Chavez have had the ability “You always draw this on turn 6”, meaning you could draw her sooner, but will always draw her by turn 6.
A: Glenn “We could’ve done it, but the card would be very weak and we didn’t think it could remain as appealing. You’d only draw it on turn 6 about 33% of the time.”
Q: Is Kingpin’s new glow effect something that all debuff cards will start getting?
A: Glenn “We generally want to apply VFX to cards that threaten harmful effects at their location. We have a queue going for that sort of thing.”
Q: Does Kingpin’s new effect work on unrevealed cards such as when Juggernaut moves unrevealed cards to Kingpin’s lane?
A: Glenn “it does, but it shouldn’t. we’ll fix it soon!”
Q: Have you considered doing OTA’s off schedule for cards that really need it? Like buffing Hercules before his Spotlight ended by just updating him?
A: KentErik “OTAs require a fair bit of coordination across multiple folks, so we only rifle one out really fast if there’s a burning issue. otherwise, we stick to our schedule, so as to not cause too much thrashing for the other folks from their other responsibilities”
Q: 6 months in, how do you feel about Spotlight Caches? Have they met expectations?
A: KentErik “6 months in, it’s definitely achieved the goal of getting the new cards some playtime. this is super important for helping the game feel fresh, alive, and awesome.
are there improvements we could make? sure! almost every system can be improved, and in particular, economy systems in general are hard to nail in a single-go, so i think you can expect that one day we’ll make some improvements / changes to the system”
Q: With more cards releasing that have RNG factors, how does the team balance strategy vs RNG?
A: KentErik “Unpredictability and RNG are core to a card game…where you begin every turning drawing from a *randomly shuffled pile of cards* 😛
not every card has it (caiera and skaar have no RNG printed on them).
i’d say on the whole, we don’t really view things from the ‘RNG’ perspective unless a card is truly warping the outcome of the game in a really random way that invalidates all the previous turns.
many years ago, in early prototyping, Annihilus was a 6-cost card who said ‘On reveal: move all your cards randomly’. Great for move decks! but it was such a vast arrays of random outcomes, it felt like all your previous plays didn’t really matter, and your opponent couldn’t interact with it meaningful, so it was changed significantly. that is an element of RNG we’re very cognizant of”
Q: Has the team considered making locations bigger, more immersive, or just occupying more of the screen?
A: KentErik “the locations are definitely a secondary-art piece compared to our amazing Characters, so when laying out the board forever ago, we def. wanted to hit that sweet spot of recognizability for the place, but give the cards as much room to flex/breathe, as that’s where players get to see the awesome characters or variants they’ve bought/split”
Q: Do you have a card naming standard? If so, why does Miles Morales also have his hero name, but Spider-man doesn’t have Peter Parker?
A: Glenn “we work closely with our partners and friends at marvel on how to name each character.
For Miles, we didn’t want to have two cards with the exact same name (Spider-man), yet have different functionalities, but also wanted to reflect that in his universe, he is Spider-man, so that’s why we went with his name before Spider-man.”
Q: Is it intended that Miek doesn’t get a buff when Black Cat discards herself?
A: Glenn “We’ll look into that.”
Q: Currently when I view my Black Knight variant it shows the Ebony Blade behind it. But when I view the blade it shows the base art for Black Knight. Is this something the team will look into fixing?
A: KentErik “Sure, can look into it.”
Q: Why does Miek discard at the end of the turn and not after each discard and just move at the end of the turn?
A: Glenn “Two discrete triggers is a level of complexity above our general targets for card effects in SNAP.”
Q: Why wasn’t Miek designed to move multiple times per turn? If he can only move once, what is the design goal for this move effect on a discard card?
A: Glenn “Moving multiple times per turn was very problematic.
As for the design goal, we want to create cards that offer unique rewards to create more diversity within archetypes and fuel “cross-pollination” among decks.”
Q: What was your favorite card rework (so far)?
A: KentErik “Hands down, the Spider-man rework!”
Addison “I like Snowguard’s rework. Retained a lot of the same function and spirit of the original but added some additional play options and is just a better overall feeling card imo.”
Q: Can you explain how the Selene change is considered a buff?
A: Glenn “Selene can be quite strong with Black Widow, you may want to reconsider.
The 1/-1 was to add another 1-Cost for 2/3 Viper to donate, along with The Hood. Now that Viper is 3/5 and competing with Green Goblin, that use case is less important than just making Selene a better card overall.”
Q: Blob new text says: **until it gains 15 or more Power** Hypothetical Scenario: Blob already has 20 power from the initial on reveal, still 5 cards in the deck, player plays Odin retriggering Blob. What happens next?
A. Blob eats only 1 card from the deck, and then stops because his power is already >15
B. Blob keeps eating cards from the deck until it gains 15 (additional) or more power from this new trigger
C. Blob does nothing
A: Glenn “B.”
Q: How does the team feel about the latest version of Black Knight / Ebony Blade?
A: Glenn “We’re happy the card began seeing real play in a novel strategy, and we’ll continue to keep an eye on it.”
Other Questions
Q: Have you considered making “Switch Sides” count as moving?
A: Glenn “I have briefly, but it didn’t really seem worthwhile to me.”
Q: Has the team considered making a +7 cost cards that can’t be discounted?
A: Glenn “We have. I expect we will eventually make more than one, even.”
Q: Is the team concerned about players hoardings reserves because the rewards inside are so low?
A: Stephen “Our stance on reserve hoarding has not changed. We hear the feedback that folks want additional value out of reserves. Based off our models and data, the game economy cannot currently support higher rewards out of reserves. As a result, we have no plans to change collectors reserves at this time. If we did make a major change at some point in the future, we would most likely do it in a way that auto opens hoarded reserves out of fairness. If this happened, our goal would be to make sure folks who are playing and opening reserves to have the most fun out of their time playing Snap do not feel punished.”
Q: What is Ben Brode’s role is behind the scenes? At least from my perception, Glenn has taken on the role of heading the logistics side and player feedback.
A: Ben Brode “my job is to get Glenn coffee”
Q: Why did you add a new card to Spotlights the same week as the season pass launches? Isn’t it hard enough to get all of the cards each week already?
A: Stephen “The spotlight cache system dishes out a ton of cards. Much more than we previously gave out in the old system. A large and increasing over time number of players are becoming collection complete or the equivalent of it by owning all the cards they care about which is awesome! However, it means that those players start to stockpile tokens and keys to a point where both become an unexciting reward to receive.
The extra card has two main purposes. To make that first week of the season more exciting with two new cards to impact the meta and to create another reason to consider using the increasing amount of keys and tokens that are being stockpiled after someone hits that collection complete zone.”
Q: With Agatha players going afk in Conquest, can Agatha get an auto end turn so players who face Agatha aren’t roped?
A: Glenn “We will be reducing Agatha’s turn timer in a future patch.”
Q: What takes more time to create: the card functionality or the vfx?
A: Glenn “The functionality. We develop VFX based on finished functionality, but card function itself requires weeks of iteration and review to finalize. A season spends up to 4 weeks in VFX, but up to 6 months in design.”
Q: Why hasn’t the loading screen ever been changed?
A: KentErik “it’s something we’re looking into doing!”
Q: Has the team ever thought about a multiple turn cards? For instance when you play this card for the next 3 turns something will happen?
A: Glenn “Sure. The design space on “countdowns” is fairly small, since the game has a fixed number of turns, but we’ll likely find at least a couple designs in that space one day.”
KentErik “tricky thing with those is the mental tax you’re asking the player to remember. Since we’re digital, we can do things to ease it (VFX can do a lot of heavy lifting here), and like Glenn said, we’ll probably do something in there one day, but often times you can get the same benefit with a simpler deisgn, since we are just 6 turns”
Q: What’s the craziest, super OP card you tested internally?
A: Glenn “A few months ago we tried ‘On Reveal: Fill all your locations with random cards’ on a 7-Cost card. It was often hilarious, but overall as busted as we assumed it would be.”
KentErik: “surprisingly, one of the most game-breaking mechanics (that took a while to figure out) was:
On Reveal: Draw a card.”
Q: How do you measure player confusion?
A: KentErik “we can usually pick up on confusing through internal playtests, but occasionally something will go out that made sense internally, but less so once it was in the wild, and yea, places like the Discord are a great place to see what’s causing confusion”
Q: Any plans to change the conquest reward from avatar borders for players who have what they want already?
A: KentErik “not at the moment! there’s always new avatars coming out, so maybe that pool of yours will grow over time!”
Q: Are there any plans to let us pin variants in the daily offer shop?
A: KentErik “sorry, but there are no plans to let you pin variants in the daily offer shop.”
Q: Is the team ever worried about another comic book company making a rival card game?
A: Stephen “We always are mindful of other awesome games out there both as gamers and developers. We always view it as opportunities to learn something from the design choices made in other games.”
Q: What’s the most underwhelming ability you have ever tested?
A: KentErik “This is so tough, because honestly I feel like a ton of ability designs start out lackluster before getting improvements…and honestly I forget them 😅
Here’s one that whiffed for a while: sentry used to create a 7-power Void for your opponent at the same location. It was pretty meh.”
Q: Do you avoid making strong move cards?
A: Glenn “I think we gave Move some fairly strong cards last year, and I’m sure we’ll give them more. As an archetype, Move can be tricky to balance in a fun spot because it can be very overwhelming for players. Not knowing where your opponent will play mystery cards in their hand is actually less burdensome on the mind than not knowing where cards you can see already will wind up. So we like move, and we want to make cool move cards, but we try to monitor carefully how much is going on in a given turn.”
Q: Has the team considered changing the rewards for winning a game vs losing one?
A: KentErik “In previous, very early designs, we played with lots of types of different reward structures for games. In the end, though, it was best to keep it simple: cubes for your rank are what is at “stake”, and then boosters are a reward for playing, win-or-lose.”
Q: Does the team have an in house name or terminology for effects like Miek, not on going or on reveal but the more permanent type of ability?
A: Glenn “Trigger, or in Miek’s case EOT trigger.”
Q: How do you factor in play rate into balancing when not every player owns the card?
A: Glenn “We look at play rate for cards in multiple ways, including games played relative to the total number of players who own the card, raw volume of games and wins, and how often a card is played in a given deck.”
Q: After Mobius had his nerf/ change situation, you said you would analyze your design process and test cards more aggressively. With Blob launching so strong and needing a nerf so soon, why didn’t your new process seem to improve this?
A: Glenn “While Blob and Mobius may seem far apart to you, Blob was finalized before Mobius released. We just started working on September 2024, for example. We have made adjustments to our process in pursuit of improved balance upon release, but those adjustments wouldn’t have been able to impact Blob.”
Q: How many more Pre-Mobius cards are yet to be released?
A: Glenn “Our next season will include a couple cards directly impacted by our balance process improvements, but they don’t really kick in until after that.”
Q: Can you delve more into what processes are changing to update card balance before releases? It’s hard to want to buy a card when it may not be the same card weeks later.
A: Glenn “I’d like to talk about this in the future, when we can present it comprehensively to all players and also have the bandwidth to answer the follow-up questions. I don’t want to dive into the piecemeal specifics in Discord, especially as we’re even iterating on some of them.”
Q: Long ago, devs mentioned move decks are one step away from being the best deck in the game. After the release of Hercules, are you still hesitant to make a strong move deck?
A: Glenn “The threat it poses isn’t 100% one of game balance. Part of the core fun of SNAP is making the placement of cards on locations an important choice, and move decks (for the pilot and the opponent) can negatively affect that. It’s similar to why we don’t make it easy to disable locations.”
Q: Is Snap opening up to more multi card abilities? Electro and Soul Stone used to be the only cards, but now we have more like Jeff and Blob.
A: Glenn “We expect it to remain fairly rare and special.”
Q: What metrics are used to determine if a variant gets the new “popular” tag in the shop?
A: Tucker “The popular tag is based on a variant’s purchase rate (# of times it’s purchased / # of times it’s offered in the shop). There was a bug in yesterday’s shop refresh that made the shop a little overzealous in applying that tag 😅 .
Behind the scenes: We thought about doing ownership rates instead of purchase rates at some point, but decided against it as it heavily favors rare variants (since you can get them randomly in Mystery Variants). Going that path player preferences would get lost in that sea of randomness & a lot of the pixels would be popular 😱 .”
Q: Has the team considered adding a soft lock on rank levels? So if you reach level 70 for example, you can’t drop under that rank that season?
A: Glenn “during our soft launch, we had a ‘floors’ system in place, where every tier (30, 40, 50, etc.) acted as a floor upon reaching it. After playing with it for a while, we made the decision to instead move to the “bonus ranks” system as a way to provide some protection against losing your tier, but not provide a universal stop-gap like the floors. After the change, the ladder felt much better and more engaging on the whole, so that’s why we’ve kept it that way.
We have zero plans to go back to a floors system.”
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: For players who are stuck with 50 tokens from the old reserves, will there possibly be a 50 token reward that players can earn in the future? Can the effected players get 50 tokens added to their account to resolve the issue? Or will these players forever have a unusable 50 tokens?
A: After months of you guys asking, and me asking for you, I was finally able to get a response from the developers!
Stephen “I’m hoping to add something in the future that will cost tokens in a multiple of 50 to save the poor souls stuck with 50.”
Q: Why did you add Gold Tickets into reserves? Something you can get an unlimited number of by playing thr game isn’t a good reward.
A: Stephen “At the time conquest had just come out and we felt they were perceived as a valuable reward that would help players save time and jump straight into gold conquest to try to earn an infinity ticket. Unfortunately the perception of gold tickets did not reach that bar.
Hopefully in the future as we add more features (events, clans, more game modes, booster vats, etc), we can find a replacement for gold tickets with something that the community values more.”
Q: Does Miek have to move in order to get his buff?
A: KentErik “no, he will not need to move to buff”
Q: Will there ever be an option to buy the season pass with gold?
A: Stephen “No plans to do that at this time”
Q: Last year, a bundle was made available that had an old exclusive Punisher variant in it. Was that a one-time experiment, or do you foresee the possibility of old bundles coming back every once in a while?
A: The old Punisher variant returning was part of the beta content becoming avaliable one time for the global release players. Bundle variants will not be avaliable again once the bundle is over.
Q: I have 30k tokens and have nothing to spend them on. Can you add something of value for me to collect or let me convert them to another resource?
A: Tokens can be used on Ultimate variants in the token shop for 5k tokens, and are exclusive variants to that shop and rarely collected. Devs have stated they intend to improve these variants with special effects in the future. If you really have that many tokens you aren’t using, start collecting those and start flexing your collection 💪
Q: After Griffin Gaming Partners recently invested $100 million in you, what are your future plans?
A: While I don’t have a new discord answer for you, the developers already made soke public statements on what the investment will be used for. Here is a piece pulled directly from an article by the Hollywood Reporter:
“We’re grateful to have Griffin Gaming Partners on our team,” said chief operating officer Matt Wyble. “From our first conversation, it was clear they love Snap and respect our need to be free to make the best games we can. This investment will help us make more awesome stuff! We’ll use it to develop and commercialize new titles, incubate original IP, write better press releases and ensure that MarvelSnap continues to grow globally.”
While “most of Second Dinner is focused on Marvel Snap,” Ben Brode, co-founder and chief development officer at the company, also said that “we’ve also got a couple other things cookin’. And they’re super, super fun. I put two ‘super’s because it’s possible they are too fun.”
Q: To the reader who really wants their Phoenix Force question answered each week:
A: I haven’t gotten a developer answer for you, not every question gets answered unfortunately. Some questions get removed by moderators and referred to their suggestions or bug report channels, and other questions simply don’t always get answered. You haven’t been ignored, friend. The interaction is likely different because Phoenix Force merges with a card and fundamentally changes how the card functions (it gains a new ability to move each turn). Hulk Buster is like Forge. It really just adds a power modifier to a card. So when it merges with a card, the “card” is gone, and only the modifier to the power remains. So when Phoenix Force revives another Phoenix Force, the revived one merges with a card and changes the card’s text, therefore letting the initial Phoenix Force find the secondary one.
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!
More Content