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 Bullseye and the return of Marvel Snap to the US. Second Dinner has announced a generous compensation package for all players, which you can read about here.
If you don’t know if Bullseye 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, and Questions From You!
See all individual questions and answers updated in real time!
Card Specific Questions
Q: You said you were watching clog cards after the nerf of White Widow. How is Acid Arrow doing?
A: Glenn “We keep an eye on it, as with all cards. You might be surprised, but Grapple Arrow has actually been better than Acid Arrow over the last month (and neither is concerning). Acid Arrow is certainly one of the best clog cards, but randomizing access to it and pushing the timing to turn 3 or later helps a lot in keeping it checked relative to something like the previous White Widow.”
Q: With Scream nerfed hard, will you be supporting that move deck in other ways?
A: Glenn “The Spidey buff was already a preemptive change to support the archetype in the wake of adjusting Scream, as we called out in the notes. If it needs more, we’ll give it more.”
Q: Has the community ever surprised you with utilizing cards in ways you didn’t predict?
A: Glenn “We didn’t build the Agatha Moon Knight deck that those two card changes enabled. I liked that deck, it was clever.
I don’t think any of our Agent Venom decks were using Klaw, that was a meaningfully additive improvement to those decks. He was better than Iron Man!
I know a *while* back there was a Magik deck that aimed to use a turn 6 Wave + Psylocke to enable turn 7
Many surprises wind up just being how two ideas could be hybridized together.”
Q: How do you guys decide what cards trigger the board slam effect. Like a 9 power abom slams the board but a 20+ apoc won’t.
A: Glenn “That’s currently an element we manage mostly card-by-card. It’s possible we’d revisit that, but not high on our VFX aspirations right now.”
Q: Did you consider making Hydra Bob’s downside worse instead of making him a 1/4?
A: Glenn “Generally, we prefer to use the available balance dials rather than revise the design.”
Q: Would you ever change Deathlok? He may be used in a lot of decks, but he is worse value than Carnage or Venom when you have several cards at a location.
A: Glenn “Sounds like a card that is successfully offering a variation on an existing effect with trade-offs in a variety of situations. It’s exactly the sort of card I’d avoid changing.
Every card isn’t supposed to be equal—in addition to not being practical, it’s not actually a better experience than having a range of differences in the card pool. Our goal is for each card to serve a role.”
Q: Did Mister Fantastic’s buff happen now because Marvel Rivals introduced the character?
A: Glenn “No, we’d had it on ‘the list’ for a while.”
Q: You mentioned that Hela’s first change wasn’t “eloquent”, so you changed her again to her current state. Do you find Arishem’s change to be eloquent, or do you expect to give him a better change?
A: Glenn “I don’t think it’s the same, though the difference is subtle. I agree the creative justification is loose–you could make a case that it represents Celestials taking a long time to be born, but that’s basically just ‘retconning’ the design.
From a design perspective, it’s different because the Hela change added a whole new element. It was a totally new thing for the card to be doing, and it also pushed the deck towards requiring Luke Cage. Arishem decks today don’t look or feel very different–they’re just weaker. If you want to be technical, the effect is like most OTA changes–just a number, from turn 1 to turn 3.
Where Hela was most inelegant was as a balance dial. Increasing the afflict would only ever polarize Hela further in the same direction–she’d need Luke more, she’d need more huge 6-Costs, etc. It wasn’t a very interesting dial, and in turn would ensure Hela could never be an interesting deckbuilding challenge–you’d always be forced to run the same stuff. That’s one of the things we liked most about the new design, was that it restored some amount of positive exploration to Hela.
If we were to change Arishem, we believe the existing numbers give us enough dials–I don’t expect to rework him to undo this tweak. However, it is true that sometimes we’ll just have to live with little bits of inelegance here and there–most games do.”
Other Questions
Q: We know locations all have their own appearance rates, but do you have any weight on locations appearing together?
A: Glenn “Currently, no- Locations’ appearance rates are independent. However, stay tuned for updates on that front this year!”
Q: Has there ever been balance changes that are “obvious” in one of these metagame tiers, but due to unpopularity or lack of strength in the other metagame tiers, the team strayed awag from making these changes?
A: Glenn “Yeah, the metagames can diverge enough that some changes might seem appropriate for one but not others. It’s fairly rare, but most common when the high-infinite metagame starts to become stale while whatever deck is outperforming there isn’t doing as well elsewhere. We don’t generally balance the game around the top 0.5% of players, so their metagame may not always fluctuate as fast as the wider ones do.”
Q: Is the team still using AI despite separating from artists who use AI? First you use AI voice generation with Ben Brode, now the Profile Medal Variant text?
A: Griffin “The AI voice ads have been discontinued.
The ‘Profile Medal Variants’ typo was just due to a translation/misinterpretation via localization and publishing teams.”
Q: Does a card’s avalible art affect play rate?
A: Griffin “I can’t comment on play rates but since art is inherently subjective, it would be hard for us to use data in determining that answer.
For instance, I personally love Galacta’s art.”
Q: Can using a VPN ever cause a player to get banned?
A: Glenn “No, we have neither precedent nor reason to do that.”
Q: Why wouldn’t you nerf cards based more on the top infinite players, when they have a better understanding of the game?
A: Glenn “The play experience of a very small group of players being used to regulate the experience of all players isn’t a good experience for all players. Our balance actions have an obligation to consider the net good of the changes in question.
Very often, the things that happen at high infinite *eventually* happen to a wider audience. But if we react to every good deck our best players find by banning it, then the rest of our players don’t get to experience that aspect of the game’s depth or the way the metagame can respond and change. It also prevents players from getting a chance to solve their own problems, which is one of the hallmark joys of CCG metagames.”
Q: Could factions ever be utilized in the future to showcase iconic teams?
A: Glenn “I think they could, sure.”
Q: You mentioned previously that the small deck size and lack of factions are Snap’s weaknesses. Can you explain that in more detail?
A: Glenn “Factionalization elements open up a lot of game design space to make interesting deckbuilding choices and creative connections.
For example, a world where Captain America buffs Avengers, Beast is 2/3 and applies the Cost reduction to X-Men, or hosts of different effects. It diversifies deckbuilding, the kinds of gameplay and content we can make. You can already see some elements of this in how we key off of different mechanics—Blue Marvel works for everyone, but can be complemented by Ka-Zar, Captain America, or Cerebro without feeling redundant. Factions offer more of that, everywhere.
It also makes the game more accessible by easing deckbuilding. Finding the best 12 cards for a Darkhawk deck is harder than for an Avengers deck, in a world designed to enable the latter, much like ‘building a red deck’ in Magic is easier than 5-colors (even if you can do both).
I can’t usefully speak to the specific hypothetical challenges of introducing them, but they would be a big change and interact with lots of systems. Then there’s the player-facing considerations, such as determining how to help players quickly identify teams, see how they interact, etc.
The larger deck also offers more range of design and gameplay. Our current deck size offers a remarkably consistent CCG experience, and slightly larger decks would give us more space to both diversify games as well as print cards that have similar outputs with different overlaps. For example, we might have space to make more versions of Ka-Zar, because there would be more slots on top of the ones dedicated to 1-Costs and their complements in decks to fill. You can see a simple version of this in effect with how often many decks only run one 5 or 6-Cost card, because drawing two can be worse than drawing zero given the finite time to deploy them.”
Q: Will the Snap outage cause any delay with the next patch?
A: Glenn “I personally don’t expect that it will at this time, but the situation is unusual and fluid. Any changes will be made public as soon as we can.”
Q: How do you decide what will represent a character best for their base art?
A: Glenn “We make each choice separately for the character. We often talk to Marvel, consider recent or upcoming media projects, and popular runs.”
Q: Do to the outage, will Character Mastery be delayed?
A: Griffin “We don’t have plans for any delays for Characters Mastery right now.”
Q: Has the “transform” ability been explored to target your opponent’s cards?
A: Glenn “Our games are very short in length relative to these examples, and these games also don’t revolve as heavily around access to open board slots because they have combat attrition to clear them away. So these kinds of cards would wind up being the most powerful form of removal in SNAP, and we’d have to make very sparing use of them.
Compare them to Shadow King or Enchantress, and you’ll see there’s a decent amount of overlap–strips away a lot of strength, leaves the enemy card behind. Spider-Ham is by far the closest, of course.”
Q: With the Snap outage compensation coming, when did you have to play to qualify for the rewards?
A: Griffin “If you played in the US in the last 30 days you’ll receive US compensation.”
Q: Glenn said that Surtur and Wiccan share similar stats, but he added that Wiccan is a lot more popular. Could this imply Surtur’s deck stats are inflated in comparison since very few people play it?
A: Glenn “We remove mirrors when evaluating decks and cards, so the most meaningful element of being exceedingly popular tends to be a wider diversity of skill ranges among the players. A deck doing well with low popularity usually signals it a) succeeding specifically at high Infinite, or b) succeeding in the general pool in the hands of dedicated fans. Either way, there are less players losing with the deck to low familiarity or skill, so the numbers are a more accurate representation of what the deck’s potential is.
It’s fair to say that indicates the best Surtur deck likely isn’t as good as the best Wiccan deck—but that also doesn’t mean either is out of line.
We account for these effects with different metagame slicing, looking into specific matchups and card performance, as well as variety in deckbuilding. We’ll often peruse individual players’ decks by highest wr/cr at high MMR as well, to monitor common choices.”
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: What exactly does the balancing team consider “Nosebleed” infinite to be?
A: Glenn “I use the top 0.5% of players on MMR to represent the heights of competition.”
Q: Can we see variant trading added, or at least with alliance members?
A: Stephen “No plans to do this at this time. In general our philosophy is we do not want players to destroy their collection. At some point in the future we do want to address collection bloat but that would most likely be something more like archiving cards/splits you have earned but dont want them distracting you in your normal collection view.”
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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