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 and the end of the newest game mode Team Clash!
If you don’t know if Fantomez 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: With Wolverine and X-23 getting procs from getting destroyed or discarded, is it time we see Sabertooth get the added discard portion to his text to buff him?
A: Glenn “This specific change, no. In Sabretooth’s case, I think the value in being discarded would so far exceed the value from being destroyed that it would essentially delete his current ability and make him a different Proxima Midnight. We’d rather find a tweak that maintains the current card.”
Q: Are you aware that Havok is capped at eating 6 max energy per game, even if you have more avalible?
A: Glenn “I’ll look into that. We’re already in the process of refactoring a bit of how Energy works, so it may already be fixed (or have been created) by this work.”
Q: Why wasn’t Gambit banned from Team Clash?
A: Glenn “Because our testing didn’t indicate a ban was warranted. Neither did the metagame data during the mode before or after our balance pass, which saw X-Men as the #4 deck in winrate uneven though it was the #1 or #2 deck in popularity each day.
We don’t default ban Gambit (or any card) in game modes in principle; even Galactus gets a sliver of a chance. We do it based on playtesting, data, and the specifics of those modes. If our postmortem indicates Gambit was some large outlier in Team Clash we may do that, but I currently haven’t seen any indicator that’s the case.”
Q: Could some team-clash cards like Spider-Man 2099 keep their new text in the base game?
A: Glenn “It’s a possibility, though in the case of a card like Wolverine, whose existing card has a role, or 2099, whose original design is in a different space altogether, it’s more likely we’d make a new card than rework the old one. We will at least consider it for 2099, but in general we prefer not to fully abandon the original fantasy when we rework a card—that tends to be reserved for specific issues like America Chavez and Kang.”
Q: Does Jean Grey fit your criteria for a Team Clash card that needs a rework?
A: Glenn “I think Jean Grey’s a potential candidate for a rework, as she has some similarities to Chavez and Kang (not great gameplay incentives, complex ability, VFX breakage).”
Q: Since Bucky Barnes wasn’t in team clash, but Winter Soldier got a standalone card, could we see that version of WS be a permanent change?
A: Glenn “I expect we’ll make a true Winter Soldier card at some point, though I’m more doubtful Bucky will start creating it since Bucky’s fine the way he is.
The primary reasons I put Winter Soldier in Team Clash were a) Bucky’s design was too narrow and b) we didn’t need a new art piece to make a new card 🙂”
Q: What does the team think about meme cards such as Agatha? Do you have any plans or wishes for any more? And finally will I be able to add the rock to my base deck?
A: Glenn “We think they’re a sweet treat once in a while and always on the lookout for an opportunity. I don’t think you’re likely to get Rock in your starting deck, but Rock synergy is on the table for sure.”
Q: Why didn’t Daken’s Muramasa Shard get the “When Discarded or Destroyed” text change like other cards?
A: Glenn “Likely just an oversight. It’s easy to forget a token card when auditing hundreds of cards.”
Other Questions
Q: Do you think game dev’s ego can have an impact on balance decisions?
A: Glenn “As a courtesy I won’t speak to any particular games, but it’s a certainty that personal qualities of game designers often impact the decisions they make in games. I’m hardly immune–there are plenty of things I’ve learned to second-guess myself on.
Fortunately, in my experience these kinds of problems all have the same solution: hire a good team, build a collaborative culture around trust, and succeed/fail together. When you’ve got all that, things always improve.
As an example, one of my design mantras is ‘there are no bad ideas.’ People often default to silence in meetings, avoiding attention or embarrassment. But that’s an awful culture for collaboration–if you want the best idea, you can’t have people scared to say one!
Plus, talking about weak ideas as a group makes everyone’s future ideas stronger.”
Q: I noticed in the help section of Team Clash, it had Magneto’s Helmet. Was this for a Brotherhood team? And was the team cut?
A: Glenn “1. It was 2. The Brotherhood aren’t a team in Snap…yet!”
Q: Speaking of Brotherhood, why haven’t we seen more characters added to Snap from the Brotherhood?
A: Glenn “Just hasn’t happened to line up with what we were doing for various seasons”
Q: Why was the latest game mode pass so tedious and long compared to previous events?
A: Glenn “When we increase event time or rewards, that’s going to tend to pair with increasing the size of the pass or the cost. It’s never our goal for the game to become a chore, but we both want the passes to provide satisfying F2P motivation for the duration of the event while also making sure the upgrade is a good purchase to players interested in spending some gold. We always review our events for learnings around what players find most fun and engaging–that’s what guides our changes.”
Q: Why are there so much less movers than cards that can move them? Is it because only a small percentage of traditional move decks want to use any given enabler, but most would want to use a new scaler so focusing on enablers possibly encourages deck variety?
A: Glenn “That’s part of it. The ceiling to improve upon existing “movers” has also been low, with strong existing options and Human Torch presiding over them all. Now that he’s less dominant, there may be more room for healthy competition.”
Q: Will we see a roadmap in 2026?
A: Glenn “We’ve been hesitant to put out a roadmap in 2025 due to the fact that our own internal roadmap has been changing so often. We’ve learned from previous roadmaps that while listing things “In Development” and “In Concept” are awesome to share and talk about, it can cause a lot of frustration when those things either get pushed or shelved.
That said, we do want to share more about our plans and focuses for 2026 and so you’ll be hearing more about that come the new year. As for reflections on 2025, I think that’s a good idea as well.
It was a HUGE learning year for us at SD as we began our self-publishing journey. We learned a TON but it wasn’t always a smooth ride. That’s part of the reason for lack of a 2025 roadmap, with us running into new or unforseen issues along that journey.”
Q: There are currently more super rare variants than rare variants. How do you explain something called “super rare” being more common than “rare”?
A: Glenn “It’s a common misunderstanding that rarity is directly tied to quantity, but rarity is a matter of frequency, not quantity.
In systems where you’re drawing at everything with equal chances, they’re directly related. For example, in a gumball machine, you’re basically equally likely to get any color, so adding more red ones will make it more common, and taking them out will make red more rare.
But if the machine is designed to award a red gumball 1% of the time (and 11% for each other color), rather than draw equally from all gumballs, then it doesn’t matter if there are 100 or 100,000 red gumballs in the machine. The frequency of a red gumball is fixed, and so is its rarity.”
Q: What were some challenges you faced when making Team Clash teams? Did some designs get changed?
A: Glenn “The X-Men were echoing the same thing as the Avengers, teamwork—just with a different resource than Power in Energy. Creatively, working together is something important to both of them.
The Thunderbolts were also creatively inspired by our love of the recent movie, where they were portrayed as underdogs or losers who turned it around for victory. We knew this gameplay would work for Snap because it already does.
Honestly, I think these mostly stayed about how they started. Only Avengers and X-Men saw substantial iteration.
Avengers started as a buff for playing Avengers in the front row, but it was a bit boring and sometimes tricked players into playing too wide.
X-Men started as a Raft-like reward for filling each location that gave +1 Max Energy, but we simplified it in part to reduce making movement a big part of how to leverage it, since we already had a team doing that for Energy.”
Q: What’s the difference between a card having 0 Power, 1 Power, or even -1 Power as a base stat balance wise?
A: Glenn “Generally, we simply avoid releasing at 0 Power. That’s both an appeal element–having no Power makes a card harder to get excited about–and also a balance element. In balance terms, the “gap” between 0 and 1 is quite a bit larger than 1 and 2 when it comes to Strength. That’s because it’s a binary element–has Power or doesn’t. You can see something similar manifest in chess, where the “value” of a piece that can checkmate alongside just the King is substantially higher (the Rook vs. the Knight/Bishop).
Negative numbers are more permissible to us, because they do contribute to the system, but they’re even less appealing so we tend to rely on them in specific scenarios that make sense for balance and flavor. For example, Gorr’s a bad dude afflicted with a curse; being able to use his base Power as a dial to weaken or strengthen his card makes sense, including going below 0.”
Q: Did you ever think about limiting all cards to their respective teams?
A: Glenn “Nah, we think that’s pretty clearly a less fun version of the game.”
Q: I collect Rian Gonzales variants. I even have her albums favorited. And the result was months of not seeing a single Rian variant in the shop. Which led to my gold accumulating, which led to getting enough to purchase some off the 5k gold bundles… and as soon as I was under 1,200 gold, THAT’S when the Rian variants suddenly started showing up daily in the shop. Is the “help” of the algorithm showing them when you would need to spend money to buy them?
A: Glenn “No, that’s not a thing. Hard to know what might’ve happened without more information. My guess is you owned a large percentage of them already and started seeing newer ones when they came out, or older ones during a promotion window, or after an update the targeting to improve it. As a Peach fan, I’ve seen all three of those in action myself.
The human brain is pretty good at observing and rationalizing potential patterns. Doesn’t mean the pattern or the rationale is real (see deck-based matchmaking).”
Q: Can you update us on if LTGM rewards like emotes will release again in the future?
A: Glenn “That’s still the plan. However, we often delay rereleasing cosmetics that were otherwise exclusive for at least a year to maintain their appeal to players as prestige rewards worth earning.”
Q: Could we ever collect team clash exclusive borders?
A: Glenn “We’re debating this idea. The borders are specially built in a different way from other borders, so it’s not a simple shift. But they also serve a really vital purpose in the game mode that could be damaged by making them more widely available.”
Q: How do you track healthy amounts of player homebrew decks versus copying existing decks?
A: Glenn “We track the individual play rates of all cards, as well as clusters in which cards appear together and the variety of those clusters. Many of our balance changes (nerfs and buffs) and design choices focus on growing the diversity among those clusters.”
Q: Instead of big balance changes or reworks, could you implement a system like “this card and that card can’t be used in the same deck” to open new balancing opportunities?
A: Glenn “Colloquially, this is the kind of fix I refer to as a “duct tape fix” in design. That’s because it doesn’t actually fix anything, it just covers up the problem. I prefer to address gameplay issues directly, rather than make new systems to work around them.”
Q: Lots of new cards lately have new and unique are for Snap. Did something change so these new cards can’t have old art like cards used to have?
A: Glenn “When we launched the game, our license included a large repository of existing comic art with a lot of awesome stuff that we didn’t have to commission ourselves. Naturally, we’ve aimed to use the best of it over time for existing characters, and so the balance has naturally shifted to account for more new commissions, different ideas from our art directors, etc.
We do still have ongoing access to new comics and art in addition to our original commissions, so it’s not going away. Just a slight shift in the balance and when that art becomes available to us.”
Q: Have you noticed a decrease in players reaching infinite?
A: Glenn “We’ve seen slight shrinkage, which was expected. The increase in game modes in 2025 required more total play for some players to reach Infinite, which would naturally cause some reduction. Plus for some players, LTGMs have simply given them goals they prize more highly than Infinite. But nothing is landing outside our expectations in this regard.
We do track our percentage of players that reach each rank threshold, it’s one of the most important metrics to our matchmaking team.
Overall, our metrics point towards having more play goals than just making Infinite as a very good thing for our players. That said, we also think LTGMs and Ranked could have a more symbiotic relationship, and we’re actively exploring what that could be.”
Q: Will the next Dev video be late due to the holidays?
A: Griffin “Yes. The next season’s Dev Update will go live on Jan 5, the day before the season for the reasons you outlined.”
Q: How did the popularity of Team Clash teams compare to their actual winrates?
A: Glenn “X-Men and Guardians were both a little more popular than their winrates, while Avengers and Thunderbolts were a bit less. Spider-Verse was pretty even. Overall everything was in a healthy spot for our first run, though we’ll make improvements.”
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: Why is my game crashing / kicking me out of matches?
A: The team is aware of these recent issues and performance crashes, and actively working on fixes.
Update on previous Q/A edition:
Q: Are there any plans to release new albums with variants that are pre-existing in the game?
A: Griffin “No plans at the moment. That’s not to say it won’t happen in the future.”
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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