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 questions such as: why aren’t more tech cards banned in high voltage, will imbalance patches return in 2025, could Master Mold see a buff, 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 of new Series 5 card Rocket and Groot! If you don’t know if this card is worth Spotlight Caches, make sure to check out our weekly Spotlight Cache guide, as well as our Bonus Challenge guide!
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!
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: With Bruce Banner uniquely using percentages in his text, will we see more of this style in the future?
A: Glenn “It’s not as unique as it might seem—cards like Kate Bishop and Nico Minoru are versions of fixed chance outcomes, and we’ve got plenty of dynamic ones like Gambit, Blob, etc.
The templating is a bit more novel, for sure, but ultimately that was just what we felt communicated the effect best. If we’d wanted a different chance, like 50/50 or 1/6, we might’ve gone with ‘flip a coin’ or ‘roll a six-sided die’ instead. Generally, we prefer to avoid direct math in the effects, that’s just where we ended up here.”
Q: Why does Agony trigger after a location effect resolves, but Nico’s effect will activate before a location effect resolves?
A: Glenn “Agony is functioning as intended; Nico is the unusual card. Other than Nico and Iron Fist, every “after you play a card” effect goes location, then card.
The reason Nico and Iron Fist are weird is because their abilities aren’t conditional on them being in play, but our system needs the source of an ability to exist in order to reference it and there are ways they could otherwise cease to exist (like transform or merge). To avoid that, they each create an ability that attaches to the player, and players go before locations.
This is an element of our system we want to change, but we only want to change it once because it will involve relearning several interactions. So we’re evaluating it diligently alongside a variety of other systemic improvements to the game’s structure.”
Q: How does the team feel about disruption cards that require priority, such as Alioth and Negasonic?
A: Glenn “The design space is fairly narrow, because these are cards that have really polarized utility–the effects’ impacts don’t vary by small amounts, the way something like Red Guardian might. They’re useful to have though, so we try to identify opportunities for them periodically.
The best structure tends to integrate some additional disruptive impact, like Cosmo or Echo.”
Q: Why has Master Mold been around so long, but hasn’t seen a buff despite his low playrate?
A: Glenn “The bulk of Master Mold’s strength is in the effect, which has high potential to create frustrating gameplay by effectively denying players the ability to draw cards. That area’s rarely an effect designers should to cost aggressively or allow to happen repetitively–it should mostly be a novelty or an odd counter, such as against Dracula.
When we select cards to buff, we do so with goals in mind. Improving decks, changing metagame patterns, etc. Master Mold has a niche where it already serves a role well, so the primary result of buffing it would be making that deck better (we could do that other ways, and have) and/or increasing how many decks play Master Mold or how often (low upside, given the play experience).”
Q: Is there any interest in letting High Evo change Rocket so it’s more lore accurate?
A: Glenn “That’s his MCU origin, but Rocket (and many other characters) have a variety of relationships in different incarnations, and SNAP isn’t MCU-specific.
We try to match lore to the character’s individual essence, and when we do have more specific ties they’re for elements that are fundamental to the character in all of its versions, to maximize the resonance.”
Q: Why is Snap inconsistent in that Gambit requires you to discard an card for his effect, but Moon Knight doesn’t?
A: Glenn “It’s not an inconsistency; they’re just two different effects. Sokovia will discard a card from one player’s hand even if their opponent has none; Moon Knight works the same way, that’s just the output of the effect. Gambit’s destroy is conditioned on fulfilling his discard as a cost.
We could implement either card the other way, but that’s a choice with functional gameplay impacts and creative elements. Gambit canonically throws cards to damage enemies, so it makes creative sense that he’d need cards to do that. One of his mechanical use cases is also repeating by the effect many times, and we wanted to give that effect a meaningful extra hoop given its potential, so it helps that as well.
Most of our cards with requirements like Gambit are structured to be ‘if you can do A, get B.’ But Moon Knight as well as cards like Killmonger or Crystal are just basically ‘B for both sides.'”
Q: Is it intended that Luke Cage blocks Rocket and Groot from stealing Power? If so, will there be future interaction changes?
A: Glenn “There was no intent to change this card’s function relative to existing interactions, like Scream.”
Q: If Alioth was banned from High Voltage, why keep other tech cards that ruin the fun all the same?
A: Glenn “If we stripped all tech cards from the game, the best High Voltage deck would be the one or perhaps 1-3 decks that simply go the biggest the most often. It would reduce the diversity of the format a different way: by kicking down ‘medium-sized castles’ that could otherwise enjoy an advantage over the big ones by being less vulnerable to disruption, or by being able to play disruption of their own.”
Q: If Magik is banned from High Voltage, but Kang is not?
A: Glenn “You could also ask why we would make Magik in the first place, as the answers are similar. You always want some game pieces to stretch some rules—that’s core to all CCGs.
I wouldn’t say Kang is even trespassing HV’s line, given it mostly only even goes to 5 turns if both players ‘agree’ and 4 is still a significant reduction. But beyond that, we’re inclined to give cards that are weak or underplayed on the ranked ladder more leeway in game modes, since we want all of our cards to see play. (Even if we expect to change them later.)”
Q: Can you elaborate on Peni Parker’s and Bruce Banner’s unique abilities? Why not let Peni gain Power instead of Energy? Why not let Bruce’s percent be based on the amount of energy you skip?
A: Glenn “For Peni, the input is already power, so we wanted an output that wasn’t—merging is both an addition of Power as well as a more efficient use of space, which also often translates into Power. She’s also a support piece by design—we weren’t aiming to put strength into her on par with something like Phoenix or Negative, because merging multiple cards into Peni is hard and the deck would wind up being too much of a glass cannon. The “mash up” vibe is also intentional, as Peni and her spider are two different life forms working together.
As for Bruce, we did consider several other options. Our favorite of these was a steadily increasing %, but we had some complications communicating the function to players and it ultimately wasn’t a huge difference vs. the very simple card.
The reason we specifically avoided something like a threshold transformation was multifaceted. It reduced the High Evo synergy, as bulk skips don’t play efficiently with small ones. Any version of a guarantee is a huge buff too—we didn’t see how we could print him below 3-Cost or possibly 4 if the transform was certain. These versions of the card would also consistently “blank” a late Bruce, because balancing around a threshold meant a card that wouldn’t ever be able to meet the threshold if you drew it on like turn 5.
The nature of a card like Banner is also polarizing in appeal. Competitive players don’t tend to like RNG on this scale, and players who do enjoy it don’t tend to value competitive strength as highly. So pushing strength into Bruce has diminishing returns because it improves the card for an audience that isn’t going to receive it warmly either way. We don’t get to make a lot of cards for the other audience, and Banner felt like a good time for it given the rest of Rivals season was aiming elsewhere.”
Q: Why are Scream and Scorn effectively giving +4 Power each activation, when you previously have said +4 is too strong?
A: Glenn “All strength exists in other context. For example, Scream is the best card in a solid deck and carries a lot of the deck’s win equity—she’s not as extreme a case as Mr. Negative or Phoenix, but it’s a similar principle. Phoenix adds 8+ Power each turn, but because the context of how you get that Power is so specific, it’s appropriate to be so high. You can see this contrast across a spectrum of cards—for example, Angela asks you to do something very easy, while Thena asks you to do something slightly harder.”
Other Questions
Q: Do you track how many players buy titles in conquest store? Does this inform future plans for titles?
A: Glenn “I’m sure this is tracked. However, given that many devoted Conquest players buy the whole store because medals expire, it doesn’t necessarily reflect strongly or weakly on the value of titles to those players.”
Q: What about players who have an abundance of medals, but choose not to get the titles? Wouldn’t that better inform you of player sentiment towards the reward?
A: Glenn “It can, but getting a statistically significant sample is difficult when the contents change each month. We’re already talking about a subset of a subset of a subset (Conquest players who win an abundance of medals and don’t buy the title). It would require some attention and effort to bear fruit, and we have a lot of larger bonus initiatives for those teams on top of their usual work, such as card acquisition updates.”
Q: How do you determine when a card is okay to be a staple card for a specific cost that everyone uses in any deck (Shang-Chi) versus one that is too prevelant and should be nerfed (Silver Sable or Nocturne)?
A: Glenn “There’s a fairly significant difference for us in a card being the best at a job vs. being the best card. A major reason for this is deck size—if Nocturne is the best 3-Cost in the game for too many decks, it makes the game less diverse and restricts deckbuilding to 11 cards.
However, the dynamic is different if the card is the best at a specific role, because if a deck isn’t interested in that role then it doesn’t matter as much that one card is the best. Conversely, if two cards are equally good at a role, then the 12-card deck means players are incredibly likely to see one of them, reducing diversity another way.
Take Shang-Chi. He’s the best at what he does, but not every deck wants to use that effect. But if we made a card that was like ‘4/4 – On Reveal: Return the enemy card here with the most Power to your opponent’s hand’ that would warp the metagame significantly around such decks having two effects that punish single high-Power cards.
So essentially, the more specific a card is, the more strength it’s allowed to get—and the less likely we are to deliberately overlap it with another card. Generally useful cards that give you a lot relative to their Cost need to either have some kind of downside or find exactly the right spot.”
Q: Has the team considered a different cadence for releasing cards at all? At the moment, 1 card released a week means we either see that cards main deck all week or it’s counter and it makes the meta feel kind of stale.
A: Glenn “We’ve made small changes to that this year already, with the second card the week of the Season Pass debut as well as game modes awarding additional cards. I imagine we’ll continue to test similar options.
If you’re asking whether our model will shift to something like quarterly or even monthly sets of cards, that seems fairly unlikely. Much of our philosophy is built around keeping things interesting with a steady drip of new things. Both options have downsides, certainly, so it’s just a choice.”
Q: With upcoming card acquisition changes, should players be concerned how to manage their current keys and tokens?
A: Griffin “IF any changes are made to those currencies or systems we’ll give people ample time to make decisions on what to do with them.
We’ll refrain from speculation on the future of card acquisition at this time, however.”
Q: Will there be any compensation for Spotlight Caches that are opened now and give 1k tokens before the change coming up?
A: Griffin “No, there will not be any bonus Tokens retroactively to Spotlight Cache duplicates before the change is enacted in January as the system is working as intended.”
Q: Reading the update about Tokyo 2099, does the team consider Mindscape an Anti-Discard location?
A: Glenn “Technically yes, but it doesn’t really accomplish the goal because it’s incredibly disruptive to both players. A good basic example of what we’re looking for is something like Wakanda vs. Destroy–the non-Destroy player can largely ignore it.”
Q: I love the art for Daken’s Spotlight variant (by Cameron Stewart), but is the team aware of his grooming and sex abuse allegations?
A: Griffin “Thank you for alerting us to this serious issue.
After further investigation, we’ve decided to remove and replace the Daken Variant from players’ Collections with another Daken Variant (by artist InHyuk Lee). Once updated, the previous Variant will no longer be available in game.
We understand that for many, that Variant was desirable and added to your decision to spend a Spotlight Key. For that reason, we’re not only refunding all owners of the Daken Variant in question with their Spotlight Key but also providing an additional 700 Gold.
We also will no longer be working with this artist moving forward as well as continuing to improve our vetting and review processes.”
Q: For people who see the new Daken replacement variant and want it, how will they get it since the spotlight has ended?
A: Griffin “We’re still discussing how to best bring it back in the future.”
Q: Why do some cards release without vfx attached?
A: Addison “Oh, I know the answer to this one!
Lasher’s VFX were finalized and came in a bit later than we’d normally like on the QA side of things and had already missed the cutoff for the currently live client. We opted to reduce risk and not try to force it into that release during our hardening period on our staging environment and instead pushed it to the next upcoming client. Everything should be hooked up and ready to roll for Lasher when that update goes live in January.
I think the goal generally is to release cards with VFX good to go, but there are certain circumstances like this (timing issues, known bugs, performance concerns, etc…) where we may opt to disable them. Not an exact science though and sometimes we prioritize things the other way too, just depends situation to situation.”
Q: Do you prioritize new or old cards vfx first?
A: Glenn “New cards are always top of the queue. In recent months, our VFX team’s workload has had less time for older cards, but they’re still in the queue.”
Q: How do you measure forced engagement vs fun? High Voltage missions 3rd reset is during bedtime hours, so many players have to decide if they should grind missions or rest.
A: Glenn “We cycle resets evenly throughout the day, often over 8 hours, to ensure players all over the globe have roughly equal opportunities to enjoy the game. Building the resets around any specific time zones’ ‘bed time hours’ would always disadvantage some players who live on the other side of the planet, and running our resets on bespoke schedules by location has many practical challenges.
High Voltage’s maximum rewards are optional and available without losing sleep, if they’re important to you. But given how good some of the rewards are, we do want it to be a meaningful achievement to earn it.
To answer your question about engagement: it’s less that engagement is a more valuable metric than others and more that engagement correlates positively to every ‘good’ metric. I haven’t seen any indicators that new game modes are causing burnout, but we’re cautious of it. That’s one of the reasons we run them as time-limited events.”
Q: Will we see “Imbalance” events return in 2025?
A: Glenn “We have some similar things in the works I am hoping to debut in 2025, but we aren’t planning to do exactly imbalance patches again. I am personally highly invested in finding the best way to showcase the kind of fun those events could provide, but they’re not especially practical to run the way we did before.”
Q: Why not update X-Mansion to only summon X-Men?
A: Glenn “We avoid using player-facing terms we’re not going to explain or support, as it can set up bad expectations and confusion. That’s especially true for newer players, for whom such a revision would imply our game will care about mutants or similar qualities (Alien? Soldier?) Even if you don’t need to know the list, the existence of a list you can’t know can feel confusing to encounter.”
Q: Has other content you wanted to be closer to launch been delayed due to the work on Character Mastery?
A: Glenn “Yes, in the sense that if the designers and engineers weren’t working on it, they’d be working on something else. I couldn’t speak to the specifics of that content though, since we build our schedules with those expectations in mind.”
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: Will there be any kind of compensation for players who open their Caches before the update, but aren’t Series 3 complete yet? (I think you or someone else posted your exact question to discord before I could post it, but I’m displaying here anyways just in case)
A: Glenn “There won’t be compensation. If you want to save your Caches and wait until the patch, you totally can!”
Q: Does a card’s variant avalibility factor into how quickly it returns to the Spotlight system? Is that why some cards aren’t getting features like they should?
A: Glenn “It’s a meaningful impact, and we’re aiming for future systems to reduce or eliminate the issue.”
Q: Will unused activate abilities consumption by Symbiote Spiderman be fixed? Or is it intended behavior?
A: Glenn “Intended. You can only activate a card once per game, and Symbiote Spider-Man has already been activated.”
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