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 Clea! If you don’t know if the card is worth the 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 Nightmare is used on limited time modes, can get create abilities from the banned card list?
A: Glenn “Nope, they’re automatically removed from the method that generates random cards”
Q: If Astral Projection hits Brood or Sinister, they generate tokens at 0 Power. How is this possible if spells have no Power?
A: Glenn “When forced to compute the absence of Power as a value, we return that value as 0. Honestly, there’s a reasonable case that Broodling and Sinister Clone should have a default of 0 given they’re always set.”
Q: Will Werewolf be analyzed as a bannable card in future Sanctum Showdowns?
A: Glenn “We’ll certainly be reviewing his performance.”
Q: Instead of reworking Lockjaw, did you consider making his new ability into a new card and simply buffing him instead?
A: Glenn “We did consider it, and it was a close call. The main factors at play were that 1) previous Lockjaw was underplayed and very weak, 2) we don’t want a lot of this kind of effect running around, and 3) we didn’t want to buff Lockjaw’s previous functionality to a competitive level. When Lockjaw’s strong, it’s very polarizing for players and the closest thing in our game to cheating card draw, while often cheating Energy as well.
So, in order to improve his playability, we needed a design we could feel good about positioning with more strength. This could also be compared to something like Iron Fist, Ghost-Spider, and Arana, where the minor differences and the limited number of deck slots can create reasons for players to want specific versions of similar effects, but Lockjaw is just doing a high-power thing relative to these cards.”
Q: With Thanos no longer starting in hand, could Spider-Ham return to his previous version?
A: Glenn “Thanos wasnt the only reason, and we’d always wanted a more random Ham but been unwilling to risk him getting bounced. This solves both concerns neatly for us, and lets us make Ham a stronger card in the long run.”
Q: Why doesn’t Sentry generate Void’s Power relative to his own, like Brood and Sinister do?
A: Glenn “Most tokens have specifically defined Power; Brood and Sinister are the exceptions, not Sentry. It’s a lot more relevant to how you build around them than it would be for Sentry.”
Q: Would you ever consider letting Void scale with Sentry?
A: Glenn “I don’t think it would be too strong or anything, but the described function would add unnecessary complexity and potentially undesirable weirdness to the card. Buffing Sentry isn’t really a component of playing with him right now, so adding an effect that discourages/encourages it (Viper/Annihilus depending) doesn’t complement his existing role very well. It would more likely open up interaction for other odd things to occur, like using Shadow King to shrink the Void, that we don’t particularly desire to enable.
Generally, we try to avoid layering complexity on top of the baseline function in SNAP when we can, as a design heuristic to keep our game accessible. Sometimes we find it’s worthwhile for other reasons, such as Hela’s new cost restriction or Prodigy’s place-based copying, but we always want a compelling cause for that kind of ‘extra’ dimension.”
Q: Any chance of a Doom 2099 buff soon?
A: Glenn “We’ll have some old pals of his in town soon, let’s wait and see what they think.”
Q: Since skills are all On Reveals, is there a concern that Astral Projection makes future high Cost spells forced to be balanced around Projection copying it for cheaper?
A: Glenn “Skills have inherent challenges at higher Costs already, but I don’t foresee Astral Projection specifically being among the most significant problems. If that did turn out to be the case, I imagine we’d just update Projection to ‘character.'”
Q: Could Dormammu get a “can’t be destroyed” text added?
A: Glenn “No, we generally want location-winning threats to be vulnerable to interaction. Otherwise, they become very difficult to compete with in a fun way.”
Q: When Skaar was moved to a 7-Cost, why wasn’t Caiera updated to protect 7-Cost cards? Especially with Dormammu now in play.
A: Glenn “We could’ve done it, but we often find that it can be more interesting to make the smaller scale changes and then pick and choose when it’s right to “catch up.” It creates a larger number of metagames with differences and reduces how much we change, which are both worthy goals. That’s not to say we expressly plan to make this change to Caiera, just that we would often prefer to see the world without such a change first.”
Q: Did the team consider giving Dormammu some interaction with Dark Dimension for lore purposes?
A: Glenn “The Dark Dimension’s function doesn’t really permit much synergy-based play, given that its design prevents anything from happening unless both players make it to the end of the game.
We did consider some ritual and Dormammu elements that would ‘wink’ at the Dark Dimension, such as starting Dormammu in play but unrevealed until the rituals complete or a ritual delaying reveals a la Lemuria, but ultimately these weren’t as fun to play with as where we ended up.”
Q: Did you consider letting Dormammu be banished at the start of a game, and let his ritual bring him back? This way he isn’t ruined by cards that interact with him before the ritual.
A: Glenn “We did consider that, but a) we don’t want to do a lot of Agatha/previous Thanos stuff–it homogenizes the game a lot–and b) putting a card in your deck that’s explicit function is to take itself out of your deck and add a different card is just toooo weird. If we were going to go that route, we’d have likely just made Dormammu a token and the Ritual the base card in question, but that would just not be as exciting (and we’d lose some other gameplay angles).”
Other Questions
Q: Are there any plans for draft mode?
A: Glenn “We have some ideas in the works, but it hasn’t been in active development this year due to prioritizing other features (especially self-publishing).”
Q: How do you view cards that have super unique effects, but aren’t very strong. Do they warrant buffs to make their uniqueness usable?
A: Glenn “We often try to polarize narrow cards into being very powerful in their prescribed use. Some examples include Mister Negative, Scream, and Death. Depending on the specifics, it can be harder or easier to find that point where a card boosts its “home” without becoming strong enough to make it in more mainstream decks, or overwhelm them.”
Q: Have you ever made an ability, but never had a character that it could fit with?
A: Glenn “Hasn’t really happened, doubt it ever will to be honest. Partially because our process is ‘top-down’ so often, but also because we’ve never struggled to in the past.”
Q: Would you ever consider “group” cards? Like one card with The Avengers, Fantastic 4, Nova Corps, The Wanders, etc ?
A: Glenn “It’s certainly something I’m interested in exploring.”
Q: Are you exploring the idea of using Snap Packs as a game reward?
A: Glenn “We are pursuing using SNAP Packs as rewards in more places, as well as some new twists on the Packs. Our existing infrastructure wasn’t developed for the former, so we did have to adjust a few things.”
Q: With deck sizes now exceeding 30 cards, is card draw effects more likely to be made?
A: Glenn “The fact that you can choose to make your deck larger doesn’t impact the strength of card draw on designs that don’t require you to make that choice, and that’s where the consequences are negative. Something conditional would be much more in-bounds than us upping the amount of unrestricted card draw available.”
Q: Do you ever balance around frustrating or unwinnable matchups? Like Arishem versus Cassandra Nova?
A: Glenn “We do prefer to avoid them all things being equal, but it doesn’t override most other concerns. An inevitable outcome of fostering a diverse metagame is that decks will be varying degrees of fun to play against one another. The more diversity, the greater the delta will be able to get.
Our game is also unique in the world of CCGs in that retreating is a core action of the game. That is, choosing when to snap/retreat/neither is a decision that rewards skill over time. These kinds of matchups do demonstrate those opportunities, so they serve some purpose there as well.”
Q: Players reported a Sanctum bug that let them skip to the final rewards. If that is true, will players who didn’t get to skip be compensated for fairness?
A: Griffin “Yes, there’s a bug that’s affecting some players allowing them to move up faster. We’re still investigating the how and why.
By fairness, are you asking for all players to rewarded with the same rewards the bug caused?
As this bug doesn’t affect others negatively, it’s very unlikely we’ll take any further action beyond fixing this for future iterations of Sanctum.”
Q: If players get a clear advantage by the Sanctum bug letting them skip progression to get rewards, why wouldn’t you compensate other players who had to earn theirs?
A: Glenn “If a shop accidentally sells something for less or returns too much change a few times, should they reduce the price of their items to match or offer partial refunds to past customers? No—an occasional human error to the shop’s disadvantage is an accepted element of doing business.
The purpose of compensation is that it is restorative. Players unaffected by this bug have not been materially damaged by it—they’re having the intended progression experience. I sympathize that a ‘good bug’ can lead to some players envying others, but CCGs offer nonstop opportunities for envy by nature. Someone else getting lucky doesn’t merit compensation.”
Q: For players who paid the extra 200 charms to get the returning Sanctum variants, what will happen with those players since the higher price wasn’t intended?
A: Griffin “You can reach out to Customer Support to be refunded to difference in Charms OR we’ll be automatically refunding all players who purchase those with the difference in Gold after the event.”
Q: When giving cards +/- 1 Power, does the team view these was “might as well give or take the extra Power since it won’t break the meta”?
A: Glenn “We don’t tend to make changes cavalierly—we have a goal for each one, but the overriding goal is basically ‘encourage players to make different decisions.’ +/- 1 Power can have a larger impact than people think, especially on lower-Cost cards.”
Q: With more skills being added to the game, should more cards like Morph or Baron Zemo be changed to not interact with Spells?
A: Glenn “We started light here on purpose, so that we could measure over time how an increasing density of skills in the game would play alongside many of the cards you mentioned.
That said, I don’t expect us to look at using it to ignore the drawbacks/restrictions on cards too often—that starts to defeat the purpose of having them. Stuff like Ebony Maw, for example.
We might change cards where the difference is irrelevant, like Agony, just for added clarity. It hasn’t seemed necessary or impactful yet, though.
Stuff like Morph or Zemo are more likely, because these are cards where their prescribed gameplay is a lot different when skills get involved.”
Q: With so many cards adding more cards ro hand, could we ever see an ability that increases your hand size for that match?
A: Glenn “Possible, but not super likely. Our hand size is a practical limiter in addition to a strategic one, and we like how it serves both roles.”
Q: Would you ever make a card that you can add X amount of copies of itself into your deck?
A: Glenn “Unlikely but possible”
Q: What about a card that shuffles a copy of a card into your deck?
A: Glenn “Certainly”
Q: Would you make a game mode that let players pick multiple copies of the same cards?
A: Glenn “Maybe—it would need a compelling reason for that, as the tempo and length of the game’s normal play don’t make this especially fun or even useful for most cards.
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 had unclaimed rewards in the inbox from webshop codes, which claimed they expired in ~50 weeks but have now disappeared from my inbox. I’m not sure if they’re completely gone or if they were maybe just force added to my collection, can you provide clarity on this?
A: Not a dev response, but code rewards don’t typically show up as claimable like in-game rewards do. When I redeemed the pride bundle code, the Ice Man variant just showed up in my collection (without notice) after I reset my client.
Q: Will events when you can’t get the cards without paying the new norm?
A: To simplify lots of answers around this topic, your feedback will play into it’s usage going forward. Kid Omega’s feedback was clearly heard, but we haven’t been told what the outcome of that feedback is yet.
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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