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: will there ever be a Series 6, is it possible for Arishem to be nerfed, will you be able to unequip borders in the future, 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 Arishem! If you don’t know if this card is worth a Spotlight Cache, make sure to check out our weekly Spotlight Cache guide, as well as our Arishem 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: I just noticed Korg has a voiceline now, when did that get added?
A: Bella “Idk the exact date but that was (as you can tell) a recent addition. We were all excited and love hearing all the various sound effects and music TheChrisAlan puts in the game when he shares them with us.”
Q: You have Spiderman 2099 as a card, but 3099 cards are just variants. What made you decide to do that?
A: Glenn “Not every character will get the same treatment—no uniform system could function. We make those decisions around what makes sense to us and for players.
Spider-Man 2099 was the antagonist in a highly anticipated sequel to one of the best superhero movies of all time. That helped his case, but even internally some debated adding him to the season.”
Q: Will Arishem be a big bad?
A: Stephen “No more big bads. The spotlight system removed the need for cards in that category.”
Q: Is Mockingbird a 5/9 because she is 5′ 9″?
A: Glenn “Total coincidence. She was 5/8 to start, actually.”
Q: Was Darkhawk intended to be a release valve for balancing Arishem?
A: Glenn “Yes, knowing Darkhawk was one of our strong decks meant we knew Arishem had a ‘predator’ in the metagame.
It’s difficult to imagine a scenario where a valve’s strength against a given deck would become oppressive, since narrow impact combined with randomized availability insulates from a lot of that.
For example, Mobius is great vs. Negative decks, arguably the best card. But Negative can beat Mobius, it’s just really harsh. And we didn’t nerf 2/3 Mobius because of how good it was against Negative, but because of how wide its impact proved to be—Negative was part of that, but not the primary issue.
Spider-Ham is probably the closest analog we have, in that the original effect targeting a their highest-Cost card hit Apocalypse too harshly, but Ham also wasn’t specifically aimed at Apocalypse decks.”
Q: If Arishem is too strong, how can you balance him?
A: Glenn “Before we release cards, we talk about the potential future dials. Increasing the card quantity and/or reducing the card quality are the first ones we’d use here. (Not that I see cause to turn them, nor am I checking right now.)”
Q: Is Arishem geared to be more of a Agatha card (fun but never meant to be meta) or a Thanos card (a strong meta card)?
A: Glenn “I would say Arishem was aimed to be in the middle, but lean more toward Thanos.”
Q: Why did you make Arishem’s interaction with High Evolutionary a 50/50? Isn’t that confusing and unintuitive?
A: Glenn “It’s common to look at an interaction that seems confusing and assume it should change, but the alternatives aren’t always better. Even if they seem better to one person, they also may be worse to another.
In this case, we didn’t want the situation where High Evo becomes a default Arishem card to mitigate some of the variance for vanillas. So we were deciding between 1) always bricking with Evo, which felt no less intuitive (you would often have Evo and non-Evo of the same card in a deck), missed potential fun, and implied an enforced hierarchy for Start of Game triggers that doesn’t exist, or 2) a system that could work for future cards, which would be the current one (start of game effects resolve based on order in the deck). As we make more, maybe that system is unsatisfying, but we don’t have enough now to know if that’s true or the costs to the design space of making it rigid.
It could change, but I don’t see a need or a better alternative at present. Change introduces a new level of confusion because it contradicts a previous learning, so it must be a marked improvement for most players to compensate.”
Q: Could Drax ever be moved down to Series 1 to match the other Guardians of the Galaxy?
A: Glenn “Cards aren’t distributed among Series based on mechanical or creative commonality with other cards, and we don’t intend to start doing that.”
Other Questions
Q: With all of the discussion around the move changes lately, I’m wondering how you guys find a balance between meeting the needs of clear and simple gameplay with providing enough information to users about what’s happening.
A: Glenn “We come up with potential solves, assess their costs and benefits, and then implement them for internal playtests. In the case of this move adjustment, we had it live for over a month with standing queries to call out any weirdness people experienced. Everyone was able to adjust once they heard the new rule, so the confusion cost was low.
In general, I do think forcing resolution is better than forcing the UI. If someone literally can’t do something they expect, they often think it’s a bug and might not consciously realize there’s been a change. Consistently handling a resolution of their actions the same way is more convincing.”
Q: Do you think the game will get to a point where we need a Series 6?
A: Stephen “It’s possible at some point but we have no plans for series 6 within a known time horizon”
Q: Do you try to make a special “card of the year” that stands out with a special ability? Like High Evo was last year, this year is Arishem?
A: Glenn “No, we try to make the most awesome version of each card we can. Sometimes a card’s creative or mechanical function constrains ‘how rad’ a card can get, but we don’t target cards to go higher or lower.”
Q: Will every new border that is added to the game be available for purchase with gold in the custom card shop?
A: Stephen “Some borders will be in the shop and some will be exclusive to events / promotions”
Q: Will reward/bundle/event borders be unique/exclusive? Borders feel like they have very different pressures at play to variants.
A: Stephen “They will sometimes be exclusives and sometimes not. For example, the neon green and silver metallic ones from the login bonus are not exclusive. There is a new matte and distressed border style that will debut in Diner. They will not be exclusive to Diner but will be only available from events/bundles/promos. We are still experimenting with how many border consumables to give at once and will keep iterating there.”
Q: Any plans to allow consumed borders to be removed in some way from the card they are applied to?
A: Stephen “No plans to allow them to be removed once applied at this time. If it becomes an issue we can consider it down the road.”
Q: For cards with animations like Arishem, what gets made first: The card design or the vfx?
A: Glenn “We always develop VFX at the end of design. Sometimes some work is concurrent, but generally VFX is the second-to-last thing we finalize (with Cost/Power being the last).”
Q: When you decide base art for a card, how do you choose which version of a character they will portray?
A: Glenn “We discuss each character individually and decide what we want to do.
For example, Ravonna is a lesser-known character for non-comics fans. However, her MCU presence had a higher profile thanks to the Loki show, which our season was also synced with. So we went with that version for the base.”
Q: There was a recent reddit post showing a dev exclusive card back. Are there any other in game dev perks? Do you get the bundle variants for free or any variants only available to devs?
A: Glenn “Not that I can think of; even that card back is only for employees with certain tenure (I don’t have it). We don’t get any bundles or their variants for free, though occasionally we have awarded in-game gold/tokens for internal competitions.
Sometimes we might get access to a reward on our live account early while feature testing, but we still have to earn it (since that’s what we’re testing).”
Q: Can Alliances have repeating team names? If so, you could see people impersonating streamer teams.
A: Bella “2 alliances cannot have the exact same designation.”
Q: Is there a minimum number of players Alliances require?
A: Bella “Currently, the minimum is just 1 (whoever is leading said alliance). So you and your friend should be good.”
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 we ever see more 0-Cost cards?
A: Glenn “I imagine we’ll make more, but we don’t set out trying to. The design space is very shallow and tends to contribute to negative patterns.
Fun fact: Martyr was a 0/3 at one point.”
Q: Would you ever bring back an old variant in a bundle again? I missed some important variants while I was hospitalized.
A: Stephen “I feel your pain and totally hear you. Its a tough dynamic because if we bring them back then it will change how everyone perceives bundles and season pass causing them to most likely stop or decrease purchasing them. We need to maintain that relationship so we can continue to fund our studio and make this awesome game for you guys. I’ll never say never, but we still have no plans to bring back exclusive variants at this time. This dynamic is the same as it is for other successful cosmetic driven games like Fortnite, Apex, etc. Being able to show off an awesome cosmetic that is no longer available is a core part of the game.”
Q:If I put high evo in the same deck as arishem, will high evo evolve the cards arishem creates?
A: I couldn’t get you an answer last week when this was asked, but devs made an official statement on all Arishem interactions this week. If you haven’t seen the answer already yet, there is a 50/50 chance the no ability cards generated by Arishem (if any) will become evolved. This is based on if you draw High Evo first (no evolved cards because the deck isn’t expanded) or if you draw Arishem first (deck expanded, then evolved).
Q: Why can’t I get boosters for my Kingpin?
A: It could be bad luck, but it also could depend on the other cards in your deck. If a card in your deck has less than 50 boosters and is at infinity rank (or is a custom card) it gains 2x chance of getting boosters. In a 12 card deck, of 1 card is infinite with less than 50 boosters, it has a 2/13 chance of getting the boosters. If 11 of your cards are infinity/ custom and all have less than 50 boosters, your Kingpin only has a 1/23 chance to get boosters. Hopefully this conveys the idea clearly.
Q: Was there no dev update last week? (2 weeks ago from this edition)
A: No there wasn’t! There were very few answered questions involving Snap. Many questions lately have been off topic of Snap, so we skipped publishing that week. Many questions were “what’s your favorite cereal” or “what’s your dream vacation place”. There are dev answers, but it has nothing to do with Snap. If you (or any of you readers out there) want me to include those questions and answers each week, let me know in the comments! If general consensus is yes, I will stop filtering out those questions.
Q: Will there ever be a super rare location that give the game 8 turns?
A: Glenn “Probably not; 7 is already a lot.”
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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