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: what is considered a healthy meta, is Zabu coming back soon, are devs worried about why some players may be quitting, 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 Sasquatch! 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 Sasquatch 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: Why is Sasquatch not named Heather McDaniel?
A: Glenn “We expect to have a variety of Sasquatch variants. We’re not currently planning to split Sasquatch off into multiple different characters the way we might consider for higher-profile variations like Robbie and Ben Reilly, though such thoughts could change.”
Q: If the early game experience is meant to be simpler so new players can learn, is the new Captain America text too complicated?
A: Glenn “There are several decks we steer players towards during the new player experience, based on early cards acquired. One of those cards is an Ongoing deck that uses Spectrum, which new Cap will slot into very naturally as players grow within the game.”
Q: What’s going on with Zabu?
A: Glenn “We already have a plan in place for Zabu, but it’s going to be a little longer before we enact it. This response will make more sense then.”
Q: Is it fair to say the play rate and cube rate of Hela is higher at 10,000 or less infinite rank?
A: Glenn “No, the opposite is true; Hela performs slightly worse for strong players than everyone else. She’s fairly close on winrate, but quite a bit less efficient on cuberate.”
Q: Why doesn’t Omega Red trigger on Cancun? He can be technically winning that location, but the points there don’t matter.
A: Glenn “No one is ever winning Cancun–you’ll note the Power hex never turns orange, which indicates winning a location.
To clarify our text choice: we went with ‘the game’ in Cancun’s text specifically because we wanted it to be clear that Power at Cancun doesn’t impact tiebreakers. Just saying “winning” wasn’t enough for playtesters to guess that correctly.”
Q: Do you have any plans to improve Moon Knight?
A: Glenn “We’re trying out a couple ideas.”
Other Questions
Q: Are you aware there are players abusing proving grounds for season xp?
A: Stephen “We are aware and are working on ways to discourage it.”
Q: Which Bruno does the title “Bruno makes me swoono” refer to?
A: Glenn “I believe this title refers to Bruno Carrelli.”
Q: Are there still MMR floors after you hit infinite?
A: Glenn “It’s quite complicated. The simple explanation is that with every season reset, we normalize MMR to better reflect players’ performance expectations. This value also informs the initial reset of SNAP Points for the season, but from there on SNAP Points (and thus infinite rank) care about seasonal performance. So your MMR serves to ‘ground’ your starting SNAP Points, but from there is less tightly tied to it until the season ends.
SNAP Points (and the leaderboard) aren’t designed to precisely reflect the most skilled players at all times. Very few competitions actually do that–they measure performances within a system during a specific time frame. For our leaderboards, that’s each season.”
Q: Would you ever create a card that redraws your hand?
A: Glenn “These effects are mostly powerful ways to homogenize game experiences into feeling very similar, so we don’t really plan to make them unless they serve highly-specific decks and introduce variance some other way, similar to how Jane Foster and Mister Negative create a ‘parlay’ effect.”
Q: What do you define as a meta deck?
A: Glenn “We have a number of different metrics for competitive decks, but generally speaking I consider decks competitive that are exceeding a specific posititve winrate and cuberate threshold against the field for a given week, among players that are series 3 complete. We also remove elements like featured locations and bot play from these calculations.
We can slice data more thinly than this, and often do–in particular, I like to slice decks’ matchup winrates against the frequency of those matchups to determine exactly how good it is.
It is possible for ‘pocket metagames’ to develop to a point that doesn’t align with this data; for example, among players with very high and very low MMRs, game behavior can vary. Third-party trackers by their nature tend to capture a version of these metagames, as they’re a data funnel for specific player types.
Spectrum Ongoing is a recent good example. Strong players can diminish the value of a card like Jean Grey before she even hits the board, and easily calculate the exact totals Spectrum herself will threaten. But across diverse group of players, it’s a robust deck that’s straightforward to play with a fair amount of incidental disruption, so it does really well.
Another historically good example has been Shuri, as a deck that is vulnerable to precise tactics (‘flip the Shuri location’) but very strong if the opponent isn’t familiar enough with the winning strategy for the matchup.”
Q: It feels like cards and locations have been changed to slowly update changes like Cost or Power. Are there any plans to add a 2x speed mode for veteran players?
A: Glenn “We haven’t changed how any of the cards worked, but some of the underlying technology has been updated and affected the experience. We are actively working on improvements in this space.”
Q: How do you stat cards that passively discount their cost?
A: Glenn “We have a general guideline that if we think the card is a risk to be copied a lot, we usually prefer 10 power to keep it vulnerable to Shang-Chi. Creatively, we want ‘Hulks’ to cost 6 and/or have 10+ Power as often as possible, too.
From there, it’s just testing. Mockingbird we balanced mostly around the decks we hoped it could help and create. Sasquatch already had some straightforward decks to go into, so it was aimed more at finding a complementary rate to what a deck like Bounce might want to do.
There aren’t many shortcuts, just some starting goals or guidelines and then playtesting.”
Q: What is considered a healthy meta?
A: Glenn “We check multiple data slices, but the primary one we use for metagame snapshots counts Series 3 complete players and includes only normal PvP games, no H/F locations or anything.
We tend to consider metagames with ~6 (or fewer) winning decks unhealthy. Last week, the following decks from our primary slice all had positive winrates and cube rates within the above criteria:
Apoc Discard
Wong-Namora
Blink Ramp
Sera Surfer
Ultron Patriot
Deadpool
Lockdown
DeathBird
Shuri-Sauron
Thanos
Hela
A pretty cool Werewolf-Stature deck
(Order random, names our internal unimaginative ones)
All of these decks saw thousands of games played, and none of them made up more than ~6% of the metagame.
The winrate differences across this range were interestingly small: the worst deck on this list was only ~3.6% behind the best one.
So while I wouldn’t say it’s our best meta ever, it’s a pretty healthy one from this view. Of course, different metagames can develop around different ranks, cards can have different success from their decks, etc. That’s why we look at lots of different slices of data, and talk to the community.”
Q: Can the post-game flicker after booster reward be removed or toggled?
A: Daniela “This flicker is a bug and should be fixed very soon!”
Q: Is the team concerned about players who are quitting the game? I ask this because I have noticed that recently a lot of people and even some creators (Drewberry being the latest) have been getting more and more discouraged to play the game or have even dropped it altogether. Is this trend of unhappiness with the game and slow decline of interest especially from creators of any concern to the team?
A: Glenn “I appreciate your candor with this question and I’ll try to reply with some candor of my own in response.
Speaking as the Community Manager, it’s a core tenet of my job to listen and understand what players are feeling and why they’re feeling that way. Understanding why players stop engaging with SNAP is something I personally work on every day. When it comes to listening to influencers or creators, their voices can be louder and bring with them the opinions of their communities which are very powerful and helpful.
I say that all so that so I can confidently tell you that we’re absolutely listening to Drewberry’s thoughts as well as every player out there. We want to make SNAP the best game ever, just like you.
Saying this is a ‘concern’ isn’t how I’d frame it, however. These feelings of waxing and waning interest and engagement are the realities of an on-going game like SNAP. It’s more of an opportunity for us (me) to listen, learn, and keep improving.
The only way we achieve greatness is listening respectfully to each other. And if we fail, well, then in the words of Steve Rogers, ‘we’ll do that together too.’
Sorry for the rambling answer but I’m kinda passionate about this topic.”
Q: How many games (or what metagame share) does an archetype have to have before it crosses your radar? I could imagine a deck with an 80% win rate over 5 games, for example, which wouldn’t be very useful.
A: Glenn “For decks, our limit isn’t based on the number of games. We aggregate the data, and the number of games a group of cards played is just a data point. We can tighten or loosen the commonality—for example, a very loose association might show us lots of different decks with Annihilus and Sentry. As we tighten the requirements, it will merge toward a single cluster of the most popular core cards, which we can then analyze in a variety of other ways.
So for example, the 80% deck with 5 games will contribute its win percentage towards multiple collections of cards, depending on what it plays. Let’s say it was the DeathBird—Carnage, Killmonger, and Death would contribute equally based on their combined shares of that 80% toward Deadpool decks, while Mysterio and Mockingbird would do the same for Patriot.”
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: Any roadmap updates?
A: No official announcement yet, but there is a live “news about an exciting update and the future of Marvel Snap” coming Saturday June, 8 on IGN live. Perhaps we get the long awaited news then?
Q: What is your favorite card rework so far?
A: KentErik “Hands down, the Spider-man rework!”
A: Addison “I like Snowguard’s rework. Retained a lot of the same function and spirit of the original but added some additional play options and is just a better overall feeling card imo.”
Q: Could we eventually see full cards for characters that are currently only variants like Mister Knight or Red Goblin?
A: Glenn “How to handle characters with multiple heroic aliases as well as heroic mantles worn by a variety of characters is an ongoing discussion. For now, we’re looking at what feels right for each case as we go rather than codifying hard rules, but the latter is a goal and we’re happy to hear player feedback about how we’ve handled some similar cases (Throg, Jane Foster, Robbie Reyes, Scarlet Spider).
Long way to say ‘we don’t know for sure yet’ in this specific case, but there you go.”
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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