Table of Contents
Welcome back to this week’s Developer Update! This week’s edition comes after:
- The launch of the new Masters of the Arcane Season and the Merlin, the new Season Pass card.
- Series 5 card Morgan Le Fay. If you don’t know if Morgan Le Fay is worth tokens or Snap Packs, make sure to check out our Bonus Challenge guide for a post-release review of the card and new decklists!
- Four new Series 4 cards Hellion, Mercury, Nicholas Scratch, and Jennifer Kale.
- The patch and the latest OTA Balance Updates! If you haven’t seen what was changed, be sure to check out the official patch notes and the datamines.
- Golden Gauntlet II tournament – day 1 has now wrapped up!
- New Gold Bundle Poised for Piracy and Vibranium Powered Offers do not offer free Credits anymore.
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: Will Dormammu still be drawn like a normal card? Or is he restricted to only skills to summon?
A: Glenn “Yes, you can draw Dormammu”
Q: Was Nightmare the real reason why Sauron was nerfed?
A: Glenn “No, the decision to nerf Sauron wasn’t about Nightmare—the deck was (and is) a very strong deck. We did aim to choose a nerf that would sustain their separation, but *whether* to nerf was not a major impact.
Ironically, the decision to explore the buff to 2/2 was Nightmare inspired. We were costing Nightmare at that time and started looking for Sauron buffs that would create some harmony and improve the deck (it was weak at the time), as Nightmare had already proven too strong at 2-Cost.”
Q: Is it correct that the limited time game mode reward, Kid Omega, is releasing as a Series 5 card? Normally these cards are always Series 4 except for Cassandra Nova.
A: Griffin “Kid Omega is indeed a Series 5 card.”
Q: Was Infinity Ultron’s synergy with Silver Surfer considered before changing the stones? The deck was a very unique Surfer build.
A: Glenn “Those decks weren’t strong performers, so we didn’t weight thme heavily. But we’re always sad to see a deck go, and thought it was cool. We just didn’t see a better route for finding the right balance point for the card.”
Q: Did the team have any thoughts to make the keyword for Merlin to be “create” instead of “add”? It feels like having a card that also has release valves (Gorgon) for those people matching up against him frequently would be good.
A: Glenn “Merlin’s cards are created and this affected by Gorgon. If a card didn’t start the game in a players deck, it’s a created card.
We’ve held off on a mass text change because it’s a large audit, and ‘add’ also doesn’t always mean create—and there are some forms of create that don’t currently use the word ‘add’ either, like Moon Girl.”
Q: Were Hellion and Mercury intended to be released next season?
A: Griffin “They were both intended to be released this season but in other ways.”
Q: With so many effects changing locations, is Magik due for a rework since Limbo isn’t dependable anymore?
A: Glenn “Magik’s one of the most played cards in the game, and has been for a long time because of how fun her effect is (the play rate stays high even when the winrate doesn’t). That’s not the sort of card we rework, it’s the sort of card we occasionally buff.”
Q: Do Merlin’s Skills all have the same 1/3 chance to be created?
A: Glenn “They are all equally likely.”
Other Questions
Q: Did Agamotto’s release (and Skills) teach you anything about Skills that helped you make this new season?
A: Glenn “This season was pretty much finished before Agamotto released, so we didn’t take much into active consideration from a gameplay perspective. We did improve our testing of skills and make their backend more robust, plus the new frames.”
Q: Can you explain when we can buy the season pass on the Snap store and get milestone progress? And how exactly will the 10k point reduction be applied to the track?
A: Griffin “Good question. If you want Webtrack Milestone track progress, you’ll need to wait until it’s back up on June 10.
The reduction of 10k Web Points on the track is spread fairly evenly across the track. It’s not just 10k off from the end.”
Q: It seems like a big oversite that the new season started a week before the webshop rework. Should players just not buy the season pass for the first week?
A: Griffin “It’s not an oversight but rather an unfortunate reality of the switch over of data on our backend.
It’s up to you if you’d rather have Season Pass at launch or wait until the Webshop is back.”
Q: Will there be an updated Snap client released back on the Samsung store in the future?
A: Griffin “No, there will not be.”
Q: Will the new webshop reward track be any different than it was before?
A: Griffin “The new one will be the same. Since it’s a new season, it’ll have the normal changes that a new season brings to the Milestone Track, though.”
Q: Will the customer service experience change with SD now self publishing?
A: Jared “Methods of contact will largely be the same. There will be some changes to the speed at which certain things are handled (i.e. resolution times will be faster).You should also see some big changes to the knowledge base in Helpshift as well as some of the early flows in how tickets are handled.”
Q: What will happen to the Galactus Spin in the webshop after the changes go live?
A: Griffin “For our first iteration, we wanted to focus on stability and core user experience details.
We know the ‘Galactus Spin’ is a favorite feature on the old Webshop and we want to add something similar to the new Webshop in the future and it’s on our roadmap.
However, there will be a free daily claim reward when it launches! We’ll share more details next week when it launches.”
Q: Will the new webshop go live before the Copycat bundle leaves the shop?
A: Griffin “We’ll be extending the run of the upcoming Copycat and Viper bundles to last until June 17!”
Q: The blog says this months twitch drops include an ice border, but the image shows a blue snowflake border. Which is it?
A: Griffin “Good catch! The image is incorrect. It is the Ice border.”
Q: Did your data from the last twitch drops show players liked getting Volts as a reward, since we are getting them again this time? And have the twitch drop bugs been fixed this time?
A: Griffin “We took the feedback that players didn’t like having JUST Volts as a reward so that’s why we added Volts on top of other rewards.
We definitely aren’t planning on having more bugs! We solved the original issue (which was tied to publishing changes) so we’re confident it won’t happen again. 🤞”
Q: Will the publishing changes allow Snap to return to Vietnam?
A: Griffin “Sadly, no. This doesn’t change that issue. It’s due to local government regulations.”
Q: Do the devs know MCU plot details before movies release to help you design cards and seasons around the movie release?
A: Glenn “Our partners at Marvel are excellent at helping us design content that will best complement the seasons from time to time. Some tie-ins moreso than others, for various reasons.”
Q: Why can’t I get matched against bots on ladder? Am I not grinding quick enough to get the easy infinite climb with mostly bots?
A: Glenn “The simple answer is that players who are harder to match fairly do get more bots–that’s the purpose of the fallback bot, to maintain fun queue times. And that’s why that bot tries to win, because we want those players to still have a meaningful climb to Infinite that presents challenges.
However, we also did not design the season journey for players with the assumption that climbing to Infinite two days after the season reset was a default goal. By all means, go for it! But it’s far from the average experience for players who make Infinite each season, and we don’t use bots (or anything else) to actively support the “turbo” approach to making Infinite.”
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: Can you explain a bit more about how post-infinite matchmaking works please? I’m ranked about 25k and keep matching against opponents at ranks like 2k.
A: Glenn “Our primary matchmaking weights in Infinite are MMR (an internal rating of players’ true skill), not rank or CL. The bands are also wider, to ensure speedy matchmaking.
While MMR can correlate to rank, it doesn’t always, and only does so generally. For example, the top 25% of ranked players likely has a mix of players whose MMR is in the top 25% as well as ones who are not. Rank is essentially just a value that measures a players’ most recent matches.
Collection level is purely a measure of a player’s credit usage, so it has no meaningful bearing on MMR. We do use CL thresholds for very early matchmaking, when players can have fairly disparate collections, but once a player is a bit into Series 3 that’s no longer true and thus no longer needed. (The more cards you have, the less impactful missing a given card becomes.)”
Q: Are you concerned about running out of cards you can make with Snap’s design constraints?
A: Glenn “I don’t foresee that being a problem.”
Q:Is Sauron not being compatible with Electro a technical limitation or an intended choice to stop the archetype from being too strong?
A: I assume you mean why does Sauron remove both of Electro’s Ongoing AND On Reveal texts? If so, it’s not a limitation, it’s an intended interaction. Sauron removes all abilities from any card that has Ongoing text. Blob used to be Ongoing and On Reveal as well, and his text was also completely removed if Sauron was played. You can see similar interactions when Absorbing Man copies Electro’s On Reveal, he also copies his Ongoing effects too. The game doesn’t currently have partial text copies or removals.
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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