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 Diamondback, the launch of Sanctum Showdown, and the latest OTA! If you haven’t seen what cards are dropping in the upcoming Series Drop, be sure to check out our guide!
If you don’t know if Diamondback is worth Spotlight Caches, 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, Sanctum Showdown Questions, and Questions From You!
See all individual questions and answers updated in real time!
Card Specific Questions
Q: When will the bundle Broodling token variants be fixed to actually appear on board?
A: Addison “The Broodling variants should be corrected in the next major client release.”
Q: Is it intended that Lasher will give the opponent positive power if his power is negative?
A: Glenn “We decided to let it ride ‘mathematically correct’ but we’re going to adjust it in the future as we’ve decided it’s not an area we want to explore much.”
Q: What happens to Nico’s spells if the game lasts longer than 7 turns?
A: Glenn “She should loop, but I think the order of the spells will change.”
Q: Does Gotgon affect rocks too?
A: Glenn “It works on any card in your opponent’s hand that didn’t start in a player’s deck. ‘Created cards’ are just cards made by other effects once the game starts.”
Q: Is Diamondback avalible to be pulled from the random S4/5 reward?
A: Griffin “Diamondback IS available to pull from the Random S4/5 Card.”
Q: Will Laufey ever get a vfx for his ability?
A: Glenn “It’s already been completed, it just didn’t make it into our Sanctum build.”
Q: Is the team concerned about how playable Sam Wilson is?
A: Glenn “He’s a strong card that’s widely playable, we’ve certainly seen that. He isn’t contributing to any particular single-deck dominance which would be more concerning, although we don’t love how easily he enables Cull Obsidian and Attuma for Surtur.”
Q: Regarding the text change to Alioth and Gwenpool, I understand the “characters” keyword is meant for upcoming features, but does that mean that they still affect things like Rocks, Vibranium, and Kate Bishop’s arrows even though they aren’t characters?
A: Glenn “Yes; these cards are still considered ‘characters,’ as the change is just to text and not to current function. We recognize that’s weird.”
Q: Why does Professor X now say “characters” instead of “cards”?
A: Griffin “We did not intend for Professor X’s text to change in the OTA. We’ll be reverting that in a future update.
For full transparency, it is a change the team was/is looking at for the future.”
Q: Was Surtur and Skaar really the problem? And not the large amount of 4/10 cards?
A: Glenn “Surtur and Skaar have always been the two best cards in their deck when drawn by a big margin, while the various 4/10s have pretty interchangeable metrics; similarly, the winrate of the deck when those cards aren’t drawn is noticeably worse. This indicates that the synergy pieces are carrying most of the strength.
Is it possible that there’s a secondary issue of having too many 4/10s without enough drawback on them? That’s possible, but part of accurately measuring that is finding a healthier baseline for the outliers.”
Q: Was Skaar’s change considered a Hela buff?
A: Glenn “It was noticed, but given Hela’s metrics not too concerning.”
Q: When changes like Skaar fitting into Hela are “noticed”, does the team spend time playtesting those adjacently-impacted decks to ensure they remain balanced? Or is that something you leave to the players to figure out?
A: Glenn “Usually we play some games to evaluate the impact. Not 100% of the time; for example, we don’t test every change that might impact a Cerebro deck (though we do sometimes). In some cases we’re comfortable inferring the outcomes.”
Q: Why was Makkari banned from Sanctum, but now Sam Wilson who always starts with 1 point on the board?
A: Glenn “They’re pretty different cards. For example, Makkari has unique potential to randomize the game outcome by landing where the Sanctum will be on turn 3, while the player has agency over Sam and spends Energy to play him.”
Q: What are your thoughts on cards that mix archetypes together? You mentioned you didn’t like seeing Surtur in Scream decks in the OTA.
A: Glenn “Creatively mixing decks is great, generally speaking. But when a card is getting mixed a lot because it’s just too strong on rate with too little investment, that’s Not Good.
For example, if
Q: How does The First Rider card interact with negative power cards like the hood? Would it be +3 since it’s minus a negative or would it just bottom out to zero?
A: Glenn “It will be counted as zero.”
Other Questions
Q: Do you “aim high” more often with season pass cards than regular releases?
A: Glenn “It’s more that we avoid a weak Season Pass than that we aim for a strong one, but the result will often be similar. The Season Pass is one of our most popular game elements, it sets the tone for the whole season, it can often be the difference-maker in whether a player is excited to play each month. We always want to make it an appealing and exciting card–if someone buys the SP and immediately regrets the decision, that’s a worst-case outcome for the player and us.
However, another element that leads to the weighting is that we deliberately take more unusual risks or narrower shots on our Series 5 and 4 cards. That’s going to wind up with them having a different “hit rate” because we design them with different limitations. For example, Bullseye and Redwing are both fun cards with fairly narrow sets of uses–that’s less appropriate for a Season Pass, because the Season Pass should be exciting for everyone, but we still want to make these kinds of cards.”
Q: Would you hold off on buffing or nerfing a card due to an upcoming card release that might balance the meta?
A: Glenn “Yeah, that’s a common sort of consideration. We don’t often want to balance for a metagame that won’t exist very long.”
Q: Since you allow game trackers to exist, why not make one official so all players have easy access?
A: Glenn “While the decision does not belong to me, I am personally not a fan of providing deck trackers in-game for CCGs, and generally prefer the minimum amount of necessary tracking. Why? Their presence can create a perceived obligation to engage with the tools, since otherwise you’re giving up some amount of advantage, and that decision isn’t necessarily enjoyable either way.
Why is the obligation problematic? Various potential reasons: it’s a feature that skews away from our primary fast-casual CCG audience, it adds time to turns in which it’s referenced, it can get weird with new mechanics, it makes the game feel ‘heavier,’ and some people also just don’t like them being a thing in the first place.
I don’t have any issue with players using tools to track the cards in their deck, whether that’s pen and paper or an additional app, because that’s the player choosing to supplement their experience. I just prefer to keep it out of the client by default.”
Q: Why is the webshop “shop for a friend” option removed?
A: Griffin “We discovered a security issue with that feature so we disabled it in an abundance of caution. We don’t have an ETA on its return right now.”
Q: Can you update the auto deck/ auto fill feature to be filtered by the gamemode you want to play the deck with?
A: Glenn “This is a goal of ours, just a bit out of reach for the moment.”
Q: Is the team concerned too many OTA’s are making it too hard for players to stay up to date on the meta?
A: Glenn “Our research has consistently indicated that the pace and impact of our balance changes is one of the things people love most about the game. We recognize there’s a limit, but we think we’ve generally found a healthy target on both counts and expect to continue with our existing approach.”
Q: The latest OTA referenced an unannounced card. Does this mean you are open to talking about datamined cards now?
A: Glenn “No, this was just an unusual case of the necessary OTA timing preceding the update for relevant seasonal content.”
Q: Would the team ever add a location that warps the game into a Sanctum Showdiwn match?
A: Glenn “We currently bake that sort of thing into the locations themselves, like Asgard, Castle Blackstone, The Raft, etc. And we’ll continue doing so for sure!”
Sanctum Showdown Questions
Q: Will Sanctum rewards be avalible again in the future?
A: Griffin “The new cards will be available in the Token Shop starting on March 13. The new Emotes will be added to the Cosmetic Shop in the July Season. The new Variants will be available in future runs of Sanctum Showdown and available in the Vault February 2026.”
Q: Why did you allow retreating in Sanctum Showdown?
A: Glenn “It’s fairly common to let players quit a game if they don’t want to play anymore, we saw no reason to make people close the app in that case.”
Q: Why wasn’t it mentioned that you cap out at 12 scrolls when getting the 8 hour refresh of 2 scrolls?
A: Glenn “As one of the FAQ writers, we just missed it. However, it is in-game on the information for the refresh.
I’m collecting info on items that we may have missed or should’ve been more clear about, so that we can both do better in the future and update some postings.”
Q: Why didn’t you ban [insert card you don’t like here] in Sanctum Showdown?
A: Glenn “All of the questions about banned/unbanned cards are going to have very similar answers. We banned the cards we felt confident were too powerful, unfun, or not functional, and didn’t ban the cards for which we were less certain.
We don’t expect to have hit 100% on those decisions, but we value giving players the experience and opportunity of finding powerful things for themselves, too.”
Q: Is there a list of banned locations?
A: Glenn “We decided not to publish that, since it’s not very useful information and we were happy to just see thoughts on these locations organically.”
Q: How does Scoring work with Hydra Bob and snapping?
A: Glenn “Scoring happens after everything else. Hydra Bob moves in the same window that Sunspot or Havok add Power, and similarly determines the Power at locations prior to scoring.”
Q: Are you going to look into the amount of retreating happening in Sanctum?
A: Glenn “If the retreat issues persist longer than expected, we may evaluate some future tweaks to the mode around the function.”
Q: Why do ties not give both players a scroll back?
A: Glenn “The scroll is a reward for winning—ties aren’t a win, so they don’t earn a scroll.
There are some system reasons, too. If ties awarded a scroll, the strongest reward incentive for players would change from ‘win the game’ to ‘tie the game,’ because that’s the outcome that would distribute the maximum to both players—up to 38 charms and 2 scrolls.
We want to reward winning and also want to avoid collusive pressure from other players, so rewarding ties doesn’t make sense. While the latter might not seem that likely to happen, we’ve seen players successfully develop ‘language’ with emotes on multiple occasions to pursue cooperation, especially in smaller matchmaking pools.”
Q: How did you decide on 2 scrolls per 8 hours for refresh?
A: Glenn “Each scroll is worth about 2 games, since you can win them back. We wanted to award ~8 games each day as well as distribute them equitably for a variety of time zones, and landed on this pacing for accomplishing both goals.”
Q: Did you pick the 3 portal pull cards to be released because they all would be likely good cards to play in Sanctum decks?
A: Glenn “That didn’t factor into their selection; we focused more on what we wanted in the larger ranked metagame.”
Q: Can you get cards from the random Series 4/5 reward that are about to drop into Series 3? If so, will players who do be getting any compensation?
A: Glenn “No, the cards are valid pulls until the Series Drop goes into effect. We recognize the timing isn’t ideal, but January was pretty complicated.”
Q: Will the new game board be avalible to use in other modes?
A: Glenn “It’s an event exclusive.”
Q: Why even have scrolls if they just lock players out of the mode?
A: Glenn “Players can’t be locked out of Sanctum Showdown; you can always acquire a scroll to enter the queue.
If your question is why scrolls have a gold value, we design all of our game modes with vectors for gold spend. As a F2P game, that’s important for supporting the costs of developing the mode and providing its rewards. We’re also giving away enough scrolls to play over 200 Showdown games for free.”
Q: Why did you cap the number of scrolls you can have before you stop regenerating them? People who got their twitch drops are missing those refreshes because they started with so many.
A: Glenn “We didn’t want to passively award scrolls to players who aren’t engaging with the game mode at all, because that would change how we can value them. That’s especially true at the end of the event conversion, because there would be waaay more of them in players’ collections. We want the scrolls we’re giving away to be used.
We considered requiring players to log in for their scrolls, similar to how players have to log in for free credits. But the purpose of the free scrolls is to ensure players who hit zero can continue playing—forcing them to time their logins sounded like a bummer chore. So instead we tried a soft cap that would only let inactive accounts accrue 12 scrolls, but ensure players who needed scrolls would always have them.
It’s true that Twitch drops has had an unorthodox impact on this choice, so I’m sure we’ll be reviewing the outcomes for the future.”
Q: How did you settle on 12 being the exact number of capped scrolls?
A: Glenn “The numbers were chosen independently, they just happened to line up. We chose 12 for the refresh because it was two full days, which seemed like a reasonable span to allow for a break. We spent most of development with the starting scrolls at 7 if I recall, and increased them to 12 as part of some other rebalancing.”
Q: Was the team expecting the Guardians of the Galaxy to be ao strong in Sanctum?
A: Glenn “We expected them to be strong, sure. They don’t seem inappropriately powerful relative to many other things you can do in the game mode, though they do challenge players to strategize in some unique ways. That’s something we generally think is cool about game modes.”
Q: Are you okay with such a high frequency of the Guardians in Sanctum?
A: Glenn “We’re more tolerant of dominant strategies in limited time modes, both because of the duration and the necessary wrinkles of supporting the core game while creating novelty.
The Guardians are also a unique wrinkle here, in that they are simple and widely available, so we can expect players with smaller collections to more often lean into these cards. This isn’t so dissimilar from decks like Destroy, High Evo, and Devil Dinosaur being popular among lower collection levels. We want there to be accessible, competitive decks for these players.”
Q: Why exactly was Kang banned when he isn’t adding any points?
A: Glenn “Kang’s turn rewinding wasn’t implemented with points-based game modes in mind and was a concern for bugging the game.”
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: When would it be possible to get past spotlight variants again? Or how far along are we from getting a new way to get them?
A: In case last week’s answer wasn’t clear, the dev’s intended for Spotlight variants to be added to the daily shop after 1 year of being in the Spotlight Cache. Players were unhappy with their cost, so they retracted that and are working on a new solution.
Griffin “For the returning Spotlight Variants, we’re still tossing around ideas for the best way to bring them back. Nothing has been decided upon but we’re eager to bring them back as well.
Q: With the introduction of Activate, has the team ever considered something like a toggle trigger to “activate” cards, but once per turn (rather than once per game)?
A: Glenn “We did playtest with Activate effects that could be activated each turn by default. However, the design space for these effects was fairly small, and the cards tended to look very similar to one another—lot of emphasis on small amounts of Power at low Costs, since higher-Cost effects couldn’t be a lot stronger. If they were, ramping just a turn faster once could swing the game a lot!
Look at Arana, for example. What’s the multiple use balance point for that effect? 1/1 no buff? And I think we know something like Hellcow would definitely be off-limits.
On Reveal and Activate both can’t be repeated—without help. On Reveal was there at game launch with a ton of cards, so designs like Wong and Odin make a lot of sense to include early. I’m confident we’ll explore similar space with Activate, and maybe more.”
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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