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 Starbrand and the latest OTA! If you haven’t seen what was changed with the balance update, be sure to check out the official patch notes!
If you don’t know if Starbrand 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, and Questions From You!
See all individual questions and answers updated in real time!
Card Specific Questions
Q: Why can Luke Cage prevent Rocket and Groot from stealing power, but he can’t prevent Cassandra Nova stealing power? Should Luke Cage’s text change to protect “cards on the board” or something?
A: Glenn “Unless explicitly stating otherwise, cards generally refer to cards in play. For example, Ironheart can’t hit your deck. We do occasionally call out ‘in play’ when there is some specific potential for confusion, but we’d rather lean on teaching that’s the default expectation than add two words to the majority of our cards.”
Q: Will Firehair be able to use On Reveals from destroyed cards, or be like Absorbing Man and say “no target”?
A: Glenn “Firehair doesn’t work like Absorbing Man; she retains her own text, she just uses each On Reveal effect she sees on a card that dies.”
Q: Can Corvus Glaive discard Khonshu twice since he is a new card after being discarded?
A: Glenn “It’s still the same Khonshu card, it’s just transforming. Programmatically, Corvus sees your hand when he resolves, and chooses cards to discard at that point. He also can’t discard Swarm copies made by the initial discard for the same reason, which are actually separate cards.”
Q: Can Mirage copy skills, because her text says “card” not “creature”, but it also says give it +2 power?
A: Glenn “Yes, because Mirage performs a copy action first and then tries to add Power later.”
Q: Is there a card you could make in the future that created a character? For example, a Lamp card that generated a Genie, then banished itself after use.
A: Glenn “Sure, that’s design space. The reason we might avoid it is that variants of Genie would be more popular than Lamp (using your metaphor), and that structure makes Genie harder for us to do and for players to enjoy in their collections and games.”
Q: Have you considered using card abilities that trigger after enough turns have ended?
A: Glenn “Yes; we have a handful looking at the next turn already, like Hawkeye and Iron Patriot. However, in testing new ones (and monitoring the ones we have) it’s clear that the downside of these effects is very severe. If you draw them on a turn that prevents their effect from resolving before the game ends, they wind up feeling pretty miserable. Longer waits justify stronger rewards, which in turn usually means a weaker base Cost/Power rate, so this all winds up polarizing such cards to be very strong or very weak.”
Q: Why does Agamotto’s opening animation display for both players, but Arishem and Thanos don’t?
A: Glenn “We’ll also be updating those cards in the future to work the same way. We just prioritize new card VFX higher than backlog VFX, so sometimes older updates fly a little slower.”
Q: Was Doom 2099 really performing so well that he needed another nerf so quickly?
A: Glenn “Doom 2099 was one of the strongest cards for the last few weeks by no small margin. The goal of most nerfs is to create a reduction in winrate and/or playrate, so we do expect that to happen here. However, our goal is also to keep cards we have to weaken competitive as often as possible, and Doom 2099 is no exception. If we overshot that mark, time will tell and we can make a correction the other way.”
Q: As a follow up question, do you think season pass card nerfs are more impactful than buffs?
A: Glenn “Yes—in general the nerfs we make are more impactful than buffs.
That’s because they have different goals. The purpose of a nerf is to correct a clear, measurable problem. We’re not trying to create new problems when we buff cards, just improve the range of play available, and a soft touch accomplishes that goal best most of the time.
However, we also don’t try to make heavy nerfs when we can avoid them. And historically, those can land too soft as well—Doom 2099 and Surtur are both recent examples. A harsher hand there would’ve been better, but we’d rather have to cut twice than do undue damage by being cavalier with a nerf.”
Other Questions
Q: Is it true Snap will be unavailable in Vietnam now?
A: Griffin “It’s sadly true. Due to their local regulatory matters, we have to discontinue offering MARVEL SNAP on the Vietnamese Google Play and Apple App Store. As a result, players in Vietnam will no longer be able to access the game starting March 10th.”
Q: Has the team thought of adding the start of turn of keyword like the new end of turn keyword?
A: Glenn “We don’t expect to use this timing often enough for there to be a lot of value in having it. The start of the turn is a disruptive time to add effects, because players are getting new information already, and we can get most of the way there with End of Turn effects.”
Q: Will other cards have their text changed to say Character instead of card, such as Heimdall?
A: Glenn “We approached the first Skills update with a minimal number of changes, but we’ll examine the areas where we think more updates might be merited very soon.
I don’t expect us to update cards like Heimdall, etc. because there isn’t a meaningful point for much confusion, and it introduces the difference to new players much earlier than they need to understand such cards exist.
In sum, our plan isn’t to change ‘card’ to ‘character’ for everything that happens to not affect skills, but to change ‘card’ to ‘character’ when not knowing which the card interacts with can create a meaningful point of confusion.
For example, skills can’t gain Power, but if you play Gwenpool with a character and a skill in your hand, it’s reasonable to be unsure whether they’re guaranteed 6-Power on their character or not and not have a strong basis for guessing, so we made her function explicit. We think that’s a lot more uncertain than playing Forge and then playing a skill, for comparison–it’s the next card you played, and it can’t gain Power, so you won’t get any.”
Q: With the introduction of skills as standalone cards, will the 12-card deck model be changing?
A: Glenn “Skills will not impact the deck size–they’ll just be cards you can add to your deck. However, that’s not to say we won’t experiment with deck size in the future to allow for other gameplay variations!”
Q: Will the wording of Castle Zemo change from Card to Character? I just played a spell (a card) onto the location, but the next card I played still swapped sides.
A: Glenn “That interaction is going to change, one way or another–we’ll either change Castle Zemo to character, or update the functionality to consider the skill as having triggered the location.
Which is a case we’re evaluating, along with Negasonic Teenage Warhead, Aunt May's, that sort of thing.”
Q: Why don’t you update the shop refresh to account for daylight savings time?
A: Griffin “DST isn’t standard everywhere. It may not be ideal for you in EST but it could be beneficial to others elsewhere.
I’ve worked on games where we switch it up, I’ve worked on others where we keep it consistent and don’t switch. There’s not a perfect solution.”
Q: Why are point values in Alliance Bounties so inconsistent, with some rewarding more points for easier tasks?
A: Griffin “We do run 2X (double points) adjustments every single week, but which bounties they’re on does change. This is usually also accompanied by a higher appearance rate.
This week for example, sanctum boosted bounties are back to normal and the win with high power bounties will appear at higher rates with 2x points.
To add, we’re working on adding some sort of visual indicator to the bounties to highlight those which are boosted. Coming in the future!”
Q: Are you concerned at all that almost no season pass card seems to be released balanced? Are they intentionally overtuned to boost sales?
A: Glenn “I see this narrative from time to time, but I don’t think it really lines up with reality.
Starting with the January 2024 SP, we’ve buffed (I think) almost exactly as many SP cards as we’ve nerfed?
* Buffs: Black Swan, Gilgamesh, Symbiote Spider-Man
* Nerfs: Agent Venom, Surtur, Sam Wilson
It’s possible I’m off there, going from memory. Skaar kind of interestingly counts both ways, since he released weak and we buffed him via card releases, leading to a nerf almost a year later.
These 7 cases out of the last 14 mean that we’re batting roughly 25% over, 25% under, and 50% about right. That’s not ideal—we do hope to target better than that—but it’s also not particularly disappointing.
As I’ve discussed many times in the past, we lean into strength for all our cards, Season Passes included. Releasing cards that are too weak to play can wind up looking a lot like releasing no card at all, which isn’t any fun at all, and we’d rather miss high than low to avoid a boring release.”
Q: When is compensation being sent out to all players due to Khonshu being the weekend mission instead of Eson?
A: Griffin “We’re still working on a delivery of 200 Tokens to those who owned Eson before the Mission expired. Expect it next week sometime.
I know I originally mentioned it was coming to all players, but after review we’re targeting just those who owned Eson and were prevented from accomplishing the intended mission.”
Q: Why are some weekend missions worth 200 tokens, but others are 300 tokens?
A: Griffin “It’s just our way of testing things out. Seeing what works best, what players respond to, etc.”
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: Do bots ever show to be in an alliance? Maybe as a way to simulate being a real player?
A: Yes, bots were recently updated to show alliances. However, if you look up the alliance the bot was in, they won’t actually appear as a member. You can’t verify that though until your match is over.
Q: How can Cassandra Nova steal Power from a card with 0 or negative Power?
A: Glenn “We don’t treat 0 as a ‘floor’ for Power reduction in general.”
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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