Developer Update for the Week of March 16, 2024: Mockingbird Edition (35+ Questions)!

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: why can’t you mix splits with other variants for the same card, is Thanos problematic for designers, why can’t you undo turn after an opponent snaps, 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 Mockingbird! If you don’t know if this card is worth a Spotlight Cache, make sure to check out our weekly Spotlight guide, as well as our Mockingbird Bonus Challenge guide! This edition also comes after the latest patch! If you haven’t read the patch notes yet, make sure to see what’s new to the game so questions make sense.

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: Is the fact that pixies can shuffle cards of the same cost intended or a bug?
A: Glenn “Intentional. There’s a lot of potential for unusual exploits in some undesirable and nonintuitive ways using any method other than a truly random shuffle.”

Q: Why didn’t you give M'Baku the Angel treatment and let him jump from your hand and deck?
A: Glenn “Angel’s quest has a mechanical hook of asking you to destroy cards. Where Angel comes from isn’t as specific to that ask.

M’Baku in turn only asks to be in the deck at the end of the game. Allowing him to work from hand would remove that hook for synergy and reduce his identity. M’Baku needs more support/strength, but I’d rather leave him intact for when that comes.”

Q: Some players got Ms. Marvel out of this week’s Spotlight cache because they didn’t update their game. Will anything be done for players who didn’t abuse the update and missed Ms. Marvel?
A: Glenn “Ms. Marvel and the same variant for Ms. Marvel will be part of the Spotlight Cache next week.  No one will miss out on access to her”

Q: Does the existence of Thanos limit design spaces?
A: Glenn “Thanos is constraining, but I’m optimistic that there are ways we can explore solving for it without reworking the foundational concept of the card.”

Q: How did Iceman end up as a 1-Cost card when he is a omega level mutant?
A: KentErik “he was originally somethign like “3/2 Ongoing: ALL Cards cost 1 more”

as you can imagine, it was pretty un fun to play with, and just slogged games, and it was really really hard to find a deck that took advantage of that line of text.

so then we thought a better hit would be to be an on-reveal and hit just 1 card, which made sense as a 1-cost ability. (Further, 1-cost abilities are tricky to make/hard to find, so back then, if we had an ability we thought would work good on a 1-cost card, we’d be inclined to make the card 1-cost.)

Also: on the whole, cost doesn’t always match power of the character (let alone what aspect of that character’s arc we’re trying to represent). It’s much more important to us that we have fun game pieces than every single card lines up with a fantasy hit for that card. (When we can, we absolutely LOVE it when the fantasy of the character comes to live…but we definitely weigh fun gameplay / fun game pieces over that).”

Other Questions

Q: Would it ever be feasible to let players select something like Dan Hipp Squirrel Girl with zombie squirrels?
A: Stephen “Unfortunately not anytime soon.  There are some major tech architectural issues with setting that up which is why we have tied the tokens to a specific variant for the time being.  We could fix it but it would be time and resource consuming.  We feel its a better use of our time to make other features and game modes to you guys more fun features to play”

Q: Is the Snap team growing?
A: Glenn “When I was hired in December 2022, I think we had ~60 people; we hired our 100th last month. So yes, we’ve grown a lot.”

Stephen “100 is the studio size!  The Snap team is around 70-75.  When the game launched in October 2022 the Snap team size was ~50-55”

Q: Glenn previously mentioned that Stature/Black Bolt nearly reached the all-time win % vs the field. What deck set the record, and what % did it reach?
A: Glenn “It depends on the slice, but January 2023 Silver Surfer hit ~62% against the field among top MMR players who were S3 complete. Crossing 60% in this slice basically never happens.”

Q: Are you aware how long the load times are to claim credits, boosters, or collector caches?
A: Addison “Yep, we’re aware and we’ve had some active investigating and work done recently to address this. The speed degradation has to do with how the client pings the server to check claimed and claimable rewards. Changes are currently in testing so while I wouldn’t expect major changes in the client release that’s slated to go out this week, I would hope to see improvements to the claim speed in the next major client update after that.”

Q: Is there a significant difference in deck performance between one region and another?
A: Glenn “We haven’t observed such a difference”

Q: Would you ever let players bank a few missions in case they can’t claim the daily 6 missions in time?
A: Glenn “The foundation of daily rewards in games is to offer bonus opportunities to players who enjoy engaging with the game at a high frequency.”

Q: With the new custom borders, why can’t I put an unlocked flair onto a different variant?
A: Stephen “For this v1 it is by variant, but we are going to make split combos usable by character in a future update.   So if you roll a Gold/Krackle on your Hellfire Gala Prof X and you decide to buy Pandart Prof X, then in the future update you will be able to immediately apply that Gold/Krackle to your new Prof X variant or any other Prof X variant you own”

Q: Is it intended that you can get animated and frame break on custom cards at the Grey border stage?
A: Stephen “This is intended.  Have Fun!”

Q: Is the new gold pass exclusive to the in-game store?
A: Stephen “It will be available on the web shop in the future”

Q: Will you add the ability to select a card flair with the original background (no foil, ink, or gold)
A: Stephen “We will add a new split type in the future that is effectively ‘None’ that will enable this functionality but it isn’t part of this update.”

Q: Could you bring back the old infinite border color as a custom card option?
A: Stephen “Additional collectible borders is coming soon in a future update”

Q: Is there a limit to the number of days you can stack with the gold pass?
A: Stephen “You have have up to 12 months saved up”

Q: If you buy the gold pass, do you get 300 extra each time you buy the gold pass, or is that a one time bonus? Or does that bonus refresh every 30 days?
A: Stephen “Every time you purchase the Gold Pass it will immediately give you 300 gold and then the ability to collect 50 gold / day for the next 30 days.  It does not automatically refresh like a subscription at least not yet”

Q: You’ve mentioned it would be difficult to change the contents of an album. If you wanted to hypothetically buff a card like Elektra to not be a 1-Cost card, would it make you hesitant to buff her since she is in the “low cost, high impact” album?
A: Glenn “It wouldn’t make me personally very hesitant, but it would be worth chatting about.”

Q: Why don’t you want to allow the ability to customize or mix and match flairs and backgrounds?
A: Stephen “The primary end game activity in Marvel Snap is chasing the coolest splits.  Mixing and matching would fundamentally change Infinity Splitting  to be about unlocking instead.   This would effectively devalue the current primary end game goal and remove goals to continue to upgrade cards.  When everyone can have the same split then the Infinity Split system is no longer motivating or worth sharing.”

Q: Are the playrate metrics thresholds for specific unfun cards, such as Alioth, professor X, and Hela, set lower than other cards? If not, why not?
A: Glenn “If you mean ‘how much play is too much?’ then yes, those cards have lower thresholds.”

Q: Is it intended that if your opponent snaps, you can’t undo turn?
A: Glenn “This is a bug resulting from the server and the client disagreeing about the turn timer. We have a fix for it, and we’ll let you know when it goes live.”

Q: Is the goal of albums to get all variants into an album eventually? I feel hesitant to buy ant variants that aren’t currently in an album.
A: Stephen “Our plan is to get as many variants as possible into an album.”

Q: Any update on if Spotlight variants will ever be avaliable again?
A: Stephen “We are planning to add a new tier of variants in the Daily Offer shop for Spotlight variants called you guessed it ‘Spotlight’. Roughly 12 months after they were available in the Spotlight Cache they will be added to the Daily Offer shop purchasable for Gold. The avatars and spotlight avatar frame will remain exclusive to the Spotlight Caches and will not be part of the purchase of a Spotlight Variant in the daily offer shop.”

Q: Is it intentional that the graveyard shows what Alioth and Lamentis destroyed?
A: Glenn “The implementation is intentional.”

Q: Die you consider making cards appear in the graveyard only if they were destroyed face up?
A: Glenn “No, or at least I didn’t. In general, I find by far the best way to approach stuff like this is to start with the most straightforward and simple execution, then evaluate its results before spending time and effort on something weirder without supporting data.”

Q: What tells you that a card was nerfed too much, or if it was unnecessary?
A: Glenn “I don’t think unnecessary applies often; we’re always motivated by something when we nerf. We generally aim for adjustments to pull cards closer to a 50% winrate, so a quick and easy measure is if the card falls farther below 50% than it started above. For example, nerfing a 54% WR card to 45% would be too harsh. There are other measures, but that’s an easy one we use that’s rarely inaccurate.”

Q: Do you track how long it takes players to end turns or finish games? And do you matchmake based on players speeds?
A: Glenn “We do track it, but we certainly wouldn’t implement that tracking to rig matchmaking. Generally, games can’t gate matchmaking criteria behind opt-in player behavior, because any system that does so is inherently exploitable.”

Q: I like the appearance of grey border cards without frame break. Is there any plan to allow users to create custom cards that have this appearance?
A: Stephen “Totally understand the desire to control each aspect of the card.  I don’t have a time table for when we will add it right now but it’s on our backlog of potential quality of life features.”

Q: Will future “improper balance” updates ever have their own queue?
A: Glenn “It’s an element we’re considering”

Q: With a delayed patch, when is the next OTA’s and patch scheduled?
A: Glenn “We are planning OTAs for 3/21 and 4/4. Our next patch’s target release is 4/9, and the one after that is 4/30 to get ‘back on track’ so to speak. Those dates are all subject to change, but are our current plans.”

Q: Why are there so much more cards effected by this imbalance update over the last one?
A: Glenn “We’re still in the stage of experimenting with these kinds of events, to understand more about what players enjoy and how to best invest our resources for making future ones even more fun. In this case, one of the reasons we went ‘wide’ was to reduce how often players would guess and be wrong about a card’s team affiliation.”

Q: What are some of the team’s favorite locations?
A: Glenn “I really like Aunt May's.”

Addison “Ego (Ben Brode Laughing Emote)”

Q: Will we ever see more actor signed variants?
A: Glenn “We’d love to be able to make more content like that available and are excited about the potential.”

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!

To all of your many Custom Card questions from last week, I included them in the main portion since many players had the same questions as you. If you still have questions after this edition, make sure to leave then below in the comments!

Q: What is SD’s approach to shared mantles and characters with wildly different eras that could become cards themselves?
A: To summarize many answers given about this subject since the game’s launch: If the character is popular / widely known enough, it could get its own card. If not, you could see different versions of a character shown as a variant instead. Iron Lad is an alternate timeline of Kang, and it got its own card. Meanwhile, Spider-Man has a variant of the Scarlet Spider.

Q: Does using a custom card affect the booster drop odds at the end of games?
A: Currently, cards that have less than 50 boosters get a higher target rate to get boosters after a match. The variant you use or the status of its border progression doesn’t matter. (It used to matter, but it was changed around a year ago)

Q: Why has Kang not been buffed?
A: As KentErik said, “Kang’s a tricky one!” The developers are having a difficult time finding a change for Kang that makes him stronger without being too good or breaking the “fantasy” of the character.

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!