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 Eson and the launch of the newest season! If you don’t know if Eson 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: I recently had a game where after the highest power card on each side in the throne room were at 10 (doubled to 20) after playing diamondback at the location, rather than reducing the power to 8 on the opposite side, the power got reduced to 18. Is this intentional?
A: Glenn “Throne Room and Diamondback are both conditional modifiers–they each have to apply after other Power changes, similar to Cerebro, Omega Red, and Baxter Building. While there are relatively few conditional modifiers in the game, when two or more of them are on the board, they can get confusing because they’re applied in an order based on type (location or card) and then timestamp (oldest to newest). So in this case, Throne Room doubles the Power and then Diamondback reduces it.
The math has to have a set order to it, as the operations are separate from one another.”
Q: Will Agamotto be the only card with skills?
A: Glenn “No, you can expect to see more skills. I won’t rule it out for older cards if we find a great opportunity that better executes an existing card, but our focus is primarily on the new things they let us do.”
Q: If you buff Khonshu and then discard him, will the next form retain the buff?
A: Glenn “Yes”
Q: Do the 2nd and 3rd forms of Khonshu count as generated cards?
A: Glenn “They do count as created, as they are transformations”
Q: Do the discarded forms of Khonshu go to the discard pile, or does something else happen to them?
A: Glenn “Khonshu returns to hand and then transforms, he doesn’t leave forms anywhere”
Q: Since Phastos either gives -1 cost or +2 power, and spells don’t have power, does that mean Phastos will 100% -1 cost on all spells?
A: Glenn “Correct.”
Q: How do Agamotto’s spells interact when it’s On Reveal is blocked by Cosmo or Deep Space?
A: Glenn “Always banished.”
Q: If I play Nico with her Demon spell and then a Skill card, does the skill get banished before Nico’s spell, thus fizzling her effect?
A: Glenn “Yes, the skill is banished when Nico triggers. Technically, I believe she won’t fizzle—the card will still be turned into a Demon, it’ll just be after it’s banished.”
Q: Since Cassandra Nova won’t gain Power from Skills, can Silver Sable “fail” if the top card is a Skill, making her a 1/0?
A: Glenn “Yep”
Q: How does Iron Lad interact with a Skill he copies?
A: Glenn “Iron Lad will copy the effect, but he won’t be banished because he’s not a skill—that’s tied to the card type.”
Q: Isn’t Kang’s effect basically a Banish effect now?
A: Glenn “Technically there is a small functional difference right now, but I agree we should change it. However, we’re generally reluctant to make unnecessary functional changes to Kang, as the card’s code is ‘brittle.’ So we’ll likely it until we can take a closer look.”
Q: If there is a tie on the highest Power card at a location, will Images of Ikonn randomly pick a card to copy?
A: Glenn “Yes, Images chooses a random card with the highest Power if multiple qualify”
Q: If Agamotto gets destroyed, is it intended that Temporal Manipulation will put a new copy into your hand?
A: Glenn “It’s not a copy; that’s the destroyed card being returned to your hand. It’s the intended function.”
Q: Why did you nerf Aero when Agamotto is a better replacement for her anyways at a 5/10?
A: Glenn “Generally, we aim to balance for the environment we have. Aero was a high efficacy part of the existing Surtur shell, which was a deck we needed to nerf. I can’t promise any nerf will always turn out to be the best one, but we’re often walking a tight line in trying to preserve the viability of strategies without hitting them too hard.”
Q: Was it a technical limitation or a design choice that Alioth can’t target Skills?
A: Glenn “Design choice. We felt Alioth was plenty strong enough without being able to impact Skills, so it was a useful spot to differentiate.”
Q: Will cards like Thor’s Hammer or Daken’s Muramasa ever become Skills?
A: Glenn “These won’t become Skill cards because they aren’t Skills. It’s core to their function that they exist in play, and creatively they’re not much of a match either. That said, we may consider diversifying in the future and adding an additional type, such as ‘Item,’ to cover these. (Just hypothetical, nothing planned.)”
Q: Was Yondu’s arrow animation intentionally removed?
A: Glenn “The VFX was attached to the destroy action, we’ll just need to update that in a future patch to link them together again.”
Q: How does priority work between Gorgon and Quinjet Cost changes?
A: Glenn “Like most cards with overlapping timing among their effects, this interaction depends upon which card resolved first.
If Quinjet was first, then its effect will apply first and Gorgon will apply second, leading to a created 1-Cost card costing 2 Energy.
If Gorgon was first, then its effect will apply first and Quinjet will be able to apply second, leading to a created 1-Cost card costing 1 Energy because they’ll cancel out.”
Q: Was Yondu changed in preparation for Firehair?
A: Glenn “No. We decided we wanted to restrict destroy moving forward to only cover cards moving from a location to the graveyard, as it resolves a number of interactions players find confusing (such as Yondu vs. Wolverine).”
Other Questions
Q: What is an acceptable play rate for a card, and does it really matter?
A: Glenn “As stated, we don’t want any deck share in excess of 10%. Individual cards vary; for example, Jeff being in 20% of games wouldn’t be a problem because lots of different decks can play him and he’s not necessarily a high-impact card, but Scream would indicate a serious homogenization of the metagame.
When we nerf cards, we always target them to remain viable. That’s why you’ve seen us take so many swings at Surtur lately–we really don’t want to overnerf a card that we know many players enjoy and value. In an ideal world, every card has an audience and a healthy role in the metagame, and our goal is to use balance and metagame fluctuations to accomplish that as best we can.
Play rate always matters. It might not always merit immediate action, but play rate is one of the most significantly indicators of healthy metagames, so it informs a lot of what we do. For example, a long time ago we saw a Black Bolt + Stature deck start appearing at the top of the metagame with no bad matchups, but its play rate was very low. We waited several weeks for more players to discover the deck–both to let them enjoy doing so, and also to see if broader awareness would change the deck’s metrics. What we saw was that the deck just grew in popularity without its metrics weakening, so eventually we made a balance adjustment.
Good design isn’t just about making rad cards, it’s also about creating rad play environments. Nerfing a card isn’t punishing its creation anymore than buffing a card is criticizing it–they’re both ways we manage the metagame to maximize its fun. It’s certainly possible to make something that is so enjoyable for some people that it makes the game less fun for other people, even if its balance is reasonable. However, in the case of Scream, we know that’s not the case because her balance metrics are too high as well, which has the side effect of increasing her play rate.”
Q: Does the team see Skills as “gone forever”, or will you add a banished graveyard where they can return to play?
A: Glenn “I’ll never say never, but our expectation for the foreseeable future is ‘gone forever.'”
Q: Will new Skills be released as their own card, or will they always be tied to a character?
A: Glenn “We may release Skill cards directly to Series 4 or 5 in the future.”
Q: How did you land on 16 points to win in Sanctum Showdown?
A: Glenn “Well, the range we wanted was fairly easy to ballpark, as we knew we didn’t want any games to end on turn 3 or after turn 8 (and very few on 8, if any). So the first version of the Sanctum scored 4/1/1 with 20 points to win, and no scoring differences across all turns.
We quickly found that early scoring was too strong in this scheme, so we shifted it to scoring less on turns 1 and 2 (similar to what we launched with) and 5/1/1 on the later turns. At this point some playtesters were reporting going to turn 9 too much. So I built a (very) basic model in Microsoft Excel to just brute force some distributions and see if they lined up with what our playtesters were seeing, and used it to test new combinations. The current scheme looked promising, we continued playtesting, and here we are.
We also experimented with the snap, but overall I think it took about 5 iterations to land at the final system.”
Q: Is it intended or a bug that cards that generate cards (Arishem, Agent 13, Shanna, ect) will now generate in the same art style if possible?
A: Griffin “It’s not really bug, but a feature the team is/ was working on that was intended for a future release. The team is investigating this now.”
Q: Why doesn’t the game force you to update so players don’t miss crucial Series drops?
A: Griffin “Being a mobile title, many players may not be able to download the patch if they’re not on WIFI or for a myriad of other reasons.
We don’t want to lockout these players from being able to play if we don’t have to.”
Q: Can players wait to open their twitch drop rewards to get extra scrolls the next time Sanctum Showdown arrives?
A: Glenn “While we’re likely to use the same currencies, this event’s Twitch Drops are specific to its run; they won’t be claimable when it’s over.”
Q: Will future skills always be On Reveal since they are banished after use, or will some have Ongoing, Activate, End of Turn, ect?
A: Glenn “The plan is for these to all only have effects when they’re revealed.”
Q: How is a card changed in a patch and nobody notices it lost it’s vfx? Do you test for this before going live?
A: Glenn “Yes, we do test for this. However, VFX updates always require a full patch, and patches are created at least 4 weeks before they release while OTAs are finalized within 7 days or less. As long as the broken VFX doesn’t damage the integrity of the game or make a card too confusing to play with, it’s not a deal-breaker to ship those changes and repair them later. We’d of course always prefer to avoid breaking the VFX, but it’s not as high a priority for us as managing the live metagame.
We do have ‘update VFX via OTA’ on our wishlist of technical improvements as well.”
Q: The current weekend mission says “Win with Khonshu starting in your deck”. Will this be hotfixed to Eson?
A: Griffin “We’re investigating now. Stay tuned.”
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: Have you ever thought about not releasing new cards every week, and just releasing a “set” every few months?
A: Glenn “We’ve made small changes to that already, with the second card the week of the Season Pass debut as well as game modes awarding additional cards. I imagine we’ll continue to test similar options.
If you’re asking whether our model will shift to something like quarterly or even monthly sets of cards, that seems fairly unlikely. Much of our philosophy is built around keeping things interesting with a steady drip of new things. Both options have downsides, certainly, so it’s just a choice.”
Q: Can you draw the 3 new Sanctum cards through the random Series 4/5 option?
A: No, those cards won’t be added to the normal token/ Spotlight system until after Showdown has ended. So they aren’t in the pool of Series 4 cards yet.
Q: Why do points from Sunspot, Evolved Misty or Evolved Cyclops trigger after locations like Asgard resolve?
A: Those effects are at the “end of the turn”. If a location like Asgard is still resolving, the turn isn’t over yet.
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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