Table of Contents
Welcome back to this week’s Developer Update! This week’s edition comes after a quiet couple of weeks. Here’s a roundup:
- The launch of the new Series 5 card Elixir! If you don’t know if this card is worth Spotlight Caches, make sure to check out our Bonus Challenge guide for a post-release review of the card and new decklists!
- New X-Men Global Bounty Event – tier 5 was reached on May 25, 2025, but it is unlikely to get to the 40 million wins at the current rate. Will there be a miracle?
- Conclusion of the first official Marvel Snap tournament: The Golden Gauntlet!
- Spotlight Variants making an appearance in the Daily Offer for 2,400 Gold.
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: After MODOK’s 1 Power nerf, discard decks seem to have vanished from mid to high infinite. If you see the same trend, would you revert that nerf?
A: Glenn “We’ve seen Discard’s play rate drop but its winrate has remained competitive, so that nerf (in addition to other metagame shifts) had exactly the desired effect. I would suggest the change you’re perceiving is a sampling bias from the metagaming players at the top constantly have to engage in to remain competitive.”
Q: Why won’t you give Shang-Chi a drawback of some kind?
A: Glenn “Shang-Chi does have a drawback—if your opponent doesn’t have a card with 10 or more Power, or can protect that card, he’s a 4/3. While Shang-Chi is fairly popular, this drawback has kept his winrate when drawn pretty mediocre for years now.”
Q: Would Nico’s spells ever be changed to Skills?
A: Glenn “No, her current functionality doesn’t align with skills, and we don’t generally rework beloved cards that are performing in the metagame.”
Q: When Elixir was tested, did you try him as an Activate card? Or did you design him around new game modes like High Voltage that could get better use of him?
A: Glenn “He was way too strong as an activate, that’s where we started. We don’t think much about modes right now and just focus on ranked, but that could change over time as we lock in more returning favorites like High Voltage.”
Q: Was the interaction of Makkari applying the effect of Surge not intended? I noticed it doesn’t work any more.
A: Glenn “It wasn’t intended. Surge requires you to play a card, which means dragging it from your hand and paying its Cost.”
Q: Would you consider an emergency OTA at this point? This Thanos meta is fairly oppressive.
A: Glenn “While the Thanos deck is very good, it has multiple bad and even matchups–I’d agree it’s the overall ‘best’ deck, but that margin is very thin. FWIW, we’re also already building the next OTA, so we wouldn’t be able to make one any faster than the 29th.”
Q: Why doesn’t Hulkling have a vfx to show what card he became at the start of the game? He may actually be usable if you could plan around his effect when you eventually draw him.
A: Glenn “We have to keep this bar high, because otherwise the start of game will fill with more and more effects as we add new cards–we don’t want players waiting on the game to let them play. While it’s true that knowing Hulkling’s effect can matter, it is rare enough, minor enough, and easy enough to forget anyway that we decided not to build VFX for it.”
Other Questions
Q: In the global event, the picture for the stretch goal is a Seasonal Series 5 pack, but the announcement says Collector’s Series 5 pack. Which is correct?
A: Griffin “Collector’s.”
Q: If we reach the stretch goal, what will collection complete players get as a reward?
A: Griffin “Each Snap Pack has its own fallback rewards if you are collection complete. You can view those options in-game by clicking on the ‘?'”
Q: On Pit of Exile, is it intended that you can play Power scale cards like Gorr or Darkhawk?
A: Glenn “Yes, as their Ongoing abilities aren’t active while they’re in your hand, just ‘previewed.’ For example, drawing Blue Marvel also doesn’t increase the Power of your cards in play.”
Q: Have you made changes to bots? There seems to be an increase in “cheater bots” that steal your cubes this season.
A: Griffin “We have not made any changes to bots in a while. Nothing intentional this season, for sure.
We’re hearing the feedback that some are feeling differently so we’ll double check the data but on initial look everything is as it should be.”
Q: Can we get an update on when old Spotlight variants will return?
A: Griffin “We’re making progress on our plans but nothing finalized yet. When it’s done we’ll be sure to let everyone know.”
Q: Can we get further answers about the bots being changed? This season changed bots to have identical CL as the player, so its clear a change was actually made. You used to be able to identify bots by things like impossible splits or ancient archetypes, but even those have seemed to vanish.
A: Glenn “1. The CL matching is just a display bug that was introduced this season by unrelated work. Quirky for sure.
2. Bot decks have always been constantly updated—roughly the same technology that supports SmartDeck creates the bot deck catalog with automation each season.
3. We’ve always had a mixture of bots, never a pool of 100% loss bots. This is because we use bots both to inject cubes into the game as well as to provide fallback matchups for long queue times, and these functions primarily target different play ranges. We have made updates to our fallback bot since its inception, but it’s been a while.
4. Beyond the CL bug, bots appear to be operating within normal ranges—we test this regularly. I believe one thing that’s happening is just this bug making a bot easier to see, as our fallback bot is fairly good at looking like a player otherwise, hence it seeming like all bots were loss bots to some players—they couldn’t see the fallback bot as easily before this season.
5. We often evaluate and make updates to bots; I’m not sure when the last meaningful change was, just that it wasn’t this month. But these tweaks are also often small, even sometimes just tests run with tiny audiences to evaluate what could make bots more fun to play with or additional obfuscation. In the last year we did remove some of the obvious tells you mentioned, for example.”
Q: Is the team listening to the feedback around character mastery and its issues? Nothing has been talked about since it was launched.
A: Griffin “We’ve heard the feedback, absolutely. The team is actively working on CM improvements. Nothing to announce or share right now, though.”
Q: After over 2 years since the game launched, we still haven’t gotten global matchmaking. Has it been canceled?
A: Glenn “As we worked on this, we discovered along the way that it was more complex than expected. After that discovery, the team responsible switched to working on changes related to self-publishing, as a high-priority endeavor that required their unique strengths. It hasn’t been abandoned, but has been delayed.”
Q: When the season mission “make opponents retreat” goes live each season, do you notice any changes in player retreat patterns?
A: Glenn “Nothing that’s stood out in the data, no. On an individual level, the missions are supposed to create minor variations in the experience, so some amount of atypical play is expected by their nature.”
Q: Is there a reason why you answer less of our questions than you used to? Even when they get lots of upvotes?
A: Griffin “All of us at SD we’re out of office for the majority of last week so that definitely led to a decrease.
As for top upvoted questions not getting answers, many times we’ve either answered them before, don’t have answers right now, or can’t share things as they’re still a WIP.”
Q: While its fair why we haven’t had an OTA in a while, does the big gap mean we may see a bigger OTA than normal this time?
A: Glenn “Little bit”
Q: Is there an inside joke or x-men related reason for the Christmas/ winter borders as alliance rewards right now?
A: Griffin “It’s not a joke or anything deep. We’re simply rotating through previous borders and rewards.
If it’s too out of place, let us know in feedback.”
Q: Will there be twitch drop rewards for watching the official tournament stream?
A: Griffin “No twitch drops this time. It’s DEFINITELY something we want to do next time around.”
Q: Would you consider updating the text of some locations to make them behave more in line with their text?
A: Glenn “The text space on locations is very cramped, and in many cases these changes would lengthen it beyond our target maximum (3 lines). It can also have effects on localization.
That said, we could look at doing this or some other improvements for clarity. However, auditing and evaluating the location pool for this purpose would be time-consuming and very low-impact relative to the many other things our designers could be doing, so I wouldn’t expect us to pursue it in the near future.”
Q: Some players have reported that they are seeing old Spotlight variants in their daily shops for 2,400 gold. Are they coming back suddenly like they previously were?
A: Glenn “This is a temporary solution while we work on a more permanent home for Spotlight Variants. We wanted to make sure the advertised Variants from this season are available (they’re coming!). In an attempt to do so, some other previous ‘Spotlight Variants’ were errantly included, like the Arishem and Malekith ones some have in their shops right now.
While the presentation for these Variants may change in the future, the cost of acquiring the ex-Spotlight Variants will likely remain in a similar range. We’re actively exploring the right long-term solution for older Spotlights. These variants were historically expensive to acquire, often requiring 6000 Tokens and 1–4 Spotlight Keys, so we want to make them more accessible without diminishing their value for players who earned them earlier. We don’t have a specific timeline to share yet, but it’s a priority and we’ll provide updates as soon as we can.
Our long-term intent is for Tokens to be the main way to acquire Spotlight Variants. The current offers in the General Shop are not permanent, and we’re working toward a solution that better fits the economy and gives Tokens meaningful value when it comes to collecting these variants.”
Q: For players who bought the Spotlight variants in the Shop, will they get the matching avatar at a later date?
A: Glenn “We don’t have solidified plans for the future of what we’re doing with Spotlight Avatars. If they do return in the new system, we’ll be sure to consider this, though. Thanks for your patience.”
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: Ask why things like the global bounty get communicated on discord instead of in game.
A: I didn’t post a q/a last week when this was more relevant since the devs took the week off, but it has been moved to in game now if you didn’t see it already. They mentioned the publishing changes are causing delays in adding these things to the client faster.
Q: Question about filtering variants from last week:
A: I definitely misinterpreted your question, sorry about that! They have mentioned before they know collection bloat is a problem, but I don’t have a good answer for you unfortunately. Asking this gets me re-directed to their suggestions page, so I don’t think I can get you anything direct sadly.
Q: Have you considered adding the ability to create your own cards?
A: This is an old answer from Glenn, but the team still holds this stance:
Glenn “We think it’s cool that people enjoy making the cards, but we don’t seek them out explicitly for inspiration. There are some ethical and legal reasons for that.”
Q: Considering how many variants exist, are there any plans to allow targeting certain variants, pin variants I don’t have enough gold for at the moment or at least increase chance of cards from an album I am working on to show up in offers?
A: KentErik “Sorry, but there are no plans to let you pin variants in the daily offer shop.”
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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