Table of Contents
Welcome back to this week’s Developer Update! Here’s a round up of this week’s Marvel Snap news:
- This week’s edition comes after the launch of the new Series 5 card Hydra Stomper. If you don’t know if Hydra Stomper is worth Spotlight Caches, make sure to check out our Bonus Challenge guide for a post-release review of the card and new decklists!
- The long awaited Snap Pack card acquisition update! If you haven’t seen what all this update brings, be sure to check out the official patch notes and the datamines.
- The upcoming New X-Men Season Developer Update, highlighting the 5 new cards.
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: Since Rhino was changed, will there be a new card that turns a location to ruins?
A: Glenn “Part of why we chose to rework Rhino is that it’s an effect we don’t want to make competitive. Location variance is core to the game, if a card can efficiently remove it then the game would be less fun. So rather than make a new bad card to house the ability, we’ll likely leave it to the side for now.”
Q: You once said you didn’t want to buff Captain Carter to a 3-Drop due to her Surfer synergy. Since you made that buff after all, were you just concerned about Surfer’s strength? And does his existence change how you buff cards?
A: Glenn “Surfer was evaluated for sure. But the biggest reason we preferred to push for strength at a different Cost initially was because with 3-Cost, we were worried she’d wind up a bit too specific to Surfer. We don’t generally ‘avoid’ Surfer or similar cards like Zabu or Marvel Boy—we just design with them in mind.”
Q: What do you think would happen to the game if Shang-Chi was removed entirely?
A: Glenn “We’d see a lot less deck diversity, as there’d be little reason to diversify your Power below the highest ranges along the curve, and little need to really consider protection for your strongest cards.”
Q: Why don’t you change Shang-Chi to destroy both players cards like Enchantress or Shadow King.
A: Glenn “He could be nerfed to work that way, but it would make him a much worse card and thus a much worse release valve, because players couldn’t turn to him as easily with as many decks.
It’s easy to compare him to Enchantress, but the comparison isn’t useful. Ongoing decks don’t play Enchantress, and not because she’s symmetrical–they can play Rogue or Red Guardian and choose not to, just dabbling in Super Skrull sometimes which is pretty different. Decks with 10 Power cards *do* need to be able to play Shang-Chi, as there aren’t any backups and contesting a big card is way more common than contesting an Ongoing lane.
Enchantress’s ability to affect your own cards thus winds up primarily realized as an upside, like combining her with Red Skull. Blowing up your own 10-Power card can’t be realized as a meaningful positive very often.
Ultimately, they serve different roles despite looking similarish. Enchantress is there to give players a weapon against Ongoing decks when needed. Shang-Chi creates a specific and useful pressure on deckbuilding and gameplay by being more widely applicable.”
Q: What happens if Wong is used on Surge, giving it A -2 +2? Will it chain the double effect, or will it only chain the regular version?
A: Glenn “While Surge is on Wong, her effect will continue to be doubled.”
Q: Will Surge’s ability retrigger if she’s not on the board anymore?
A: Glenn “Surge won’t trigger if she’s not in play or doesn’t have her ability anymore.”
Q: Can Surge’s retriggers be blocked by Cosmo?
A: Glenn “Yep, just like Firehair and Symbiote Spider-Man.”
Other Questions
Q: How did the team come up with the idea for Skills?
A: Glenn “Cards that perform an action without permanently joining the field of play are pretty common in CCGs, so we always knew we’d want that eventually, especially given our game’s confined board space.
The real question was what should they look and feel like creatively. We landed on skills because we wanted to keep the gameplay focused on characters, and skills did that as a concept. For example, we also considered ‘events’ but felt that wasn’t as connected to our core creative.”
Q: Why don’t you rework more cards like Attuma and Rhino, instead of just +/- stat changes?
A: Glenn “We don’t really aim to rework cards like this—it’s our last resort, when we don’t believe that dials like Cost and Power can accomplish our goals. New card function already has a primary home—on new cards. But we do have a small backlog of cards we feel merit some reworks, so we’re going to put some attention towards them this year.”
Q: Will Skills only have On Reveal abilities?
A: Glenn “That’s the plan for now.”
Q: Would you ever consider publishing the list of cards you are monitoring to rework?
A: Glenn “I’ve seen this kind of information do weird and even confusing stuff within other game audiences, so I’m not keen to try it for myself (as much as I do enjoy the topic). We prefer to stay focused on the current gameplay content for players.”
Q: How will the Ruins location be treated now without Rhino?
A: Glenn “Ruins will continue to show up where it always has, which is in games below a certain rank.”
Q: What archetypes do you have the hardest time time with when making new cards?
A: Glenn “Destroy is fairly difficult, because we don’t want to just upgrade existing decks—we want to spin off into new directions, like Nimrod, Phoenix Force, and Misery. But Discard has it beat, since balancing card strengths that don’t require playing a card is pretty tough, and we have the same goals there.”
Q: What will happen if you redeem a free Snap Pack, but are already collection complete?
A: Griffin “You can wait to open it, but if you do open it with a complete collection, the fallback rewards of Tokens would be applied.”
Q: The patch notes said in the future you will give the base card if you own the Variant. It seems that if you own the Variant only right now, the base card is removed from the Snap Packs. Is this a bug or intended?
A: Griffin “This is intended!!! While we work on delivering base cards for Variants you own in a future update we wanted to ensure you didn’t pull it from a Snap Pack in the meantime.”
Q: Could we see a Token pass similar to the Gold pass we have now?
A: Griffin “Nothing to share on that front right now. The team is aware that it’s a requested addition though!”
Q: Why were the new Series 4 cards not announced before launch?
A: Griffin “A lovely launch surprise! Our intention moving forward is to drop cards like this at the start of every Season. With that being just a week away, we decided to move it up to provide the launch with some more excitement.”
Q: Is the game using more resources now after the update? I’m seeing a performance difference after updating.
A: Addison “There was very little noticeable impact between releases in performance testing. Averages for CPU usage and RAM usage were within about 1% between the previous client (39) and the new client (40) with some devices showing it in favor of the previous release and others showing it in favor of the new release. It’s something we’ll monitor for sure though, it’s maybe possible that there’s something with the initial install and migration that is spiking usage up for either or both, potentially while downloading assets in the background and whatnot.”
Q: The 3 new series 4 cards are all “extra” cards from different seasons: Batroc (Brave New World), Fan Fei (Prehistoric Avengers) and Topaz (What if). Yet, they all are move cards and were released alongside another move card (Hydra Stomper). Is this a coincidence or were they designed together despite belonging to different seasons?
A: Glenn “A few months ago, we began designing more cards for seasons in preparation of new card acquisition models, as well as ensuring we were giving ourselves flexible options for weekly releases.
We’ve still been doing that for a while–we’re working on December’s season right now–but we may revise how we group new S4s in the future.”
Q: It seems like there are several new cards that are themed to old seasons. How soon can we expect to see this backlog cleared?
A: Glenn “Fairly soon, I’d guess 3-4 months.”
Q: How long have you been stocking up on extra cards each season?
A: Glenn “We were developing 2 ‘extra’ cards each season for a while, and recently ramped up. Topaz was the second for What If?, the second for Spider-Man and Brave New World remain unreleased.”
Q: How has the team adapted to develop 2-3 more cards each season?
A: Glenn “For 2023 and 2024, I was the primary lead on almost every set, with Jason Yang earning his wings on Young Avengers. But we’d been taking steps to change that and enable more efficient design work. We added Jules Robins to the design team last year, with his first season lead coming alongside Agamotto. We added Michael Majors this year, with his first lead coming up in November. You’ve heard me chat about how much I value strong reproducible process in design, and this is a good example of that in action, as a small team can handle more projects by distributing ownership of them.”
Q: Couldn’t balance suffer from this influx of new cards?
A: Glenn “Technically, balance could suffer for a lot of reasons–like if the design team all get food poisoning from the same restaurant next week! Part of why we ramped up from 5 to 7 to 8 to ~10 cards was to stress test our processes over time. And in addition to those designers, we have also expanded our playtesting resources a bit.”
Q: Is there a concern with how many times something is released, like features, only to be bugged? It seems to be getting more frequent.
A: Glenn “We’re always concerned with the quality of our releases and improving our process. Some of those improvements might not be easy to see, and some might even kick up a little extra dust to clear. We’ve also been working on self-publishing in parallel, which borrows from some of the same personnel.”
Q: Snap Packs feel like a huge improvement! How long have you been working on it?
A: Glenn “Quick check showed my first spreadsheet for pack composition was dated in June 21st, so at least that long!
Q: Are you working on even more improvements or features to go with Snap Packs?
A: Glenn “We have a lot of ideas, but we didn’t want to get too far ahead of ourselves when the launch would add tons of feedback to iterate upon.”
Q: With Spotlight keys gone, there isn’t a “CL until next key” tracker anymore. Will this be added back in to highlight the next 3k Tokens?
A: Glenn “Not a feature I realized was so beloved myself, but I’m sure we’ll look at it.”
Q: Would you ever add a toggle option to remove card logos so we can see full art on the board?
A: Glenn “No, we rely on the logos to identify cards. As we repeat more characters, they will only become more important to helping the game remain accessible.”
Q: The 3 new Series 4 cards were a big surprise for players. Will you keep these every season, or include them in future developer updates?
A: Glenn “I’d expect ‘surprises’ to be the exception, not the norm.”
Q: Will there be a limited time game mode next season? It wasn’t announced in the dev update.
A: Griffin “No Limited Time Event coming next season. However, we may have something else to fill the gap. Stay tuned!”
Q: How will we get the new variants without Spotlight Caches?
A: Griffin “All Variants, new and old, will be offered in the Shop in the Offers tab.”
Q: So we won’t see Spotlight variants anymore?
A: Griffin “There are no more new Spotlight Variants. Those have gone away with the removal of the Spotlight system.
Nothing new on previous Spotlight Variants at this time. Our FAQ answer from the Snap Packs launch still holds:
‘Spotlight Variants will move into the “Offers” section of the Shop. We’re still working on the finer details of how to best present them to players going forward.'”
Q: Will you be adding more ways for players to earn tokens?
A: Griffin “You may see Tokens pop up here and there as rewards from Limited Time Events or other avenues but we don’t plan to provide more than that.
The major influx of Tokens from the Snap Packs system is converting all Keys to Tokens, including where Keys used to be on the Collection Level track.”
Q: How much time is in between recording the developer update videos and the video going live?
A: Glenn “We record them 4-8 weeks before the season generally. By that point cards are largely final, though not always.”
Q: Many players are concerned about the introduction of Series 6 cards, and therefore a higher Token Cost. Is this something that could actually happen?
A: Glenn “I haven’t personally seen that worry expressed beyond this post, but we aren’t currently planning anything like that.”
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: If nothing can stop Jeff, shouldn’t you technically be able to play him without energy?
A: Glenn “The intent of the card seems quite clear. A more pedantic perspective could be that the absence of 2 Energy isn’t a ‘thing’ but rather the lack of that thing—aka nothing. And nothing *can* stop Jeff, just as the card says 🙂”
Q: Are you going to add anything special for reaching the end of the bonus season pass rewards?
A: While I don’t have a direct answer for you, Tucker answered a similar question when they capped the number of ranks you can climb. In short, they don’t want to incentivize players using botting tools to grind out season pass xp for rewards. Read more below:
Tucker “These are intended as an overflow reward, so that if you finish the SP early you’re still getting *something* for your effort but it’s a point of diminishing returns. There’s significant abuse potential in an infinitely achievable reward (think Agatha bots), so if we juice those up any more we incentivize botting a ton and have to spend more dev-time fighting botters. Since that costs us time that could be spent making the game better in other ways, it’s not a path we should go down IMO.”
Q: Why are the refresh times not based on the players time zone?
A: Having resets be based on time zone means keeping up with location. If it’s solely based on your device’s current time, it can be abused to force resets by swapping regions. Also, devs release new content on a daily reset, which is synced to the 8 hour cycle. Changing player’s 8 hourcycles will un-sync the daily shop reset and other timed releases.
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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