Developer Update for the Week of November 1, 2023: Werewolf By Night Edition (65+ 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 why was Mobius nerfed so hard, why wasn’t Alioth nerfed, will Winterverse be coming back this year, 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 of the new card Werewolf By Night! If you aren’t sure if you should open a cache for this card, make sure to check out our weekly Spotlight Cache guide, as well as our card guide!

Furthermore, if you haven’t seen the patch notes for the OTA balance updates or the recent patch, make sure to read those first as they both are referenced a lot in this edition.

Answers and questions may be slightly rephrased for more clarity and ease of reading. This weeks topics will be divided into Card Specific questions Other questions.

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: Was Sauron really the highest winrate card in Shuri Sauron decks?
A: Glenn “Sauron was often both the highest winrate card in the game (or at least top 5) and among the 2-3 highest winrate cards in Shuri specifically. Those are both fine—but the Shuri Sauron deck itself crossed a line on some of our metrics, just barely but for a while. Nerfing Sauron was the cleanest way to impact only that deck without damaging other archetypes.”

Q: With Kitty Pryde nerfed due to Elsa, can we see her gain back some Power since Elsa has now been nerfed?
A: Glenn “As we noted around Angela in [the OTA] notes, we’re waiting to see how things shake out given the scope of today’s changes.”

Q: Is there a reason for / a difference on Doctor Octopus’s “Pull” cards text versus Sakaar’s “put” a card text?
A: Glenn “There is no mechanical difference, just text differences. We’ve left each alone because the meaning seems plain in each case.”

Q: How many different spells did you test for Nico before settling on her existing 7?
A: Glenn “I think we probably tested about 10 or 11, not counting slight variations on the ones we shipped. The ones we were excited to try but had to kill tended to care about Energy, because too often you wouldn’t be able to leverage it effectively.”

Q: Is there a reason why Namor and Orca share the same text, +5 power if it’s the only card on a location?
A: Glenn “The cards are unique, even if the text is not–one of them costs 4 and the other costs 6, and they fulfill very different roles where they see play. Their mechanics lining up is purposeful, as Orka is an Atlantean often associated with Namor (as both friend and foe). We don’t do this close an homage often, but it just worked out for two fun cards here.”

Q: You mentioned Namor is a “fun card” but it sees no play. May he see a buff?]
A: Glenn “Namor’s role is primarily a starter card. We need a number of these cards to exist and be recognizable characters for the health and joy of new players. When a card can overlap both play environments, that’s awesome, but we won’t try to make every Series 1 card competitively viable.”

Q: If you play Nico and get the spell “after you play your next card, double this card’s power”, if Nico transforms into Hulk via Gamma Labs, you can play your next card and she doubles to 24 power. Is this intended?
A: Glenn “I believe this is a bug, and I’ll look into it further.”

Q: What made you decide to launch Werewolf By Night this week specifically?
A: Glenn “The combination of the full moon and actual Halloween made this seem like the best date for him. Sometimes we have metagame reasons for the order in which we release new cards, but when we don’t we try to arrange them in ways that are narratively or aesthetically pleasing.”

Q: Can you make Quake a 2/4 or do you have other plans?
A: Glenn “We have other plans.”

Q: How does the team plan to handle Loki’s balance after the latest patch?
A: Glenn “We build our patches about a month in advance, while our OTAs are more like a week. If we’re seeing issues post-patch, we’ll address them then.”

Q: Any plans to buff Captain America?
A: Glenn “Not at this time. Cap is one of the cards we use to welcome new players to SNAP, and that’s his primary role.”

Q: Why was the distinction made for Captain America to not get a rework, despite being a popular character, but not other cards? Why not swap abilities for Captain America and Patriot?
A: Glenn “The distinction isn’t specific to Cap, he just happens to be the one we’re talking about. If Cap was Patriot, I’d be answering similar questions about someone else lots of people like.

The line itself predates me, but we need recognizable characters on both sides of it. If you download our game as a Marvel fan and all your new cards were characters you’d never heard of, that’s not really an acceptable outcome. And as much as we might like to, our tutorial content can’t all also support long-term competitive play.

I’ve never said we won’t one day add a reason to put Captain America in your deck, the way High Evo created one for Hulk. But I don’t foresee that reason being reworking a card we use to teach SNAP to our newest players.”

Q: Did you consider making Mobius a 3 Cost instead of this change? Maybe split his abilities to both On Reveal and Ongoing?
A: Glenn “At the time we were composing the patch, a Cost change didn’t seem like it would suffice to reduce the pressure on Series 3 Cost reduction strategies. With the benefit of an additional ~3 weeks of observation, maybe a Power or Cost change would’ve done the trick. We wouldn’t have pursued splitting the effects apart–it’s unnecessarily confusing as to which effect is active when vs. other options.”

Q: You mentioned the changes for the patch were made a month ago. A month ago, Mobius was only out for 1 week. How did you collect enough data to warrant such a dramatic change?
A: Glenn “We expected to likely weaken him, but the results of that first week were dramatic enough that we took action much more quickly and sternly than planned. The data on what he was doing, especially to Series 3 players and the performance of many once-strong cards in those collections, was that concerning to us.

In hindsight, I agree this change was too harsh–but that’s the benefit of hindsight. In some other reality, I’m answering questions about why we’re still letting a 3/3 Mobius delete every Cost-reduction card in the game”

Q: With so many changes to Loki and his decks, what happened during testing?
A: Glenn “The biggest difference between Loki live and Loki in our testing was that we didn’t work much with Loki in Kitty/Angela/Elsa shells, in part because Elsa wasn’t Elsa yet. We had Loki decks we thought were pretty strong, but not that one, and that version of the deck has proven to be by far the strongest.”

Q: Why does Werewolf By Night not move when a card cycles through Lockjaw, but he does move if an On Reveal is played on a Cosmo lane?
A: Glenn “This is a behavior quirk of a few effects that cause a card to change zones, so when Werewolf tries to swap, he sees the card in the deck and can’t go there. However, we’re currently working on some revisions to our triggers to account for these issues in a future patch.”

Q: Why wasn’t Alioth changed in the recent patch?
A: Glenn “The patch for 10/31 was finalized in advance of the OTA on 10/12 going live, because patches require a lot more time to be implemented in the game. Remember, a full patch includes all of the feature work, like Spotlight keys, and QA needs their time too.

Given we had a nerf already “booked” for OTA that we liked, it wouldn’t be good practice to include an Alioth nerf in the patch too—that would be making two nerfs using the same gameplay data. We avoid doing that because it “tortures” the card and is unnecessarily confusing for players to have cards changing in rapid succession.

As for current Alioth, he’s a meaningful card but not breaking any of our metric thresholds. As always, we’re monitoring that for changes, and have received clearly a lot of feedback about Alioth already.”

Q: With the new Wave, can you reintroduce DeathWave?
A: Glenn “No. The reason we removed this interaction is that it made it too difficult for us to make fun Cost-reduction cards at compelling rates for their own decks while balancing them for play alongside Wave. We want Death to be cool in Destroy decks, not in a deck with just Wave and a couple enablers.”

Other Questions

Q: Is there no 13 power card (yet) due to the unlucky connotation of the number or is it just how things happened to have worked out?
A: Rada “Just a coincidence, although a funny one now that you mention it”

Q: Are there powerful decks or archetypes within the currently available cards that are yet to be discovered? In other words, are you aware internally of effective decks that the community has not yet figured out?
A: Rada “yep [Ben Brode Laugh Discord Emote]”

Q: To clarify, are these undiscovered decks a matter of decks doing well for a few people in the data that have not been widely picked up by the community as a whole? Or more that conceptually there are some card synergies that the team is aware of that have not been noticed by *anyone* at all?
A: Glenn “The former certainly exists. The latter could plausibly exist, but we don’t actively monitor for it and it would be very rare.”

Q: Is it easier or harder to design cards when there aren’t rigid restraints to cards like other card games? As in, no archetypes have set in stone guidelines for abilities that can be added or withheld.
A: Glenn “It’s mostly just more difficult, from a design perspective.”

Q: Are cards losing -1 power to weaken an archetype really nerfing the decks? A deck like Shuri is happy to see less power for her to dodge priority.
A: Glenn “Losing Power is fundamentally a nerf to these decks, though as you note situations can arise where it isn’t—though Shuri is one example where the opponent usually knows if they want priority and can fairly easily take it or leave it.

In addition to the actual impact—which is small, but real—nerfs also have the effect of temporarily reducing popularity, which helps address decks with especially high play rates.”

Q: Will past winter variants like Rogue ever return?
A: Stephen “The winter variants will come back during Winterverse 2023!”

Q: How often does the team play Snap in your free time? What is your favorite card?
A: Stephen “I play a ton 😅 .  I’ve hit infinite every season since beta launch.  Finished last season top 750 and have an infinite avatar frame.  My favorite card is tough b/c it changes a lot.  The cards I have split the most are Iron Man, Darkhawk, Dr. Doom, and Deadpool”

Addison “I play quite a bit every season, at least enough to complete the Season Pass. I’m a big fan of chaos and making my opponent uncomfortable, so my favorites tend to be weirdos like Master Mold, Black Widow, Korg, Rockslide, Legion, and the Goblin bros. If I can give you junk I WILL give you junk!”

Q: What determines what questions you answer?
A: Glenn “As we use spare time to engage here, I tend to look for solid questions I can answer while loading software, eating lunch, between meetings, that sort of thing. I also only answer questions in my purview as a game design lead–I can’t know everything we’re up to perfectly, and it would be too disruptive to investigate everything. So timing, content, and tone of the question all impact whether or not I’ll answer it, at least.”

Addison “Like Glenn, I look for things I can answer that I have knowledge of within my discipline or more often I’ll answer fluff-oriented questions because very few folks ever ask QA specific things in ask-the-team haha.”

Q: Is there design space you intentionally won’t use? Giganto, for example, can only be played on the left location, but no cards can only be played on middle or right locations.
A: Glenn “We’re certainly not going to make every expression of every idea–we don’t need a 6/14 Giganto for every location, obviously, because they’re so functionally close that most players don’t need or even want more than the one. However, we will explore more cards that are better to play left, right, or middle, for sure.”

Q: Some cards have mechanics that are obvious representations of their flavor (Destroyer) but others are harder to figure out (why does Silver Surfer care about buffing 3-costs?). Are all cards designed with character flavor in mind, or are some designed primarily to fill mechanical gaps?
A: Glenn “We design both top-down (creative) and bottom-up (mechanical) cards. We generally start from creative foundations, though.”

Q: Will there be more token variants like the Zombie Squirrels?
A: Stephen “We have plans to do more variants with themed generated cards!”

Q: You’ve said that rare and Super Rare avatars are being added to the game, does that include Spotlight Rarity variants? Will I ever be able to acquire Mech Silver Samurai, for example, as an avatar?
A: Stephen “Stay tuned for our next couple patches!   The avatar for spotlight variants will be a new bonus award when you get that Spotlight variant from spotlight caches.  We will give them out retroactively as well for spotlight variants you already own.”

Q: For further clarification, will winterverse 2023 feature cards in the Collection Level caches like last year?
A: Stephen “They will be in the daily offer shop. If you do not have them, they will show up in your daily offer shop on the day we add them to the shop like a wintery takeover. We have no plans to do another variant rush event at this time”

Q: How specific are the board states you can set up for testing and debugging?
A: Addison “PRETTY specific. We can set most anything up, the only exceptions being RNG-dependent events (for instance, causing a specific card to spawn from X-Mansion). For the more RNG heavy things, we can normally arrange with an engineer/designer to deploy a change to fake it and force pull a desired card.

Q: What does the automation regression stack look like? Are you able to automate testing menu flows, game play flows, etc?
A: Addison “Actively a work in progress. Right now a lot of our automation efforts are in card logic unit tests and backend focused cases. UI and menu-focused cases are tough to maintain simply because of how frequently there are little changes and tweaks to everything.

Q: How much of the tooling were you able to repurpose from off-the-shelf tools vs having to develop bespoke infra in-house?
A: Addison “I’m not totally sure what you’re referring to here but I’d say a mixture of both? For test case management and bug ticketing and whatnot, that’s all off the shelf. A lot of the automation work though at the moment is fairly bespoke and then similarly we have bespoke solutions for stuff like simulating network throttling or failures which could have used off-the-shelf but sometimes it’s just more convenient to have it available in-client 🙂

Q: What tooling (either automated or manual) is on your wishlist for the dev team?
A: Addison “Oh I have a few, but the most top-of-mind is to eventually get an in-client input recorder built that can parse the input and spit out automated cases to a central repo. Streamline and simplify the process for writing automated cases by having the game write the scripts for us while manually testing 🙂”

Q: Any update on global matchmaking?
A: Glenn “We’re actively working toward global matchmaking, but no ETA yet.”

Q: Why have both retreat now and retreat later options?
A: Stephen “Sometimes you just want to get out and move on to the next game.  We didn’t want to force you into waiting for the other player”

Q: With avatars for spotlight variants being obtained by owning the variant, are there any plans on how to obtain avatars of ultimate variants?
A: Stephen “We will include Ultimate variant avatars to be included in the new ultimate variant improvements when it launches at a future date. If you have already bought an Ultimate Variant, you will be able to get its ultimate variant avatar when we add the ultimate variant improvements”

Q: What’s the craziest bug y’all caught in the QA process?
A: Addison “Keep in mind that a lot of bugs we find are pretty mundane or boring or amount to “oh, this thing doesn’t work” 😄

I think some of these, like the Maria Hill one, might have been live for a short period of time before we hotfixed, but I figured I’d pull some of the funnier ones in recent months:

1. In the recent Zombie Squirrel Girl bundle, for some reason instead of the Zombie Squirrel it showed Spider-Ham for a while.
2. At one point, Phoenix Force played on Cloning Vats would crash the server.
3. At some point during Loki’s development, the cards he created couldn’t be played so you’d just have a full hand of unplayable cards.
4. When we changed Maria Hill to pull a 1-cost OR 2-cost card, she got surprisingly far along the pipeline before we realized that she would never pull a 2-cost card…ever.
5. One day we found that Medusa just simply couldn’t be added to decks for some reason.
6. Evolved Cyclops’ staging VFX were once too strong and just crashed the server if you dragged him around for a while (can’t lose the game if the game doesn’t exist!)
7. At one point, if you played Professor X and Phoenix Force at the same location, Phoenix Force would just blink out of existence

And then just for fun, here’s two Kang bugs from early in development before I joined the company:

1. ‘After Kang resets the turn, the player then immediately ends their turn’ (good for Kang’s opponent though I suppose haha)
2. ‘After Kang resets the turn, the game MOVES FASTER’ …which….what!? How!?”

Q: Is there any possibility in the long term we might ever get some of the QA tools exposed player-side in some form?
A: Addison “I’ll leave the answer to whether or not we’d WANT to do this or if it was viable to do this to other folks in other disciplines if they choose to answer. 🙂

For me though from a QA perspective, I did want to clarify that the tools I mentioned in that previous post are designed for debug use only. As such, they’re incredibly spartan in their implementation and are able to hook into systems that players aren’t ever supposed to be able to see or do. It’d likely take a substantial effort to make those commands player-friendly while also hamstringing them enough to not allow bad actors to abuse them or learn how to abuse other systems from them.”

Q: Card abilities that grant +3 power to cards such as Forge and Silver Surfer have been nerfed to +2 power, reducing their impact. I believe that +2 and +3 power have different levels of significance, especially in the Snap. How do card designers perceive this change? Are there any plans to introduce other cards that grant +3 power in the future?
A: Glenn “Yes, our conclusion is similar that we see a pretty clear break point at ‘going wide’ for 3 Power needing to cost more relative to 2 than, and we’re working that into future plans. We’ll still do both, but hopefully at healthier rates. That’s one reason we eliminated +3 as a consideration for the Spectrum buff at any Power for her, for example.”

Q: When does a card become problematic?
A: Glenn “When the card and/or a deck in which the card is a primary component cross a total of two or more thresholds for winrate, cuberate, or playrate.”

Q: Have you considered a card that cares about its position in a lane, such as placed above or below another card?
A: Glenn “We’ve considered it. It’s not exceptionally difficult to implement–Elsa is actually a slot-specific design, and the same principles apply. However, as Elsa has demonstrated, it can be confusing to intuit how certain interactions will resolve. So we’re thinking about that.”

Q: Roughly how many seasons ahead do you work?
A: Glenn “We recently began working on the seasons for summer 2024.”

A: Addison “Just want to add to Glenn’s comment here that each discipline is going to be along a slightly different track with some overlap. Right now, QA’s primary focus is a couple of months behind Design (looking at late winter/early spring). But even then, we tend to revisit seasons as different needs arise or as other changes come in all the way up to its release. It’s a whole pipeline and sometimes feels like you’re a time traveler as you bounce between months in your mind that haven’t happened yet.”

Q: The end turn button sounds different after the patch, is that intended?
A: TheChrisAlan “It was an intended change, I wanted to make it a little cleaner and tie in with the other UI SFI a bit better.  The previous end turn SFX was a bit harsh I found out after playing with headphones on PC.  It’s funny how easy it is to become used to a sound, good or bad and when it changes it sounds off, which is what I think people are feeling because yea it’s different.  But regarding the frequency content of the sound, it is much cleaner now, using less upper high frequency and will be more pleasant on the ears (especially if playing with headphones).”

Q: Out of the past 8 cards released, 4 have been nerfed. Are you feeling a bit too secure with the option to rebalance cards down the line?
A: Glenn “I don’t think I’d ever describe myself as ‘too secure,’ but I do agree that September and October didn’t hit the balance goals we set for ourselves and our work. We’ll be making internal improvements to our process with the aim of avoiding similar instability in the future.

It is very important to my team that the cards our players acquire remain useful and interesting game pieces they’re happy to own for years to come. That principle governs how we apply both buffs and nerfs, so if a card turns out to miss low we’ll be there with that change as well.”

Q: In the patch notes for Wave, you mentioned you didn’t want her to “Slam the door”. What cards would be your ideal “Slam the door” then?
A: Glenn “Mostly we don’t like them, at least not the ones that lack meaningful counterplay (which was an issue with Wave). We generally prefer to cost cards with that potential at 6, so that the final double has a lot of tension and both players have turns of opportunities to defend from that kind of influence.”

Q: How do you manage weighing both player sentiment/ feedback and balance decisions?
A: Glenn “We’re always listening and learning. The design team knows that when players are vocal and passionate, even if it’s negative, it’s because they’re talking about a game they care a lot about. We’re stewards of that game and take that responsibility seriously, but we also need to try things to learn more about what’s going to be possible for SNAP as it grows in years to come.

That said, some of our recent releases have simply not hit the mark we strive for on balance, and we’ll be making adjustments to our process in pursuit of improvement there.”

Q: Card games need balancing, and finding a perfect spot from the get go isn’t easy, but lately too many cards are getting adjusted too quickly. Especially Mobius who probably will disappear from the game in his current state. Will the economy change somehow to make situations like this one feel better or we just have to deal with it and spend resources on good cards expecting them to become worse later?
A: Glenn “Our balance goals are to make sure we get cards into happy, healthy places. If Mobius ‘disappears’ as a result of today’s change, we’ll change him again. Our balance philosophy highly prioritizes ensuring the cards players acquire are fun and useful game pieces, whether that means nerfing or buffing them.”

Q: Can the team do emergency changes to cards outside of scheduled updates if necessary for balancing?
A: Glenn “If we determine so form of action is absolutely necessary and other teams can shift to accommodate such a thing without disrupting their own work, we would consider it. However, with three changes every 4 weeks, it would have to be a pretty wild situation.”

Q: Why can’t you buff early Series cards to be both new player friendly and competitive? The Wolverine rework did just that.
A: Glenn “The first is clear–not every card can be easily buffed. Wolverine was a very weak card, and could stand to gain a lot of strength. In early play–the first week or few–Captain America, Punisher, and Namor are all fine cards to be playing with that work and are well supported by other content, primarily Spectrum.

Second, those cards are positioned to help teach. Seeing Captain America and Cyclops next to one another is illustrative of how Cost, Power, and abilities relate to one another. If Cap was a 3/4, that lesson is way less effective, and we need to teach it.

Third, these cards are likely all more than 1 Power away from competitive play anyway–Wolverine certainly was. That’s why Wolverine paid an additional cost for his buff–he got more complicated. We want to tread pretty lightly about where and how we complicate early Series cards.”

Q: Are updates made to the game in coordination with other departments? It seems very coincidental that Mobius was nerfed right before a She Hulk bundle releases.
A: Glenn “Design does keep track of our cosmetics schedule, but it has 0 impact on our nerf choices.

However, in the case of a buff where the change isn’t itself time-sensitive, we may coordinate said buff with the release of a new variant. It’s for the same reason we synchronize to MCU content–it creates a confluence of excitement. In fact, stay tuned for She-Hulk on that count.

Why delay buffs at all? That goes back to our goal for balance: to keep the game fresh and fun, with exciting reasons to log in every week. We could make every buff we’re looking at all at once, but we’d give up our ability to churn the metagame with those buffs over time, creating way more fun moments of discovery and exploration.”

Q: Will the double gold feature be added to the Snap website store in the future?
A: Stephen “Yes we plan to add it to the webshop in the future.  We had a technical hurdle on the webshop to get it there but didn’t want to delay it for in game”

Q: Is the double gold a time limited event?
A: Stephen “Permanent until you purchase that tier of gold.  We wanted it to be an awesome bonus as a thank you for continuing to support Marvel Snap as we move into year 2 of the game”

Q: Is the double gold purchases removed from each tier after you select one, or can each tier be doubled?
A: Stephen “The bonus is for your first purchase of each tier.  The order you purchase each tier does not matter.”

Q: Now that Spotlight keys are a collectable item, will they be added to bundles for purchase?
A: Stephen “We will add additional ways to get keys beyond the collection track.  We will use them as high value rewards in new features and sometimes for purchase in bundles”

Q: Do Spotlight keys expire at the end of a season?
A: Stephen “Spotlight keys do not expire.  It is safe to claim all of the spotlight keys on your collection track.  You will be able to use them to open a spotlight cache whenever you want”

Q: Lots of people posting after the patch about having shops of all one artist or category. Is that intended?
A: Stephen “It is intended.  We are experimenting with random personal takeovers to see if you guys like it”

Q: Are there any anti-move cards that could be added? So players have some agency to stop move cards with so many being added?
A: Glenn “Yes, we have some things planned.”

Q: Do you consider different skill brackets when nerfing cards?
A: Glenn “We have a baseline for the general population that guides most of our decisions, but we slice the data for different groups to spot check unique issues and make sure we understand the balance impact.

Q: Do you balance cards based on other cards or the decks they could fit into?
A: Glenn “We do both. For example, we targeted Man-Thing at 4-Cost in part because we thought he made a lot of sense in a Zabu shell, and then from there we figured out which numbers lined up best.”

For example, Sauron was a top-performing card for a long time, but a lot of that was related to how few players and decks used him, so we didn’t take any action. Once those decks also began crossing thresholds, we verified the performance and made a change. So his specific criteria earned him some slack.”

Q: Will the OTA / Patch cadence be changed with the upcoming holidays?
A: Glenn “We’ll have details about this in the next OTA, but yes, it will change. We’ll be skipping some weeks as the team won’t be in the office at all.”

Q: Why do some cards get multiple nerfs or buffs before cards like Baron Mordo get any changes?
A: Glenn “Simply put, there’s a queue. We manage the queue based on what the live game needs more, not who’s been in line the longest.”

Q: When nerfing a new card, do you factor in the resources players put in to get these cards? I spent 7,000 gold to get Mobius for example.
A: Glenn “Yes, and that’s one of the reasons we commit to ensuring cards remain useful and playable at strengths that aren’t damaging to the metagame. If we hit a card too hard, we’ll return to it.”

Q: Will there be an official response regarding player feedback from the latest patch nerfs, specifically about spending resources on a new card only for a complete rework weeks later?
A: Glenn “We’ll discuss the topic more deeply in our next OTA update.”

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: What makes Alioth so different from cards like Galactus, and the original Spiderman?
A: I am not a developer, but I can offer a but of insight to go with Glenn’s answer on the subject.

The debate about frustrating cards became a lot more confusing after the spidey rework. Spidey wasn’t directly reworked because of his ability, but more so one of Marvel’s most famous characters made players angry when played. They want those characters to be fun and enjoyable, not dispised. Glenn has mentioned many months ago the possibility of a new card getting Spidey’s old ability one day.

Galactus is also a card you build a deck around, while Alioth is more of a tech card. Alioth changed the meta by rewarding players for having priority, which has been a bad thing to get priority most often since the game’s launch. Developers like Glenn have stated they want this tension on the final turn, as explained here:

Glenn “We saw he was an effective incentive to gain priority. That’s something we’ve been looking for a while, as one reason we so consistently saw Zabu and Kitty at the top of the metagame were those decks’ ability to throw priority and counter/outscore the opponent unhindered on turn 6.”

Glenn (regarding Alioth’s effect on the meta) “Alioth’s performance is generally at its weakest alongside most ‘tech cards’ like Shang-Chi, Enchantress, Shadow King, etc. because those cards are also strongest when played at the end of the game. That’s among the reasons we were comfortable making him, because he would offer defense and competition for some highly-played cards at the same time.”

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!