Table of Contents
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: is Black Bolt too weak, are devs intentionally not nerfing season pass cards, have destroy cards reached a critical mass, 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 Series 5 card Malekith! If you don’t know if this card is worth Spotlight Caches, make sure to check out our weekly Spotlight Cache guide, as well as our Bonus Challenge guide! This edition also comes after the latest OTA, as well as the announcement of new split compensation coming soon!
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: Why did you nerf Storm to solve a problem when most players own her, but down own Legion or War Machine?
A: Glenn “Storm’s core gameplay incentive–locking down a location early–isn’t something we want to push as a primary competitive strategy. While we could’ve nerfed Legion or War Machine to weaken the problematic deck instead, that outcome would still remove Storm from her most competitive deck while also damaging whichever other card we nerfed. So, we sought to do the least total harm to cards and favored the more fun pair in the trio because they offer more fun gameplay.
However, we heard players loud and clear around their dissatisfaction with the Storm nerf. While I stand by that decision as being the best for the problem at-hand given our available options, I don’t expect we’ll be leaving Storm in her current state.”
Q: When you made new symbiotes, did you design them all around Venom and Carnage’s destroy functions? And if you make future cards with similar themes like Hammers for Thor and BRB, will you use the same approach?
A: Glenn “For Symbiote season, we started with the flavor that Symbiotes gain Power from ‘destructive’ game actions. However, we never want a season to be ‘one note’ so we looked for different ways to slice those ideas. I imagine our starting position for other hammers would be the same—finding more ways to manifest that boomerang feeling.”
Q: What is your favorite card that has released in the past month?
A: Glenn “I enjoyed Scream the most from last season, but this season Malekith is probably my favorite.”
Q: You mentioned you intended for Agent Venom to support cards that weren’t finding their place. What cards were you referring to since he just boosted existing good archetypes.
A: Glenn “Ones with low base Power, generally. We saw some of that, like Rocket Raccoon.
The issue is that the best Agent Venom decks were playing a lot of cards like Klaw, Sera, Speed, and using existing strong cards to capitalize on Agent Venom directly, like Sage and Cassandra Nova–they weren’t reaching for anything new, because the existing good stuff wasn’t hurt. For example, Klaw outperformed Iron Man in those decks.
By lowering the Power-setting, we reduce how many cards are neutral-to-lightly affected by Agent Venom, while maintaining a large enough difference for the cards that go from 0 or 1 up to 3 to meaningfully benefit from his impact.”
Q: Is there a reason why does Blackbolt discard the lowest Cost card instead of a random card? Meanwhile Gambit destroys a random card for 2 less Cost.
A: Glenn “Yes, there’s a very significant reason.
Discarding your own cards to Gambit is an opt-in choice that promotes deckbuilding decisions.
Getting a random card discarded from your hand unwillingly is one of the least fun things that can happen to a player in the CCG genre. In surveys, it has often exceeded everything else, including (strangely enough) getting a card destroyed. This is because it’s a chance denial of utility–neither the victim nor their opponent made a meaningful choice in an impactful game outcome that denied the affected player a gameplay opportunity.
Simply put, you don’t want discard-based strategies to be especially strong or prolific in a CCG, and you want random discard specifically to be less available.”
Q: With Fenris Wolf on the way, Black Bolt really shows discarding the lowest Cost card isn’t strong aside from helping Stature. Is the team open to creating more tools to help him see more play?
A: Glenn “Fenris Wolf should be demonstrative that we’ll explore the space, but strategies revolving around discarding enemy cards aren’t things we’re going to push as aggressively as other strategies. Using it in small doses to enable other gameplay is likely the direction we’ll continue, rather than encouraging the action for its own sake.”
Q: With discussion on Black Bolt and unfun discarding, does Sokovia not do that exact thing?
A: Glenn “Locations are randomized, and often symmetrical. That means they can do lots of things that would be inappropriate to let a card do at a strong rate.
If a card discarding enemy cards is the best card in the game, it gets played constantly and the game is much more miserable for it. Sokovia has a fixed frequency.”
Q: When many community members called out that Agent Venom was OP during his season, he went untouched. Why did you think his playrate would decrease with Toxin on the way? It supports the idea that you don’t nerf a season pass cards for financial reasons.
A: Glenn “As the notes stated, the reason we changed Agent Venom was largely that ‘existing good deck + Agent Venom’ weren’t the primary decks we wanted Agent Venom fueling. If a Toxin deck was the most popular AV deck, we might not be nerfing him today. But it’s 3rd place and not the best one, either.
I consider players’ reactions an opportunity to learn and reflect on our decisions, certainly. But making balance decisions with the express goal of avoiding negative reactions is both impractical and frankly does a disservice to the players by lowering the quality of the game.
It’s true we prefer not to nerf new releases, I’ve said that. There are many reasons. One of them is that players just got a new toy–we don’t want to mess with that toy unless we have to. Another is that we have much less data for a new card relative to older ones, and the next new card will immediately outdate most of it.
So yes, we could’ve nerfed Agent Venom in October. But a) it might unnecessarily upset players, b) we might not hit the right spot, and c) it might require a follow-up change on 11/14 anyway–as you note, Toxin was coming out. And we *really* strive to avoid changing new cards multiple times.
The only way I could guarantee we won’t nerf an SP card would be to release them all weaker than we think they could be. And that’s going to wind up with waaay less fun SPs! Look at this year: we’ve buffed multiple Season Passes. The process that developed all of them is the same process that developed Agent Venom.
Game design is imperfect–we will miss high and low on balance. Our goal is to target an acceptable ‘miss range’ with good dials for balance. If that range means a ‘high’ miss can’t ever be too good, then a ‘low’ miss would often be totally unplayable.”
Other Questions
Q: Could 5 cards in a location ever be possible?
A: Glenn “It’s possible, but not something we’re exploring right now.”
Q: What about 1 card that takes up 2 spaces?
A: Glenn “We’ve considered it, but a) there’s not really a desire for it as space and b) the UI is fairly challenging for elements like art and logos.”
Q: Could more new cards add cards to your deck? Or is that design space to hard to make or balance?
A: Glenn “It is restrictive design space, but only partially for the reason you surmise. More significantly, you have to build the cards around the fact that the player might simply not draw them at the right time and have a bad experience. For example, if Jane Foster didn’t exist, Thor would be much less satisfying to play with.”
Q: Is your strategy to release overpowered cards to get people to buy them, only to nerf them later without compensation?
A: Glenn “Our goal is always to release competitive cards that impact the metagame. That means some cards will necessarily release above the mark (Surtur) or below it (Symbiote Spider-Man). Our balance approach and content release model are also both different from any other CCG—we’re a true live service model with a smaller amount of content. We use frequent and impactful card updates to keep the game constantly fresh, and it’s one of the most popular parts of SNAP. But this feature is simply incompatible with compensation—we change ~150 cards a year, and we release less than half that many cards. However, we make buffs as frequently as nerfs as a different compromise.”
Q: You mentioned you try to compromise by buffing as much as you nerf, but how do you make buffs as significant as some nerfs are? And how do these changes affect low CL players?
A: Glenn “I didn’t say we would make the buffs as significant. The purpose of a nerf is usually corral something that has gotten way out of hand–a commensurate buff for every nerf would add a lot more instability to the game, not to mention a ton more work. Smaller buffs and the occasional rework provide interesting opportunities, without creeping the baseline power level of the game too fast.
As to your second point, we often buff (and occasionally nerf) lower-Series cards because we do want players with a range of collections to experience the fun and novelty of our live balance approach.
There isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution–players are a large group with diverse interests, and we change cards a lot. But in the long-term, our aim is to ensure that many cards will get a chance to shine, satisfying a wide range of players.”
Q: Why don’t you update players about changes to the season pass, missions, rewards, ect?
A: Glenn “I agree we could better communicate changes to some reward elements of the game, and I’m optimistic we’ll both improve on that count as well as continue moving towards more stable expectations.”
Q: How exactly is Snap testing cards internally?
A: Glenn “I’ve spoken at length about our playtesting approach in various other answers, but in short we have three teams—the whole SNAP group, a smaller group for bonus playtesting, and a newish dedicated group focusing on competitive play that began contributing to releases in January of this year. Beyond that, we also work closely with a data team to slice the metagame in various ways for monitoring and live balance, which is one of my primary responsibilities to lead.
Q: Does your deck get shuffled and assigned at the start of a match, or do you get shuffled 1 card as you draw one?
A: Glenn “Yes, your deck gets instantiated in a random order when the game starts.”
Q: Can you elaborate on what different tiers mean for compensation?
A: Griffin “Everyone in each tier will receive the same compensation. It’s based on the median player’s amount of splits per tier. The median is the middle person in the tier. So if there’s 100 people on one tier, we take the 50th person’s # of splits and base the compensation on that number. Some adjustment was made on the higher tiers as the spreads grow as you go up in number of splits.”
Q: How will I know if I qualified for compensation?
A: Griffin “When or if it’s delivered to your inbox. I’ll let players know here when all compensation has been delivered.”
Q: Destroy decks have been optimized since Nico released. Does this make designing new destroy cards difficult? Have you reached a design limit for destroy cards?
A: Glenn “Yes, designing new cards for optimized archetypes is harder. No, I don’t think we’ve hit the design limit.
We do purposefully make one of the Destroy decks fairly easy to collect and strong enough to play competitively as one of our bridges from early Series play into the larger metagame. So some amount of its stability is intentional, and you can expect future designs to more often veer in new directions.”
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: Can we get any updates on card acquisition changes?
A: Griffin “I can say with confidence that progress is indeed being made. Sometimes it can feel like two steps forward, one step back. The priority is to get it right.
We know this is a strong desire with players. It is for us too. As soon as we have more to share you can be sure that we will.”
Q: When are the next Series Drops?
A: Drops are officially scheduled for the mid-december patch!
Q: Can we confirm if there will be a league event this season please?
A: No league this month, instead we are getting Deadpool’s Diner back
Q: What happened to the 2 variants that didn’t win the vote (Destroyer and Howard)?
A: They should be added to the game at a later (undisclosed) date.
Q: Wondering if there are QoL features in the works for the collection manager. It would be great if you could filter by rarity.
A: No direct answer on new additions, but you can already filter by rarity! Simply sort by “Quality” in your collection and it will sort from grey border all the way to infinity! Use the arrow to reverse the order.
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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