Table of Contents
Welcome back to this week’s Developer Update! This week’s edition comes after the launch of the new Series 5 cards Superior Spider-Man and Man-Spider, as well as the latest OTA! If you haven’t seen what was changed with the balance update, be sure to check out the official patch notes!
If you don’t know if the new cards are worth Snap Packs or tokens, make sure to check out our Bonus Challenge guide for a post-release review of the cards 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: When playing Prowler, do you have to move a card before playing him to get the discount? Or does the discount apply as long as a card moved the previous turn, with the tools in hand?
A: Glenn “The former. It’s all Prowler’s ability, so you have to move on the turn before playing him.”
Q: Is it intended that Agatha always speeds through your end turn time? I was trying to decide if I should stay or retreat and had no time to think.
A: Glenn “It’s intentional, because we observed a frustrating phenomena that Agatha players would let the clock expire during Agatha turns a good bit more often. It’s not specifically to add downside, but we didn’t mind that side effect since in general we want to keep turn length shorter.”
Q: Why does the Storm/Legion combo still exist?
A: Glenn “We keep an eye on this combo, as it’s not how we want a lot of games to be ending. But there are tons of things we’d dislike at high frequency that we don’t mind being present in the game. As CCG designers, we’re trying to create a really vast opportunity space and balance the outcomes into healthy frequencies. Some people clearly enjoy playing with the combo, so it’s our role to keep it at a strength level that satisfies those players without encroaching on other design and metagame goals. When that does happen, it merits fixing.
FWIW, the majority of my cause for changing Spider-Man was that our most popular Marvel character shouldn’t have such a polarizing effect–playing with and against Spider-Man should feel fun. We just decided at the time to not put the old effect anywhere else, since we didn’t think it was particularly additive to the game and only saw play when it was too strong.”
Q: If I play Man-Spider, then Ravonna, then Arnim Zola, Man-Spider’s copies merge together. Why does this happen, but playing just Man-Spider and Zola doesn’t?
A: Glenn “The first copy merged with Ravonna, inheriting her status as the last played card. It’s very similar to the interaction Multiple Man -> Hulkbuster -> Ghost-Spider.”
Q: Will Spider-Man Noir take into consideration Cost reduction?
A: Glenn “There are no cards in the game that care about Cost modifiers for cards already in play.
When we refer to ‘Cost’ with a capital C, that indicates we are referencing the unmodified value. When we say something like ‘costs 0’ such as Jane Foster, we’re checking the modifiers. Base Cost isn’t a term we use.”
Q: How do you balance a card like Web Sling when it doesn’t have any balance dials besides Cost?
A: Glenn “Well, adding a dial for a buff is relatively easy–Web Sling could also give Power, for example. The state we’re largely trying to avoid is when a card needs to be nerfed, but Cost or Power aren’t effective dials.”
Q: Why does Man-Spider and Absorbing Man cause a 4x effect?
A: Glenn “Absorbing Man copies Man-Spider’s text, so when he merges with Man-Spider he quadruples because they both double.”
Q: When did Penni get changed to give energy when played onto Agony? Were things changed to work with Man-Spider? If so, is Blob doubling in Power when eating Man-Spider intentional?
A: Glenn “Merging was a little messed up, but we updated it recently to function both ways. It was always our intent than Peni Parker could make Energy both ways, but we didn’t have the right implementation for that and it wasn’t a big priority.
As to whether or not it should work if Man-Spider gets eaten from the deck and such, that’s an interesting debate. His ability resolves after a merge, and we generally do build merge to treat the card as it’s in play once it’s merged. We’ll keep an eye on this interaction and see if it might merit an adjustment similar to Taskmaster/Mystique/Absorbing Man in the future.”
Q: Do you think Kingpin’s current design is doing a good job as a tech against move decks?
A: Glenn “We redesigned Kingpin to be a synergy piece for Scream, because he wasn’t a fun release valve checking Move (which also wasn’t a deck worth checking at the time). So he’s not currently supposed to beat Dagger, but help Scream, Polaris, Stegron, etc.
I think he still can do that, and these numbers are fairly easy to tweak if we want to push him—but we don’t want the cost of countering Move to be overbuffing Scream decks, so I doubt we’d return to the old design.”
Q: With Zombie Galacti feeling so lackluster, do you think the cards is just ahead of its time, or does it need an adjustment?
A: Glenn “I think the answer is a little of both. ZG is a niche card that’s supposed to be challenging to figure out, not a top metagame deck. But the reward may also not be good enough yet.”
Q: Glenn recently said in a question about Prowler that the cost reduction is tied to the On Reveal trigger. Why is this different with Man-Spider? Why is his double-up after a merge effect not part of his On Reveal trigger?
A: Glenn “Because we balance cards based on their own strengths and goals, not based on how we worded another card. The words are the last thing we finalize on cards, and they’re built to communicate the design—not the other way around. Man-Spider was conceived as a complement to Peni, and an incentive to commit to Merge more fully as an archetype.”
Q: With Debrii’s new text, is she too similar to Mysterio now?
A: Glenn “I don’t think they’re similar at all in practice—you’re kind of squinting at two different buildings and evaluating their blurs. It’s even hard to imagine a deck that would play both, which tends to be a pretty good sign of novelty.
Mysterio’s interactions with cards like Bast, Hit-Monkey, Sasquatch, and even things like Vormir are fairly different from Debrii’s with Zero, Iron Patriot, Marvel Boy, etc.
That said, it’s also not forbidden for cards to overlap. Ghost-Spider, Iron Fist, Arana, and now Web Sling all have different strengths even though their functionality is similar.”
Other Questions
Q: After the recent OTA changes, including the robot takeover one, it seems clear the team wants to move away from tech decks. Why go this direction with Snap?
A: Glenn “We always look for ways our changes can bring fresh ideas or different metagames into the limelight. That’s the primary role of our OTA updates, to keep the game dynamic and interesting.
The ‘robot patch’ was largely an imbalance patch, but we did purposefully aim to choose a range of changes that seemed plausible-ish. That’s because part of the reason to do these kinds of patches is to learn from them. The results were surprisingly good, so we identified some changes to keep and see how they might make an impact over time, especially with the Golden Gauntlet now around to test them in different ways. A big part of the reason to adjust was we have way more “tech” available now than years ago, and that means we should lean on it differently.
It has been true for a long time that we specifically don’t want ‘throw priority and play two tech cards’ to be the best deck in Snap. It was when I got hired, and that had unhealthy impacts on the game—it led to fewer turn 6s and also less deck diversity, because only synergy decks that could overwhelm the tech were viable. Those metagames were overall less fun—most people prefer to do what they want in a CCG, not just the best things. It’s not really a change in our goals to keep that kind of deck checked, but a change to our tactics.”
Q: Why did you have back to back OTA weeks?
A: Glenn “We deviated from the usual schedule to accommodate a companywide obligation. It wouldn’t have been practical to implement an OTA during that time, as the process is still highly manual and the team would’ve been displaced.”
Q: Are you timing OTA changes to align with new season themes? Like nerfing Mercury before a move season?
A: Glenn “We’ve been transparent in the past that when we have changes we think are interesting but not time-sensitive, we look to time them with other content updates that can maximize their potential impact. There’s been no change to that philosophy.”
Q: There’s been many issues with the variant bundles for new s5/s4 cards showing up properly. With the issues blocking many from being able to buy them, is there any chance they might be available sooner for those that missed out on them because of the bug(s)?
A: Griffin “A fix for this issue should be coming this week.
We don’t think it’ll re-trigger “missed” bundles but rather prevent them from happening in the future.
The team is discussing ways to try to make previously missed ones show up again, however.”
Q: Since there was no mention of this in the season announcement, can we expect the Sanctum event pass again? Will its price remain the same?
A: Griffin “As usual, we’ll share more details about the event as we get closer.”
Q: Have you considered standardizing staging and revealing to have less inconsistent outcomes? (Like Negasonic and Magneto vs Negasonic and Canonball)
A: Glenn “Yes, we’ve looked into changes we could make. We haven’t found anything we were willing to do yet.”
Q: Do events like Golden Gauntlet impact your balance decisions?
A: Glenn “They don’t have much impact on it, no. The sample size of that event is very small relative to the data we have, and we already regularly review balance at different MMR groups including the highest tiers.
If we saw something like 4-8 of the same deck in the Top 8, that would merit a closer look from me, but that’s about it.”
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: Do Snap Points I gain in a season boost my MMR for next season?
A: Glenn “It’s quite complicated. The simple explanation is that with every season reset, we normalize MMR to better reflect players’ performance expectations. This value also informs the initial reset of SNAP Points for the season, but from there on SNAP Points (and thus infinite rank) care about seasonal performance. So your MMR serves to ‘ground’ your starting SNAP Points, but from there is less tightly tied to it until the season ends.
SNAP Points (and the leaderboard) aren’t designed to precisely reflect the most skilled players at all times. Very few competitions actually do that–they measure performances within a system during a specific time frame. For our leaderboards, that’s each season.”
Q: How does matchmaking work with MMR and Conquest?
A: Glenn “The earlier Conquests have some banding around the collection scores of the player. Proving Grounds mirrors the ranked play experience, while Silver and Gold are less discerning. However, Infinite has no CL bands whatsoever.”
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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