Table of Contents
Welcome back to this week’s Developer Update! This week’s edition comes after the launch of the new Series 5 card Zombie Mister Fantastic and the latest patch and 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 Zombie Mister Fantastic is worth Snap Packs or tokens, make sure to check out our Bonus Challenge guide for a post-release review of the card 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: With Mercury/Cannonball winning the latest Golden Guantlet, is it time to nerf this combo?
A: Glenn “The purpose of a nerf generally isn’t to remove something from the metagame, but to find a healthy frequency for it. The GG win isn’t concerning in and of itself.”
Q: Why hasn’t the bug been fixed that prevents Frankie Ray from moving?
A: Glenn “This bug has been fixed in our next version. We just didn’t get it adjusted in time for the cut for this patch, and it requires a patch to update.”
Q: Out of curiosity, can you give details on how Frankie Ray’s bug worked since it has a fix planned?
A: Glenn “If memory serves, this lock-up was created by the way Frankie was built to ‘see’ a 6-Cost card in your hand during staging. If you don’t have one, I believe she can actually be moved normally with effects like Cloak and SP//dr.”
Q: How did Zombie Scarlet Witch launch so weak as a season pass card?
A: Glenn “I think we undershot on Horde a bit, though time will tell as the remaining cards continue to release. We primarily focused on the balance of the “finished” season because that’s the long-term state for many of these cards, but Horde added more variables to that process for sure. In the meantime, we’ll continue to use OTAs to achieve our balance goals for cards, including new releases.”
Q: Why were Surtur and Cull Obsidian banned from Showdown, but other combo cards like Wong weren’t?
A: Glenn “Because Cull and Surtur were much stronger on winrate, cube rate, and popularity than those cards/combos.”
Q: With Destroyer now at 18 Power, when could we see a buff for Infinaut?
A: Glenn “Infinaut’s still serving a pretty distinct role in the game even relative to its peers, and we tend to reserve buffs for cards that don’t have healthy homes. I don’t personally have any interest in changing Infinaut right now, but we make balance decisions as a group.”
Q: Why is Luna Snow’s Ice Cube called “Ice Cube” when the image clearly isn’t a cube?
A: Glenn “Design accidentally commissioned the placeholder name as a logo, and it was funny/harmless enough we decided not to replace it.”
Q: Did you consider letting The Hunger skill also tutor a horde card (similar to Agamotto and his spell)?
A: Glenn “No, that’s a much stronger card than we’d like to make in general when it comes to reducing variance.”
Q: Why did Rocket get banned from Sanctum Showdown, but Black Cat didn’t?
A: Glenn “Rocket was one of the ~5 strongest cards in Sanctum during the last run, and by far the best-performing Guardian. He still might be better than current Black Cat, but either way that’s the sort of card we don’t want at high density in the format, so it’s fine to give Black Cat her turn while Rocket warms the bench. Maybe she’ll join him in the future, or swap.”
Other Questions
Q: Is there more design space to support cards that benefit from floating energy to better compete with discard, move, or destroy?
A: Glenn “It’s largely a way to flexibly cost cards by deferring some amount of their Energy. But it scales quickly, especially on low-Cost cards, since it makes one extra Energy count for multiple unspent instances. I think there’s more space to explore, though.”
Q: With Marvel pairing with Hasbro for the toy variants, can we expect to see Transformers in Snap at some point?
A: Glenn “No, you shouldn’t expect that.”
Q: What is the purpose of running 2 LTGM that both need gold to get the event pass?
A: Glenn “The express purpose of gold is to be acquired and spent. We have always built LTGMs to be places where players can convert gold into something they find more enjoyable or valuable than ‘the usual’ offers or hoarding gold for its own sake.
As for why there are two of them, players previously indicated they found the Grand Arena’s prizing structure a much more satisfying use of their gold than some other game modes, or even other primary systems. So among other things we’ll see if that’s the case, or how much novelty or other GA specifics were a contributing factor.”
Q: With the issues that Fast Foward causes, are fixes being planned? Or can it just be removed for a time?
A: Glenn “Fast forward is in a very awkward spot. We can’t simply remove it—its function is important to avoiding 5-minute loops, but we don’t have many alternate options on how to execute it.—the games architecture wasn’t really conceived with fast forward in mind.
So while we want to improve it, it’s sort of unraveling a larger series of issues to do so. For now, our approach is to exempt cards from it that are chasing problems while we actively review the game’s architecture. That’s among my current work right now.”
Q: Why is creating Limbo on turn 6 bad, but removing Limbo on turn 6 okay?
A: Glenn “They’re very different things that have different gameplay experiences.
Unexpectedly extending the game very often leads to removing the most important turn from one of the players. It’s very powerful, not very fun, and you have no agency to opt into or out of the experience. It’s in fact so powerful that even at 5/3, Magik was the strongest card in the game, and saw play in many of the best decks at the time. It was essentially inescapable that you would have to play turn 6 without knowing if it was the last turn.
Ending the game early can remove an important turn for one player too–but it’s something the Magik player has learned, understands, and is opting into risking with their gameplay choice. It’s also a limitation that has enabled us to cost Magik more aggressively, making her a more appealing choice for enabling specific decks–rather than a generically strong card for everyone.
And Magik is still one of our most popular cards, because we found a healthy place for her ability in the context of the larger game.”
Q: Are there any updates on when we will see the new borders added to the border rotations (like previously announced)?
A: Glenn “Just heard from the team that the missing Borders that were previously announced will be added/fixed in the next patch next month.”
Q: Are there any plans to make more featured packs for archetypes like End Of Turn?
A: Griffin “We’re looking forward to trying all sorts of stuff. Not sure if End-Of-Turn is on the list but we want to keep experimenting.”
Q: Why does Sanctum Showdown have locations that make no sense?
A: Glenn “We adjusted how the banned list was created in LTGMs to standardize them, and some locations appear to have slipped into the mix unexpectedly. We’re working on estimating a fix.”
Q: Why doesn’t Sanctum Showdown award potentially earned points when your opponent retreats?
A: Glenn “We award a flat 16 for retreats in this mode. This already works out quite favorably for winners against early retreats, and the later occasions when it doesn’t avoid adding weird incentives like ‘try to snap before a retreat.’ It’s generally always to a player’s advantage to stay anyway.”
Q: Have there been any cards that players have used in ways you never considered when making the card?
A: Glenn “One of my go-to answers to this question is the use of hand-replace [pre-nerf] Loki as a ‘backup plan’ in Phoenix Force decks (and I think Negative?) We didn’t really spend any time evaluating Loki in linear combo decks because it was counterintuitive he’d be played there.
A less interesting one: I don’t think we ever tried Malekith in Hazmat decks? I liked it and we landed the strength fine with other benchmarks, I just don’t recall ever evaluating its potential in that deck to increase cube equity.”
Q: Was there any consideration to releasing all of the Horde cards at the start of the season so the archetype could function properly?
A: Glenn “Yes, we decided early on not to do that. It’s important for our seasons to appeal to a diverse range of players, and we didn’t want to alienate players who might not be as excited by the new mechanic—we were already risking that with the Zombie theme. We specifically aimed them at decks we felt wouldn’t overlap as much with Horde but still felt appropriately ‘undead’ in theme.”
Q: Similar to when Activate was introduced as a keyword, has the team discussed updating any old cards to use the Horde mechanic?
A: Glenn “Right now, it’s a Zombie-specific thing. But a personal favorite thing of mine to do is put old keywords in new creative conceits, so never say never!”
Q: Did you consider making Horde more zombie-like and have one spawn on each location with less Power?
A: Glenn “This is a good example of a spot where fidelity to the creative conceit would sacrifice way too much actual fun gameplay. I agree zombies everywhere would be more resonant, but resonance isn’t the primary goal of any card in our game. There’s a spectrum to it, but every card has to land in the spot that makes it the best game piece for its story, not the spot that makes the best story.”
Q: With the last patch, “frosted glass” looks more like ice on variants. For players who liked the old design on their cards, could we see this background return as a new option?
A: Griffin “We’ve been gathering feedback on the CM changes and this is definitely high on the list. Nothing is ever “gone forever” but we’re still just in the feedback gathering stage right now.”
Q: Was a “bite” kind of skill card considered that would turn a character into a zombie or Horde?
A: Glenn “Not really? It would do weird stuff with new cards by forcing players to learn what two Hordes in play do, which isn’t the gameplay experience we want for the mechanic. It’s fine that it’s doable, but we don’t need to make it a major part of the metagame. We also generally aren’t hurting for cards that obsolete enemy cards, and debut them sparingly against more specific problems.”
Q: I’ve noticed SD references Magic the Gathering a lot. Does the team draw a lot of inspiration from it?
A: Glenn “CCG design in general has a lot of Magic DNA in it. The gameplay of SNAP doesn’t particularly draw heavily, but the design process and many fundamental practices we rely on come from Magic. It’s often a useful frame of reference because it’s so prominent in the genre that lots of designers and players are at least passingly familiar with it or related lingo.
But also, 4 of our game designers used to work on Magic (including myself), and even more coworkers play, so it gets used more often to shorthand stuff for those reasons.
Snap is considerably less complex than Magic. It has its benefits, but it also has its costs. Magics complexity buys it near-infinite design space; Snap is constrained by design to be as simple as possible.”
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 the devs confirm, in conquest can you be paired with a bot in any match?
A: Daniela “🚫 🤖 ” (no bots)
This answer is slightly incorrect, but Second Dinner was able to clarify with us on the matter! Here is their latest response:
Brady: “There are almost no conquest bots, and Infinite never has bots. Here are the two exceptions:
First Conquest game ever on each particular tier (Proving Grounds / Silver / Gold)
Extremely long queue timeouts (usually 180s+). this is very rare
Overall, bots in conquest are <0.5% of games”
Q: Why bananas as a customization option?
A: Griffin “Banana SPLIT!”
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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