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: why does Scream afflict unrevealed cards, is High Voltage replacing Deadpool’s Diner, how much will variants from the Collector’s Valut cost, 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 Scream, as well as the new season pass card Agent Venom! 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!
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, High Voltage 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: Could Selene be changed to say “steal Power”?
A: Glenn “We don’t like overcomplicating cards unnecessarily. When a steal isn’t amplifying some amount of interesting uncertainty or redistribution of Power, we tend to just stick with afflict.
For example, your Selene is basically always 2 Power, and the exception (one player has no cards in hand) makes Selene less appealing, not more. Contrast this with Cassandra Nova, who varies in the base case by turn played but also has several other cards that adjust her up and down.”
Q: Will there ever be an Activate cards that also has Ongoing/On Reveal effect? Is that even possible?
A: Glenn “Possible, sure”
Q: If an On Reveal card also has Activate, will Absorbing Man copy it too? Would there be a difference between Absorbing Man copying this card before and after it’s activated?
A: Glenn “As currently implemented, yes. B. He would be unactivated either way”
Q: Doesn’t adding 1 power to 6 cost cards like Galactus diminish the value of Emperor
A: Glenn “Technically yes, but the difference is negligible in practice.
Q: Is your goal still to make high cost move cards? I ask because Hercules moved down in Cost and isn’t seeing much play.
A: Glenn “It’s still a goal, and yes; if Hercules’s play rate doesn’t rise here, we’d likely consider reworking him in the future.”
Q: X-23 has had a venomized variant since her release. Why are you charging us another 1,200 gold for a redress of something that’s been in the game for over a year?
A: Glenn “We’re simply offering players a different interpretation of a popular concept, which is the core premise of having a variant store (and in many ways a core premise of comic books).”
Q: When you play Misery, which cards are destroyed?
A: Glenn “Just the On Reveal cards.”
Q: Why does Scream afflict unrevealed cards without stating so in her text?
A: Glenn “We’ll be updating Scream to align with existing cards. We don’t want to split hairs on stuff like Kingpin and Hazmat being able to see cards differently.”
Q: With Scream having a global effect at a 2-Cost, is the team changing their mind about these strong effects being 2-Cost instead of 3-Cost (Luke Cage and Elsa)?
A: Glenn “It’s a popular kind of question emphasize the ‘global’ quality of an effect absent other context in talking about how we design and balance 2-Cost cards since we made the changes to Elsa and Luke. However, the context matters a lot, because what applying globally actually changes is the *sum impact* of the effect.
Scream can only trigger once each turn, has a variety of ways to combat decks leaning on her strength, and requires some commitment to pull off, which all counterbalance that impact.
We tried a lot of Screams with a lot of different twists, and this one played the best.”
Q: How many triggers would a Misery get on Wong vs using an Odin?
A: Glenn “Misery’s own repeated trigger won’t be able to see the cards destroyed by her first trigger, so she’ll fire half as many as Odin would.”
Q: Will Mobius or Luke Cage change the results of using Anti-Venom?
A: Glenn “Yes, these will both let you ignore the respective modifiers.”
Other Questions
Q: Would you ever add a decimal system to Power to give more balance options?
A: Glenn “No, we’ll never do that.
Game development has a number of heuristics I value, but one in particular is ‘use good numbers.’ Good numbers are numbers that people find approachable, that they can readily engage with.
If you want more granularity in a game’s balance, scaling cards is generally always the better answer vs. going to decimals. For example, rather than make a 2/3.5, adjust the values in the game so that you can make a 4/7 there, and what used to be a 4/7 becomes an 8/14, and so on.
It might seem silly, but these systems (and others, like counting by 5s or 10s or 50s or 100s) actually feel very different to play with for different groups of players relative to one another, but especially relative to involving fractional values are a marked improvement.”
Q: How likely is it that you would ever scale up the cards to get more granularity?
A: Glenn “I can’t assign it a likelihood, but it’s possible.”
Q: Why do you very quickly balance overpowered cards, but buff underpowered cards at a much slower pace?
A: Glenn “The purpose of our balance changes is explicitly to maintain a healthy and interesting metagame. The cards exerting negative pressures on a metagame *must* be changed to accomplish that goal, while the cards exerting no pressure *can* be changed to support that goal.
We always endeavor to do a mix of both, and we accept that some players will prefer different candidates for buffs or reworks than others.
Some cards, such as Kang and Adam Warlock, have proven themselves to be complex in other ways that delay the speed with which we’re happy to make a change, because we prefer to avoid unnecessarily adjusting cards multiple times as a general rule. So if a card’s ‘issues’are complicated, it will take us longer to resolve them.”
Q: When buffing and nerfing, how do you weigh in “fun” compared to stats?
A: Glenn “There are many ways, both data-driven and anecdotal. One data-based way we measure fun is by looking at what players choose to do when winrate or cuberate aren’t their primary motivators.
For example, if a card’s performance is bad–say it’s a 50% deck or worse–but tons of players opt to play it, that’s an indicator that those players enjoy the experience. They could win more with something else, but they like doing it that way.
Clearly, Hela is such a deck for some people. I understand that there are other people that dislike playing against Hela–they may even outnumber the people who enjoy playing with her. But as a CCG, our goal is to support as wide a range of appealing gameplay as we can for all of our players.”
Q: Has there ever been a bug the team chalked up to RNG but after enough people were “beating the odds”, the team unearthed some nefarious odds weighting?
A: Addison “Any time we’re dealing with weights and percentages there’s a chance that issues will surface at scale that just weren’t apparent in smaller sample sizes.
It’s not exactly what you’re asking, but Maria Hill used to have an ability that was ‘pull a 1 OR 2 cost card’and at some point last year that ‘OR’ broke and she only ever pulled 1-costs. I have NO IDEA how long that was broken but initial anecdotal reports were just thought to be a misunderstanding of how she works. It wasn’t until we saw a handful of reports start to trickle in over time that we took a closer look and found that yep…she just doesn’t pull 2-costs anymore lol.”
Q: How long does it take to make a card?
A: Glenn “It can vary, since the iterative process isn’t a fixed series of changes and we might begin some seasons differently for various reasons. However, as an example I recently started exploratory design work on the May 2025 season.”
Q: Will you ever have a card ability that resets disabling effects from sources like Red Guardian?
A: Glenn “I imagine we’ll eventually make a card that ‘resets’ abilities to base, but I’m not sure we’d specifically aim to cleanse negative effects since identifying all of them is slightly more complex, both for players and for code.”
Q: Have you cosnsidered testing card buffs by radically adjusting Cost/Power on live servers before resorting to a rework?
A: Glenn “Stats are always the first place we start, but we don’t necessarily need to try many different combinations in live play for the same issue. When we make a stat change, it’s after evaluating all the options internally. The results of that live change are usually informative as to whether another change will or won’t be impactful without needing to actually do it.”
Q: Would you make complex locations like complex card, such as Nico?
A: Glenn “These effects can make evaluating the game state meaningfully more difficult, especially as multiple of them overlap. Because cards are ‘opt-in’—a player has to decide they want the complexity—we have a much higher tolerance on cards than we do locations.
I’m sure we will see some more complex locations, but they’ll also be rarer.”
Q: Was the transition of Spider-Man to Symbiote on Halloween month intended to line up that way?
A: Glenn “Always planned 🙂 We thought it was a unique opportunity to tell a story with seasons.”
Q: How does the auto deck function work with a new card? When I used it with Agent Venom on day 1, it built a discard deck with him in it.
A: Glenn “On day 1, our ‘smart deck’ is still gathering data on new releases. Its recommendations rely on a few decklists we feed it to get started, adding player decks as they come and linking cards based on mutual synergies. So if Swarm and Agent Venom are popular early, but the rest of the deck is less uniform among players, then its knowledge of Swarm’s synergy cards will outweigh Agent Venom’s until there’s more data for it to evaluate and learn which cards are better together.”
Q: Why has Pandart been featured in several seasons this year already?
A: Glenn “We commission art for seasons based on our goals for the style as well as its appeal to players. Pandart’s been a great partner on both counts.”
Q: Why didn’t this season get a new loading screen?
A: Glenn “An unexpected issue in the client has delayed the new load screen until later in the month.”
A: Griffin “Just want to reiterate what Glenn said. We had a bit of an issue getting it working. The full glorious load screen will arrive alongside our next patch on October 15th.”
Q: Can we get more info about the new Collector’s Vault?
A: Griffin “We’ll be sharing much more on the Collector’s Vault as its launch gets closer.
Here’s a bit of what you can expect:
– Exclusive variants will be exclusive for 1 year after they are released. Then they go to the Collector’s Vault.
– The Collector’s Vault is a special event, so even though formerly exclusive Variants will be offered there, there are limited shop slots and limited opportunities per season to enter the shop. So the best way to get the exact exclusive Variants you want will far and away remain be to acquire them on release.
– Pricing will come in 3 tiers. The lowest tier will be a bit more than a Super Rare Variant. The highest tier will be slightly more than a Spotlight Variant. The middle tier is between those.”
Q: Why haven’t we seen any more imbalance patches?
A: Glenn “Imbalance patches are a relatively high resource lift on the design team specifically, and we’re aiming those efforts at higher-intensity features like game modes right now. I am optimistic that we will eventually return to some version of what imbalance patches provided in the future.”
Q: Will Collector’s Vault be recurring, or is that still being debated?
A: Griffin “It’s all under consideration at this point but the idea is it comes at least once a season.”
Q: Why didn’t we get any Activate cards this season?
A: Glenn “We’ll have activate from time to time, but we didn’t prioritize it for Venom season and didn’t wind up with designs that wanted it, either. One element players might not consider there is that it would compound the development risks of a new mechanic to use it heavily over two seasons. If something goes wrong, it impacts two seasons instead of one.”
High Voltage Questions
Q: In High Voltage, does the random energy you get equal the same for both players, or different?
A: Griffin “It’s a random amount of energy that is the SAME for both players.”
Q: Why make limited time game modes instead of making them all readily avalible?
A: Glenn “SNAP has a core play mode around which the rest of the game revolves, and we’re not looking to change that. While game modes can be fun divergences, maintaining their appeal and matchmaking queues simultaneously alongside our core would be a difficult balancing act. It would also get crowded fast, leading to less game modes being developed. And yes, making game modes time-limited does give us more freedom to experiment with new and (hopefully) exciting rewards for them, as we did with Cassandra Nova.”
Q: Could we see a rotation of limited game modes like High Voltage each season?
A: Glenn “A regular frequency is already under consideration, but we also need to see how a game mode does with live play before locking it in for future seasons.”
Q: Is High Voltage replacing Deadpool’s Diner?
A: Daniela “Deadpool’s Diner will come back as previously stated. High Voltage is not replacing it, it’s another mode”
Q: Will there be rewards in High Voltage, and will you earn them in the same way as Deadpool’s Diner?
A: Glenn “There will be rewards, you can see a bit of what that looks like in the preview image. High Voltage and Diner are differently structured modes, but we were fairly happy with the first run of Diner and look forward to the next.”
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: Are adjustments being made to the shop? I keep seeing variants styles I don’t like.
A: Glenn “Yes we are working on this. We have a super talented data science team working on trying to make the shop smarter to better match each players preferred cards and art styles.There wont be a ‘light switch’ moment but it will continually get better over time.”
Q: Why does Agatha draw you an extra card at game start? Thanos and Quicksilver both start in your opening hand (and the text is the same: “Starts in your hand”), but they don’t draw extra cards.
A: Because Agatha makes decisions for you. You have to build a deck designed to mitigate this downside. Quicksilver is designed as a way for players to always have an option to play on curve, so his draw is intended. Thanos starts in hand to nerf the card, as well as make playing stones more meaningful since they target Thanos now.
Q: Because Thanos does not move if the effect of the space stone implies that he can, is this bug or poorly translated?
A: It is confusing wording that does leave interpretation that he can move himself. If I get a dev response to this I will update.
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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