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 Jim Hammond Human Torch, the latest patch notes (with a Kang rework), and the return of Deadpool’s Diner! 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 Jim Hammond 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: Do you think Vision is in an awkward place with so many cards that can move around without being 5 Cost?
A: Glenn “At 5/8, Vision was a pretty strong card for quite a while. 5-Cost cards in general see a lot of competition, because decks can’t really run a lot of them and plan to play them ‘honestly’, so even being among the best generic options isn’t often good enough relative to synergy-laden cards like Sera, Blink, MODOK, etc. and a lot of fair competition from Legion, Cannonball, and now Ghost Rider”]. Plus, many of the things he was best at, like contesting two locations or an inaccessible one, many decks are better at now.
We’ve got some ideas here, but they’re a little longer-ranged. I look forward to talking more about them!”
Q: Just like Invisible Woman FS, Jocasta is being released at the final week of the season. Is it a coincidence or intentional?
Would not it overshadow the next season?
A: Glenn “Like Invisible Woman, Jocasta is a card that has synergy with other cards releasing during the season. When that’s the case, we generally prefer to aim them last to maximize the amount of synergy available so they can be enjoyed as soon as they release.
This was especially relevant for these two cards, since both of their synergy pools were much smaller prior to the new content.
The end of the month may also be less exciting for some players, as they finish with their Infinite climbs, LTGMs, and might not be Infinity Conquest lovers. So having an exciting card ensures there’s something that matters going on for everyone.
There is an argument that the other cards might release a little weaker as a result of this practice, which is sensible. But a tradeoff is that some of those newer cards get to live in a unique metagame that might never exist again otherwise, while they wait for Invisible Woman/Jocasta to release.”
Q: According to Deadpool’s Diner notes, the last reward of the track is an “InHyuk Lee Foil Variant (1)” Does this mean you are putting out a new cosmetic item called Foil Variants?
A: Griffn “Not a new cosmetic category. That’s just the name of the Variant.”
Q: Does Kang pick variants based on Cost first, then an ability second?
A: Glenn “Kang generates the full list, then picks the card.”
Q: Can Kang can now be randomly generated by the likes of Arishem, Agent 13, etc?
A: Glenn “Yep!”
Q: With Kang now released, what were your favorite versions of Kang that got scrapped?
A: Glenn “If I’d liked any of them, we’d have released them instead 🙂 There were a variety of things on the whiteboard, we only even wound up playing with a handful of them because many of them ran into problems fast. Kang’s character thematics are just uniquely challenging, plus we wanted to make the VFX useful.”
Q: If I discard Agatha, Ghost Rider, and Infinaut and revive them all with Hela, why does Hela and Ghost Rider not guarantee both 6-Cost cards are returned? My match pulled an Agatha from Ghost Rider, but Infinaut wasn’t returned as well.
A: Glenn “Hela works by choosing all of her targets at once, then reanimating them one at a time. So what happened here was that Hela chose Agatha, and so did Ghost Rider.
I get the outcome not being desirable. I’ll put on our list whether we can review a way for Hela to set the list of available options, then choose and reanimate as an individual action for each Cost.”
Q: Do you have any plans to maybe guarantee one of the Kang variants that gets generated to be your primary variant you started with?
A: Glenn “It’s a good idea, I’ll look into it.”
Q: So Arishem won’t generate duplicates, does Kang follow this same logic? Thanks”
A: Glenn “Correct”
Q: My Kang had the same text as a base card in my deck. How is that possible if Kang variants can’t be duplicates?
A: Glenn “Kang’s won’t dupe each other, but they can dupe cards in your deck. This is pretty different from Arishem, because Kang usually has a different Cost and Power than those cards.”
Q: Did the team try to tinker with Kang’s old ability to make it usable?
A: Glenn “Yes, we considered a variety of things. Part of the problem is that the effect is *very* disruptive, and can be very frustrating–similar to the original Magik’s ability to disrupt endgame expectations by surprise. Making such an ability stronger is easy–making it fun to be strong is hard. Beyond the fundamental gameplay concerns we had, the card’s propensity for ongoing bugs was a very real cost as well.
Q: Is there any possibility we see a card like the old Kang in the future?
A: Glenn “Pretty unlikely. Not only because the above problems would still exist, but also because it wouldn’t be ethical to sell an effect close to something we added and then removed from the game.”
Q: Is there any way to improve decks that use Arishem, Thanos, Agamotto, or Kang to make them more consistent? Having a worse draw makes it harder to use these cards.
A: Glenn “Part of the balance of giving these kinds of cards such strength is the reduced likelihood in drawing them. Agamotto’s Temporal Manipulation is a good example of a card we’d never make without dilution–most of Thanos’s Stones were similarly pushed for a long time, and in many cases that proved still too strong.
I’m sure we’ll continue to find occasional spots to do interesting things like Eitri, but in answer to your question we don’t consider it a problem–it’s a challenge we’ve issued our players.”
Q: Do you have a card that you have sights on for the next “Kang style” rework? If so, can you tease who it is?
A: Glenn “I do have one specific card I’ve been debating changing for about a year. As for a tease… the character is not in the MCU. The MCU is the canon Marvel Cinematic Universe. Marvel has stated it to include What If? but not X-Men ’97, at least to the best of my knowledge.”
Q: Is it intended that the opponent can see Kang’s opening animation, despite Arishem not doing the same?
A: Glenn “Yes. We’ve been improving VFX elements to let us do something for cards that the opponent could “figure out” by checking your profile anyway, and intend to update past cards when we can.”
Q: Is a Namor adjustment on your radar?
A: Glenn “We’ve discussed it, but one thing that holds us back is he is a load-bearing tutorial element and those aren’t very easy to change out.”
Q: What “tutorial element” does Namor teach exactly?
A: Glenn “There are a handful of hardcoded games in the early experience—Namor’s most memorable is the one where he teaches the player how to retreat.”
Q: Is there another card that causes constant maintenance like Kang did?
A: Glenn “Mysterio’s the only other card on his level.”
Q: When does Air Walker release into Snap Packs? It’s a bit confusing when these kind of cards are released.
A: Griffin “Typically, LTGM reward Cards hit their respective Snap Packs 30 days after they first arrive.
So Airwalker hits Snap Packs on Sunday the 21st of Sept.”
Q: On a scale of 1 to 10, how excited is the QA team that Kang doesn’t have to be constantly tested anymore?
A: Addison “10. Any change that removes a templated test case is very exciting!”
Q: Why is Leech’s ability broken when a card like Nightmare gives it to another card, or Kang generates it?
A: Glenn “The reason this is happening is a small error in Leech’s behavior.
Cards have numerical attributes as constants for some of their abilities—for example, Killmonger and Cull Obsidian have 1, Silver Surfer has 3, Leech has 6.
Normally, when we write behaviors, they are hardcoded to look for the right numbers. So Silver Surfer’s behavior doesn’t ask ‘what number am I buffing?’—it asks ‘What number does Silver Surfer buff?’ This way, even if someone else has Silver Surfer’s ability, it uses the right number. Leech was accidentally written to look for the number of the card using the effect instead. That means when a card already has a numerical constant and copies Leech’s ability, it uses the wrong number.
I hadn’t heard of the Cull Obsidian-Leech bug with Nightmare personally; if I had, we’d have fixed it prior to Kang. But this one will get corrected shortly.”
Other Questions
Q: Do you face development limitations because certain designs are patented?
A: Glenn “None that I’ve ever encountered. Howard the Duck even taps! (Not really, but it did give me a chuckle)”
Q: Does nerfing a bunch if tech cards all at once make it harder to determine if each change was the best change? Would it not be better to change them one by one?
A: Glenn “We’re not trying to develop a perfect version of each card that never changes. We’re using balance updates to refresh environments and experiences. That reduces the relevance of ‘clouding’ experiments, because we’re looking a lot more at the potential directions a change might move gameplay than for hyper-specific results.
That said, many of these cards didn’t overlap one another in targets, so we can fairly cleanly look at the decks each most benefited/impacted beforehand to get an idea of the potential disruption.”
Q: How would the team describe the current OTA in contrast to previous Imbalance Patches?
A: Glenn “Not especially different beyond what it targets and the creative theme. It also has more potential to create actual change than those did, but still may not have any.”
Q: Shaking the meta for everyone temporarily feels like whiplash for a lot of players, is this something you considered, and will you be doing it again?
A: Glenn “Yes, it was a consideration, but there’s value in trying new things. We won’t know whether we’d ever do it again until we see how it went this time.”
Q: Did you intend to make the Deadpool’s Diner shop so generous? Getting every reward in the shop seems very obtainable.
A: Griffin “The pricing for the whole shop was indeed intentional but keep in mind that the Daily Rotating Shop has bonus items every day.”
Q: Is it possible for Variants to appear in the Diner rotating shop?
A: Griffin “No Variants will pop-up in the Daily Shop.”
Q: The patch notes highlight “a new set of features for players returning to Snap after having been away for a while”. What constitutes “a while”? Or in other words, how long does a returning player have to have been away to access those features?
A: Griffin “To prevent abuse and to retain a clean set of data, we’re not going to be stating the exact triggers for the Returning Player Experience to start.
However, we can say that it’ll appear for players who haven’t logged in to the game for at least two months (with wiggle room).”
Q: The game used to let you delay updating for a week, but now it forces you after 2 days. Was this an intended change?
A: Griffn “This was changed. The primary reason being that having two separate versions of the game causes lots of issues, especially when we have things like Deadpool’s Diner dropping 48 hours after a patch and that new patch contains necessary updates for the game mode.
Q: Is the team aware that the web shop logs players out every few days? It’s very annoying to log in over and over.
A: Griffin “Yes, the Web Shop team is aware and continuing to work on bugs like these. Agreed that it’s quite annoying. Apologies!”
Q: For players who are collection complete Series 4, will you get a token equivalent reward if you open the Series 4 Snap Pack login reward?
A: Griffin “Yep! You’ll get the value of the Pack for the card PLUS the two bonus goodie rolls.”
Q: Does the Nacho “3 snap” mission in DPD only refresh after a match? So you can’t carry over snaps to progress the next batch of 3?
A: Glenn “Yes. The Nacho Missions refresh AFTER a match has ended. This is a current technical limitation of the mission system.”
Q: Why are Conquest shop prices higher this season? (Update to previously answered question)
A: Griffin “Update: After reports came in at the launch of this season that Conquest Medal Shop prices were different than normal, I reached out to the team in charge for an answer.
They checked our internal documentation on current and previous Medal Shop rewards and it showed that September’s pricing matched that of previous 5 week seasons like June and April. They passed that info along to me and I then passed it along on Discord here.
Players then provided some screenshot and video from back in June (and April) showing us that our internal numbers did NOT match what was live. The team then began to investigate the cause of the misalignment.
After an investigation, it seems that back in December of 2024 that changes were planned to be implemented that would redistribute the Medal Shop rewards whenever a 5 week season occurred. While planned internally in our documentation, these changes never made it to the game itself. When implementing this season, new internal processes added the documented changes to the game files under the assumption those were the default values.
We know that these inconsistencies have been frustrating, and we truly appreciate players bringing them to our attention. For this current season, we don’t plan to make adjustments mid-season. Going forward, our plan is to reevaluate our processes and communication to ensure pricing in future seasons are more consistent. Players can expect clearer and more stable experience between conquest seasons, and any changes are communicated proactively, not reactively.”
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: End of Turn cards that trigger in hand (Evolved Hulk, Red Hulk, Galactus First Steps) do not trigger a second time when Invisible Woman First Steps is activated. Is this intended?
A: Glenn “Yes. The default expectation we aim to set is that effects apply to revealed cards in play unless they say otherwise, or wouldn’t work otherwise (like She-Hulk).”
Q: Are there any plans for players to be able to “control” their boosters?
A: SD announced they are working on “booster packs” a few months ago, which would let you redeem a pack for character-specific boosters. No eta has been given for the release though.
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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