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 Danger and 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 Danger 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!
If you have a favorite variants and want to share it with the community, check out our new community variants highlights! Submit your own to be featured in the next edition!
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: Why doesn’t White Queen give any stat buffs even though Mirage does? Is it because WQ is a series 1 card?
A: Glenn “Series 1 is part of it, yes. The other aspect is that Mirage was designed during a time when the lowest-Cost card in a player’s hand could be quite weak or even useless from one deck to another, so we needed an incentive. White Queen’s incentives are a) a baseline stronger card and b) more meaningful information about the endgame.
We could probably change Mirage now, but Mirage hasn’t been a super-popular card anyway so I’m reluctant to advocate for nerfing her.”
Q: Is it intended that Howard the Duck can’t see the new text of Kang while previewing your top card?
A: Glenn “Certainly a bug, not even really sure how that would happen. I’ll flag it.”
Q: Why doesn’t Sparky have his animation anymore?
A: Glenn “We had a game-breaking bug at the start of the season related to an oddity in Sparky. Rest assured, it shall return.”
Q: With so many strong 2-Cost cards, have you considered moving Colossus to a different Cost so has different utility for decks?
A: Glenn “Yes—I’d specifically like to move him to 5/10, along with a few other shifts. However, as a 2-Cost Ongoing card he fills an important role in the new user deckbuilding experience, and any change there has a bit of a domino effect requiring other changes.”
Q: Why does Killmonger need to target both player’s cards? Why not just one or the other?
A: Glenn “Without interacting with enemy cards, his sole use case would be a Destroy synergy card. While that is a viable design—there are many other such cards—Snap also needs a release valve against swarming the game with strong 1-Cost cards. They have little to no opportunity Cost, and Elektra isn’t sufficient counterplay against that strategy—she’s much stronger against cards like Sunspot.
Current Killmonger affects just one location of cards, and we’ve seen a fairly significant surge in the strength and popularity of decks leaning on lots of 1-Costs, demonstrating this role against ‘wide’ 1-Costs to be important. Could it be weaker, or filled by multiple cards? Maybe, but Killmonger is also positioned as a card players get early on to fill both roles in their collections, so we’d have to adjust for that too.”
Q: With Negasonic remaining at 4-Cost, could Fenris return to a 2-Cost now?
A: Glenn “Negasonic wasn’t a huge contributor to the strength of Fenris Wolf, though she was meaningful. I think time has shown that the ceiling of Fenris’s strength is more appropriate for a 3-Cost card.”
Q: Have you considered reworking Valkyrie to a more usable state?
A: Glenn “We like Valkyrie’s design, but she doesn’t have flexible dials—she’s played too strong at 4/3, and 5/4+ has some other weirdness. I imagine we may try some things in the future, but we wouldn’t want to substantially rework her ability.”
Q: Why does Invisible Woman FS have a global effect, unlike Wong or Jocasta
A: Glenn “Generally, each instance of an end of turn effect is weaker than an On Reveal or Activate ability, so the effect needed to be more flexible and generous to hit the right strength target. There’s also some cube-based ramifications that tie into that.”
Other Questions
Q: With the successful reboot of Deadpool’s Diner, did you ever consider giving up on the mode entirely?
A: Glenn “No, we never considered giving up on it. V1 is still one of our most popular and effective game modes, plus the quality and sheer number of art assets deserve a long-term home. There was clearly plenty to work with, and game design is iteration.
While tons of people worked on the mode and share in pieces of what you see today, I’d like to give a shout-out to feature designer Jozie Crump, as this was the first major feature for which she was the product owner during development. You’re already familiar with some of Jozie’s work, as she’s worked on improving and maintaining Alliances for a while now. Kudos!”
Q: Are the Diner locations exclusive to the event, or could we see any versions of them added to the base game?
A: Glenn “They’re event exclusives, though they might inspire future work.”
Q: With more and more cards having an overlap between variants and new cards, such as the upcoming Arch Angel card and Angel’s Variant, is there any chance variants get reassigned to new cards?
A: Glenn “We intend to continue relying on distinctive logos for this purpose. Removing variants players have acquired for existing card content is a very serious invasion of players’ collections. We’ve avoided doing it except for some fairly extreme circumstances. I don’t anticipate just visual character clarity meeting that bar, especially given how far ‘normal’ variants can deviate from the baseline character anyway.
It’s true that our approach to variants might have been different earlier on if we’d foreseen some of the directions we expected to take our characters. But I’d fairly strongly oppose that reason being used to take away variants.”
Q: Is there a reason why Diner says “retreat” instead of “forfeit” since you gain nothing by leaving?
A: Glenn “I’m not sure; maybe an oversight.”
Q: Conquest is now the only non-ladder mode that cares about strategic retreats. Will future limited time modes focus more on using retreats?
A: Glenn “Conquest also gives players reasons to retreat, but point taken. As for the question, maybe? I’m not convinced retreating is an important part of Snap’s fun. This version of DPD is kind of exploring a thesis that snapping is fun, but retreating isn’t, and solving for what that might look like.
Q: Would you make an effect that only destroys 1 location? Or does that put too much focus on a tie-breaker?
A: Glenn “We might come up with more reasons to do this, but generally you nailed it—games being ‘about’ the tiebreaker is kind of lame.
I say ‘more’ because Cancun was in similar space, but I’m not sure it’s worth exploring further.”
Q: Are you prepping for an Avengers Doomsday season?
A: Glenn “We work about 6-7 months ahead on seasons, so not yet.”
Q: Snap’s most popular modes are focusing on new ways of making a snap meaningful. Will future modes continue to mix this space up?
A: Glenn “Yes, it’s a consideration for sure. One reason we’ve held back is that we needed to make some revisions to the implementation of the mechanic to increase its flexibility.”
Q: Will future limited time modes be more competitive than casual like Diner?
A: Glenn “We have ranked and Conquest as constantly available modes that push competitive play, and Sanctum Shwowdown is also in that spectrum. That’s among the reasons we lean towards more casual gameplay in our LTGMs. As we saw with Diner previously, ‘sweat-heavy’ LTGMs lack as much support from the broader audience.”
Q: What took so long to revamp Diner into its current form? Did it take longer than expected, or did you shelf it for a while before working on it?
A: Glenn “We built multiple game modes between then and now, in addition to other feature work. We have finite resources and schedule them based on need and other priorities, and Diner was deprioritized given how many promising things we had in the hopper, like Grand Arena, as well as leads to own the feature.
We didn’t add any time; honestly I we probably gave Diner slightly too little time this run, but I’m glad it has largely worked out. We never discussed the possibility of ‘shelving’ Diner, I don’t think that was a realistic outcome. We might’ve needed to take another try, but there’s enough good there that I felt confident it would work out.”
Q: Would it be possible within the current code of the game to have a finish for a card that has color isolation (think of the Sin City movie) where the player can choose which color is highlighted?
A: Glenn “As one of our engineering leads often says, ‘everything is possible, it just depends how much time you want to spend on it.’ The level of agency you’re describing sounds like a huge ask, but I think a finish that’s basically ‘ink except for red’ and so on for other colors might be doable.”
Q: Was it intentional for players to so easily get Bubs and basically stay in Hell Burger all event? Will all modes be this way going forwaed?
A: Griffin “All of DPD this run is fully intentional. As we said a few months ago, our goal for LTGMs is to have a variability of rewards. Some events will be more focused on free-to-play rewards while others may include other rewards that would require increased engagement or purchasing to supplement.
As the event is still running [at the time of sharing this], the team hasn’t done a full post-mortem of DPD and the data. While all the tuning was intentional and there aren’t any unintended errors, that doesn’t mean future DPD won’t be a little different. Just like all LTGMs, we’ll continue to iterate as we go.
Q: Will there ever be anything from Disney’s theme parks in Marvel Snap? Like having the Avengers Campus as a location or variants based on it?
A: Glenn “Probably not? There are additional complications in representing real-world places and properties not explicit to our license. Not to say we couldn’t do a generic ‘Avengers Theme Park’ location or similar, though.”
Q: What is the timing difference between “End of Turn” and “After the Turn”?
A: Glenn “These timings are identical; we just use different words when specifying a specific turn, rather than saying ‘End of Turn 3:’ since that looks a little weird. And as with all effects that share timing triggers, locations go before cards.”
Q: The patch notes mentioned distressed borders would be added to the border shop, but I haven’t seen any. Did that part get canceled?
A: Griffin “We’re looking into it right now. Stay tuned.”
Q: Did the team get to play Diner at all? If so, what were your thoughts?
A: Glenn “We playtested internally before release, and of course many of us played it live too. Overall, I’m personally happy with the updates to the gameplay and thought it was more enjoyable without losing out on the ‘big bubs’ fun of the original.”
Q: Glenn mentioned Diner retained “big bubs” fun, but it felt to me like the “big” aspect was a lot smaller this time. Did the team make the stakes too small?
A: Glenn “I definitely agree that it was reduced, but felt we had enough of it still there. Perhaps we’ll find some tweaks to strike an even better balance.
However, adjusting the risk factor was a conscious decision, as while the heavy wagering was part of the fun, we didn’t want the system to punish players so harshly for engaging in that fun. The ‘correct’ strategy with previous Deadpool’s Diner involved a lot of ‘bubroll management’ that players didn’t find nearly as enjoyable as playing for large stakes, so we shifted the system to reward snapping more than playing conservatively.”
Q: Cards like the guardians sometimes share the same abilities at different costs. Will we see this concept in new cards ever?
A: Glenn “Generally, no. We release new cards as S5/S4, and cards bearing such similarity to existing cards aren’t as appealing in exchange for tokens. The other kind of ‘token’ cards like the Arrows are a little different, since we can more significantly change the context of those cards or lend new context to old designs, the way Uncle Ben does for Spider-Man.”
Q: I have encountered players that play “poorly” at the start of a game to mimic a bot (with their name and avatar too) in order to get you to Snap and let your guard down. Do you consider this a fair strategy?
A: Glenn “From my perspective, this behavior is suspected by humans waaay more often than actually performed by humans. People play the game in a large variety of ways—perhaps the play you considered poor wasn’t, or perhaps the perfect counters were just more poor plays that happened to work out. I’m not particularly interested in judging or regulating the agency of players within their games, that freedom is core to most oppositional games but especially CCGs.”
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: You mentioned no longer sharing roadmaps because things change so quickly and ideas get discarded. However, we have a case where the community loved an idea that ended up “saving” the project, like Character Mastery. Wouldn’t sharing these ideas be helpful so players can choose and support one the team chose to leave aside?
A: Glenn “While you’ve summarized the issues a bit briefly, you’re right that there were pros to our previous practice. A practice we were initially excited about! But the experience proved mixed. Bear in mind we still intend to communicate about upcoming features and work. We’ve just shifted how often and openly we approach it.”
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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