Developer Update for the Week of September 6, 2023: Loki Edition (45+ Questions)!

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 why Spotlight Caches repeat old cards before showing new ones, lots of your Mobius questions, are the devs happy with the new Spider-Ham nerf, 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 of the new season Loki for All Time! If you haven’t seen what’s in store this season make sure to check that out first! Also, make sure to check out the new balance update. Many questions today refer to matters in the balance changes and the new cards.

Answers and questions may be slightly rephrased for more clarity and ease of reading. This weeks topics will be divided into Card Specific Questions, Other questions, and Mobius Questions.

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: Is there any update to fixing the bug with Mindscape not triggering The Collector?
A: KentErik “Still on the radar, but hasn’t been addressed yet!”

Q: Are there any plans to update Captain Marvel to trigger after Dracula discards?
A: KentErik “We have a few cards that all trigger ‘at the end of the game’. As it is right now, they all play by the same rules: they resolve in the order they were Revealed. We think this is a nice, clean and easy way to understand how the order of operations works. We know this question comes up a lot, but if we were to special case Captain Marvel, it would then open the door to more special cases, and can make it all very confusing when a card’s end of game effect actually happens.”

Q: Does Ravonna check original power or current power to discount?
A: Glenn “Current Power, including modifiers.”

Q: Will Loki create Evolved cards or Infinity Stones?
A: Glenn “No, he’ll use the composition of the deck from before those effects resolve.”

Q: Why does Loki create default cards with no border upgrades or flairs?
A: Glenn “We’ll make this QoL improvement in a future patch. Currently, Loki gathers the starting deck list in a way that “cleans” it, to avoid taking modifiers into the copies, but that also set the cards to the base variant.”

Q: Will more cards like Quicksilver and Domino be created? Is this a “not an if, but when” situation?
A: Glenn “Probably an if, leaning unlikely. Those cards serve some specific goals in helping new players build playable decks, and releasing new ones with competitive play goals would require balancing out their potential to homogenize gameplay with drawbacks or variance.”

Q: Can Loki copy an opponent’s Agatha?
A: Glenn “He can, the likelihood depends on how many cards he’s copying.”

Q: How does Loki choose a card to copy? I see instances of him copying a card after it is changed like a pig, Gamma Lab, or Klyntar, which obviously doesn’t start in their decks.
A: Glenn “The goal is for Loki to copy the cards as they were before the game began—essentially what their owner saw on the Collection screen. We’re aware there seems to be a bug with some transform effects overwriting his references. Because High Evo isn’t a transform, he isn’t affected by this bug.”

Q: Now that Snowguard gives you both the bird and bear, any chance that the bear’s trigger will be updated to be able to retrigger locations that are turn dependent?
A: Glenn “No, that’s not what the card was intended to do. We prefer keeping those turn-locked.”

Q: Was the Spider-Ham change meant to remove him from play? There isn’t much reason to play him now as he is much less appealing.
A: Glenn “As I’ve stated many times, we’re never trying to prevent cards from seeing play–just find healthier rates and use cases. In this case, the intent was to reduce his generic strength and the frustrating pressure he could put on cards like Apocalypse and Living Tribunal.”

Q: In response to the previous question and answer, do you think people will actually play this Spider-Ham and create a healthy play rate for him?
A: Glenn “I can’t see the future, but we felt he still had a place. If we’re wrong, we can adjust him via OTA now that his effect is no longer so damaging to archetypes we want to support.”

Q: Will High Evo ever get voice lines like Thanos or Galactus?
A: TheChrisAlan “Yes, this is something we’re working on but don’t have a specific timeline just yet!”

Q: Why does Snowguard’s hawk’s ability not remain active after the game ends like the text suggests?
A: Glenn “Hawk deactivates the location until the end of the next turn or until the end of the game, whichever happens first. Once you get to the end of the game, the location comes back, cards like Dracula and Captain Marvel do their thing, then the game scores the winner using all active locations.

We added the “(or the game)” text in an attempt to clarify the outcome for people who thought playing Snowguard on turn 6 would last “through” scoring. It’s been a mixed bag on that account, and I’m not sure we’ll keep the text or what we’ll change it to, if anything.”

Q: Is the team happy with Leech? Is he still considered a release valve?
A: Glenn “Yep! I’m happy with Leech’s current position.

When I approach release valves, the idea isn’t “I need X tool to make sure Y problem doesn’t get out of hand.” The goal is to create a wide range of tools, so that players can find what they need in the face of any problem I might intentionally–or, more importantly, unintentionally–create. That means similar tools that work slightly differently are quite common to employ, because they fit into different decks and address different issues better or worse. Ex: Echo, Rogue, and Enchantress.”

Mobius Questions

Variants

Mobius M. Mobius

Ongoing: Your Costs can’t be increased. Your opponent’s Costs can’t be reduced.

Series 4 Rare – Collection Level 486+ (Pool 4)

view card details Start a deck Decks with Mobius M. Mobius

Q: Does Loki permanently reduce costs, or does Mobius undo the decrease?
A: Glenn “Loki permanently reduces the cards, but Mobius will disable cost reductions regardless of how long they should last.”

Q: If I wave only on 5 with Mobius on the board, will She-hulk cost 4 or 2? Or does Mobius not play into this interaction and Wave trumps them?
A: Glenn “In the specific case described above, She-Hulk will cost 4. Her reduction will apply, taking her from 6 to 4, then Wave will attempt to apply and set her to 4, which she already costs–your Mobius doesn’t matter.

However, if you had passed with 5 Energy and your opponent had played Wave, She-Hulk’s Cost would be reduced to 1. Then when Wave tried to set that Cost to 4, Mobius would cut in and keep She-Hulk at 1.”

Q: If I Mr.Negative while an opponents Mobius is in play and then I draw Iron Man, will he be a 0/5 or a 5/0?
A: Glenn “He’ll be 5/5. Mobius doesn’t care about Iron Man’s Power, but will undo him being set to a lower cost.”

Q: If I control Mobius then play Mr.Negative and my opponent also plays Wave – If the next card I draw is an Iron Man will it be a 0/5 or a 4/5?
A: Glenn “0/5. Mister Negative applies his reduction before Wave, and when Wave tries to set to a higher value your Mobius will stop her.”

Q: If I play Ravonna on 3, my Iron Man (or any 0-1 power card) costs 4 now. Then, next turn, I play Mobius first, then Bast. Does Mobius “lock in” that reduced cost and now my Iron Man is a 4/3? Or does Iron Man return to 5 cost because his cost isn’t increasing, just returning back to 5, and because it was never reduced, just affected by an ongoing ability?
A: Glenn “Iron Man will return to 5-Cost because Ravonna’s effect is no longer being applied.”

Q: Will 2 opposing Morbius plays cancel each other out?
A: Glenn “Yep, Mobius vs. Mobius is a push, similar to Daredevil.”

Q: When you say 2 Mobius cancel out, do you mean that everything is always Base cost, or is it treated as if no Mobius exists and costs are affected how they would be normally?
A: Glenn “Base cost.”

Q: With Mobius + Wave, does this mean DeathWave is back? Wasn’t this deck too strong and was nerfed?
A: Glenn “The issue with Death Wave was never the power level of that deck. In fact, I would say its strength was vastly overestimated most of the time, though it put on a good show. The issue was Wave constraining future design space.

But even so, this doesn’t bring back the same deck. Even if you assume requiring Mobius + Wave is just as easy as only needing Wave (it’s not), you can’t take the same turns. Wave on turn 5 is a 4-Cost She-Hulk whether you have Mobius or not, and Death needs 8 destroyed cards to get to 0.”

Q: With Mobius having 2 distinct lines of text, was it considered to have him be 2 separate cards?
A: Glenn “We didn’t think either ability would make an exciting card all by itself–one might be all right, but the combination had much more appeal. We did start with just the “enemy cards can’t be reduced” bit.

Q: Let’s say that I am the only one with mobius on the board. I have she hulk in hand, is it possible by floating energy she never returns to 6 cost?
A: Glenn “No. Mobius manages the application of cost adjustments, and She-Hulk’s adjustment only lasts one turn.”

Q: Why did you decide to make Mobius interact with Wave like you mentioned?
A: Glenn “It wasn’t a decision, it was a given. You can rewire your house’s lights to ignore the switches, but why would you do that?

In fact, I’m not sure I would’ve created Mobius without Wave. I don’t really like making “tech cards” unless they also have cards to directly synergize with, such as using Echo to protect Wong or Armor to guard Attuma. Even if the use case isn’t common, it adds good texture to deckbuilding decisions.

One way Mobius + Wave differs from the cards you named is just that—they’re two cards. Drawing two specific cards happens less often than one, and is much easier to disrupt or plan around.

I’m not saying this combo isn’t impactful—I believe it is—but new cards are also supposed to have an impact.”

Q: Is there a chance of Mobius receiving any last minute nerfs before release or are you guys happy with his current statline? He seems a bit too strong for a card with a vanilla statline. Was he underperforming while you guy were testing him?
A: Glenn “I know we have had instances where a previewed card didn’t release with the same stats, but that was a communication error, not a balance adjustment. We don’t rebalance cards based on preview feedback—one day of live play is more informative than any social media posts about the card could ever be. We do our best during internal playtesting focus, and then we wait and see.

Mobius was a contentious card among some internally. I’m curious to see his impact live myself.”

Q: Why did you decide that Mobius can undo Mr Negative decks?
A: Glenn “I think ‘number go down = number decrease’ is an accessible heuristic. Learning exceptions like the way power-setting works in some other games is not. Just because players have internalized a weird rule for other CCGs doesn’t mean I want to make new CCG players do it for SNAP.”

Other Questions

Q: Does the Fast Forward feature get selected by the devs as to what gets sped up? Some events don’t Fast Forward that seem like they should.
A: KentErik “The game looks ahead to see how many ‘effects are in the queue’. There’s some instances where we would expect it to kick-in, but it doesn’t, and to us that’s a bug. It’s on our radar to get addressed.”

Q: Will Beta Infinite rewards like the Hydra cardback be avaliable for purchase?
A: Nicki Broderick “We haven’t released the ranked/infinite rewards from Beta yet, but we didn’t want plans for that to hold up getting out the season pass content! Re-releasing season pass content was more straight forward – but we want to make sure the beta ranked rewards feel good for players to earn now, and not just buy (since players worked hard to earn them in beta). We’re still exploring a few ideas to make this feel fun/fair for everyone.”

Q: Is long-press to open a Spotlight cache coming soon?
A: Glenn “Yes, it’s coming.”

Q: Why are we getting Spotlight Cache repeats instead of new cards like Stegron or Howard?
A: Stephen “One of the main reasons for duplicates right now is availability of variants for cards that can go into the spotlight cache.  If we do not have a spotlight variant for that card ready then we have to hold it until one is available.  We are building out our variant pipeline further to get in front of the needs to keep the spotlight cache fresh and without undo gaps between highlighting specific characters.”

Q: Now that some time has passed it seems like the bounce archetype is dead. Does your internal data suggest the same and do you think the bounce nerfs where a bit too heavy handed?
A: Glenn “Bounce’s win percentage didn’t suffer a ton in the wake of the nerfs, though its popularity dipped a lot. This is a common phenomenon after a balance change.

The largest impact to its performance came about a week ago as players began using Wave a lot more, which combined with the nerds weakening t5 Hit-Monkey had a big impact.

Does that mean we consider the nerfs heavy-handed, or wrong? No, because things are constantly in flux and we adapt in suit. If the metagame is strong against Bounce for too long, we can buff it. It’s the same thing we did for Shuri with reverting some of Red Skull’s dings a while ago.”

Q: Will Mirror Dimension ever match Legion in the way he copies Flooded?
A: Glenn “We plan to adjust Mirror Dimension to match Legion, but we’re also looking into how this affects stuff like Sakaar so it’s a multi-layered issue.”

Q: What makes a card eligible for an OTA adjustment over others? We saw a nerf to Captain Marvel, but not to Silk or Iron Lad.
A: Glenn “The TL;DR is that players are great at identifying when they’re not enjoying an experience, but there are a lot of variables they may not observe or weigh. Combine that with the necessary temporal delay between fixes, and you’ll always have some dissonance.

We didn’t nerf Silk because two cards in that deck were already getting nerfs based on their overall performance being way too high—Captain Marvel and Legion—and we prefer not to over-nerf, especially cards we think are fair and cool, like Silk.

It’s easy to look at Silk, a card with a very high win percentage, and assume it needs to be nerfed, but that win% is a product of its play. For example, Sauron was the top card in the game when Shuri was hyper-dominant; Shuri-Sauron wasn’t even the best Shuri deck, but it was the only real Sauron deck while there were a lot of worse Shuri decks dragging her numbers down. Did Sauron need a nerf? Obviously not.”

Q: Now that Spotlight Caches have been out for a while, how does the team feel about them? Did they achieve their goals? Are there things they failed at? Are any changes on the horizon?
A: Stephen “One of the primary reasons we made the change to spotlight caches was to increase the play rates of new cards and non-big bad series 4/5 cards.  This has been a huge success for almost every new card, some older cards, and caused cards like Legion to really take off which may have been passed on in the old system.

We have a number of presentation improvements planned for spotlight cache including safeguarding against accidental opens, cooler opening animation, and a new 3D asset for the cache itself.  We are also making it easier to preview the spotlight variants, easier to see what you have collected that week, and easier to understand how much CL is left between caches.

We are always looking at feedback and the data and weighing the best options for the community and the game.  Spotlights are still something we are watching closely and will continue to watch.”

Q: Will there be any more cardbacks with the Snap logo?
A: Stephen “We have no plans for new card backs with the logo currently.  We will continue releasing new card backs every season with awesome art as the focus!”

Q: Will cards with the Snap logo be re-released without the logo?
A: Stephen “No plans to revisit launched card backs but I’m sure we will do more cool space themed ones in the future.”

Q: You mentioned Mobius was somewhat contentious internally with the team. Has other cards experienced the same thing?
A: Glenn “Well, if everyone thought a card would be low-impact, we avoid making it 🙂 So whenever there’s worry, we meet to discuss why there’s a concern and what we could do to relieve it. It’s the nature of the biz that you’ll miss high and low, but overall I’m happy with our hit rate, and we continue to learn from misses.”

Q: Why is the Loki season a month before Season 2 of the show premieres?
A: Stephen “We had it planned for September before they announced the release date for the season.  We basically were trying to guess when the season would launch.  We couldn’t move it once they announced October so decided to have it be a build up to season 2 instead of out the same month.

As a general rule though we do try to hit the same month as big MCU beats whenever we can.”

Q: Will we also see a music change in matches?
A: Glenn “We’re experimenting with music changes this season, and more experiments may follow as feedback and resourcing allows.”

Q: Are the current Infinity rankings by server region? Or is the ranking including all servers?
A: Glenn “The standing is global. We’re combining data from every region to calculate that value.”

Q: Is Infinity ranking retroactive?
A: Glenn “Your SNAP Points, which determine your standing on the Infinite leaderboard, use past seasonal data to calculate their value, in addition to the results of your most recent games.”

Q: Do you have a formula to how Snap points work, or is more similar to ELO in chess?
A: Glenn “We have our own formula, but it’s similar to ELO in that you get more points/lose less points when playing opponents rated much higher, and vice versa for lower.

Today, dropping on the leaderboard after a game was more common, because players with strong SNAP Points were likely making Infinite rank during your games and jumping ahead.”

Q: Will there ever be a place to view your MMR?
A: Glenn “Your SNAP Points post-Infinite are essentially a player-facing analog for MMR.”

Q: Is it ever too soon to nerf a card? With OTA updates, some cards seem to get very meta very quick.
A: Glenn “I like to try and wait at least two full weeks, though I might start thinking about the options sooner. One week to let the deck “mature” and be optimized, and another to let people react to it. That doesn’t mean we’ll always take action at 2 weeks, just that we avoid doing it any faster.”

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: Will we see an increase in the number of avaliable deck slots?
A: Daniela “Not at this time, we’re listening to feedback though”

Q: Can we get expanded search and filter options for collections?
A: Ali “We definitely want to improve search, sort, and filter in the future! Being able to search variants and artists is something I would like as well 🙂”

Q: Is there a Cost requirement for Big Bads, or can they be 1-3 cost?
A: Glenn “There’s no Energy requirement. It’s just a function of design tendencies that effects splashy and impactful enough to be Big Bads will often merit higher-cost cards.”

Q: Why is Kang a Big Bad if his effect is nowhere near as powerful as the other cards?
A: Glenn “Our goals for Big Bads don’t require them to create or contribute to top decks in the metagame. Big Bads strive to fulfill the “fantasy” of their character, and our priorities are making that exciting to see and novel to play with. It’s just a natural consequence of those goals that a Big Bad often creates or complements a competitive deck, and we consider that a nice bonus for players who enjoy the card.”

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!