Table of Contents
Welcome back to this week’s Developer Update! This week’s edition comes after the launch of a bunch of new cards and the start of the newest season! If you don’t know if Moira X is worth Tokens or Snap Packs, 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: Why does Mercury have the ability to move?
A: Glenn “A card that just prevents movement would be very weak and unexciting. We debated a few things, but the ability that best suited her creatively and as release valve against move combo was the ability to move herself. You don’t always know on turn 2 where she might need to be.”
Q: Why hasn’t Dracula been updated to ignore skills and only discard characters?
A: Glenn “We’re being careful with these changes, because they aren’t free. As we add skills to the game, especially skills that add Power, being able to ‘force’ what should be a random selection can defeat the purpose of the card.
For example, imagine a world where a Dracula deck has 8 skills in it. Now you no longer need to play discard effects or dump a bunch of 1-Cost cards to target Infinaut—just play your characters and Dracula ignores the skills left over in your hand to discard your Infinaut. That mismatches the original design intent for Dracula and his role in the game, maybe even imbalances him. Should skills existing require Dracula to be a 5-Cost card, or should avoiding/playing skills be a deckbuilding burden for Dracula? These are the kinds of questions we’d rather answer over time than change a bunch of cards in one fell swoop for negligible benefits.”
Q: Is Moira X supposed to show your opponent what your opening hand was?
A: Glenn “That would be unintentional, but I’ve flagged it for review”
Q: When you destroy Moira X, you get a copy of the 0 cost dormammu spell that is in your hand at the start of the game. Is this intentional?
A: Glenn “Yep”
Q: Moira X and “The Sacred Timeline” appear to have the same effect, but the phrasing is different (“opening hand” vs “starting hand”). Do they share the same result, and if so, why use different wording?
A: Glenn “Yes, they’re the same. Just an oversight in final text review, we’ll get them lined up”
Q: Do Mystique and Absorbing Man make it difficult to design cards with multiple abilities?
A: Glenn “Not really, it’s always been our default to do one ability so those cards were quite rare anyway.”
Q: Is there any interest in giving Agent 13 or Maria Hill activate text?
A: Glenn “I’m sure some activate card will add cards to a player’s hand, but I don’t expect either of those to change.”
Q: What are the least fun cards to face in Snap?
A: Glenn “The historic winner has to be Leech–he’s ruined a few metagames, and he’s actually one of our weakest and least popular cards right now, so odds are neither side is having fun with him. On the math side, maybe Baron Mordo could give him some competition today.
As for me personally? Iceman has always hit that sweet spot of being annoying and *just* playable enough.”
Other Questions
Q: Why run 2 limited time modes in a season again when previous sentiment was negative?
A: Glenn “There were positive and negative things observed about running two LTGMs in one season, and we’re iterating on them in pursuit of improvements to see what an optimized mix can look like. That’s live service game design.”
Q: Why don’t you show players the odds of different locations appearing in a match?
A: Glenn “Knowing the likelihood that a given location might show up isn’t really something a player can actively capitalize on through gameplay. As Snap is built to be as accessible as possible, we prioritize avoiding information that would be distracting more often than useful or enjoyable.”
Q: Do you have plans to bring back High Voltage: Overdrive, or is it canceled after backlash?
A: Glenn “As we’ve shown with Deadpool’s Diner, we don’t intend to sunset any game modes at this time. It’s just a matter of scheduling iteration and resources to improve them.”
Q: With a slow shift of card baseline Power (1/3, 2/4, 3/5, 4/7), why dont you just update lots of under-used cards to that stat baseline all at once?
A: Glenn “We prefer to pull them up piecemeal via OTA, rather than in one fell swoop, because the latter would be very disruptive and likely wind up creating a ton of second-order balance adjustments to account for. We also have some other stuff in the works that might matter, so the steadier approach lets us account for that.”
Q: Do you have data to support which turn is the best to Snap on?
A: Glenn “Snapping accurately is more important than timing it, but assuming you’re snapping accurately then it’s more profitable to do it early.
Don’t really have any data demonstrating that, since we don’t track game states in a way that would ascertain whether a snap was accurate or not. But it’s sensible that snapping when your opponent has the least information in a spot where you should would pay the most cubes.”
Q: Despite three cards in the Cannonball deck getting nerfed, its popularity remains quite high. On the other hand, the EOT deck’s usage seems to have dropped significantly after its first nerf. Does the data support this observation?
A: Glenn “We generally want at least a full week of data after an update to evaluate. Historically, less than that has failed to provide a reliable picture.”
Q: Will we see any new 0-Cost cards added?
A: Glenn “Maybe, but not especially likely.”
Q: Have prices in the webshop changed this season for some players?
A: Griffin “Region-specific pricing adjustments due to foreign exchange rate fluctuations and regional discrepancies will happen time to time. These evaluations typically happen to account for variances in economic conditions across multiple regions.”
Q: Why have some prices in the Conquest shop gone up, like the PMV reward?
A: Griffin “When seasons are 5 weeks long, the Medal Shop rewards have an increased price to match the extra time. The Charm values of the Conquest Medal Shop rewards this month match that of the rewards from our previous 5 week season back in June.”
Q: I looked back at a screenshot from the June (5 week) season, and the Conquest shop is not the same prices as now. Did you mean the total value was the same, or was this incorrect information?
A: Griffin “I’ll dive deeper to verify the values from back in June and get back to you all on this.”
Q: Would you guys ever make a 6-Cost activate card?
A: Glenn “Probably not, unless it incorporated some kind of Cost reduction effect.”
Q: What is the range of CL a player could face on ranked?
A: Glenn “It’s not based on a fixed range. The factors that we matchmake on start within a narrow set of given ranges, then expand those ranges algorithmically the longer it takes to matchmake. CL just expands more slowly than MMR, creating that bias.”
Q: When it comes to crossovers, Snap has showcased MCU, Rivals, and X-Men 97′. Is existing crossovers like Marvel vs Capcom a potential for Snap?
A: Glenn “There’s a different line between Marvel properties and non-Marvel ones; even all Marvel properties are not equally accessible. As I’ve said before, you shouldn’t expect to see non-Marvel properties in Marvel Snap.”
Q: Is there a reason why some locations trigger immediately (Sokovia) and others only trigger when you play a card on it (Vormir)?
A: Glenn “Certainly. Broadly, it’s a balance of simplicity and the potential for interesting gameplay. For example, consider Hotel Inferno:
After you play a card here this turn, banish the top card of your opponent’s deck.
This effect isn’t very impactful to most games–players often don’t draw their decks, so the banished card could’ve just been on the bottom anyway. The location offers each player the option of forgoing where they might prefer to play in exchange for the info, in contrast to Pet Mansion which just forces it for nothing. While these can play similarly, they’re different enough that games featuring either don’t feel repetitive. Otto's Lab and Sakaar also share such similarities, with just enough differences.
Sokovia’s not the same–making your opponent discard a card is always very meaningful, and if we made it ‘activatable’ like Vormir that would also add a dimension to it where your opponent would have to worry about when they’ll lose a card. That’s not very fun, so we just force it immediately.
We also want locations to make where you play your cards interesting, but not *too* interesting too often. Having some (but not all) locations change the texture of the game immediately and then become ‘blank’ helps manage complexity and make games feel more different over time.”
Q: As a Master Mold fan, will we get more cards to interact with opponent decks who want hand space, especially versus card generator decks?
A: Glenn “I imagine we’ll make more stuff like Gorgon and Cobra, but I don’t expect to be adding many more cards to your opponent’s. It’s just not fun enough for either player to want to have a lot of it, given both hand and board have hard card caps.”
Q: When designing cards, in addition to supporting very clear archetypes (discard, EoT, hand buff, etc), does the team specifically identify “merge” as its own (mini) archetype that requires monitoring/support? To generalize the question, what are the most important “sub-archetypes” the team has made an effort to create and categorize?
A: Glenn “Yes, inasmuch as we think of merge as a keyword cards can synergize with. We’re generally designing cards on their own merits, while trying to do a diverse spread of ideas. When we have an idea for a cool card, we figure out where it should go and make it, ensuring we feel it has appropriate support. Merge is no different than Destroy in this process, except that the latter has more existing support and flexible executions, so it’s easier to do.
We don’t really make an active effort in content design to ‘govern’ the archetypes that show up. Our job is to give you guys a ton of interesting tools, you pick what goes in your toolbox. Even with ‘End of Turn,’ one of our goals was to make sure each card could theoretically stand on its own or in pairs, rather than build it for you.
We do look at decks that exist, like Destroy, and the cards they choose to play and not play, and evaluate whether designs go in an existing shell, like Moira kind of, or ask players to do something different, like Morgan Le Fay. In the case of the former, we still want new cards to be novel, it’s just a different kind of challenge.”
Q: Have you ever considered a card that acts like Mister Negative, but targets your opponent’s deck?
A: Glenn “We have–a version of Mirage actually did something similar, at one point. It wasn’t very fun to play with, felt a lot like a worse version of Baron Mordo and the changes that would’ve fixed it weren’t fun for the opponent.”
Q: What isn’t Ego as competent as other bots on ladder? Has the team considered giving him the Agatha treatment or nixing him altogether?
A: Glenn “If Ego played well, there wouldn’t be much point to the location at all. We debated rigging specific turns—specifically ‘until turn 6’—but it’s less elegant, weird with TVA/Limbo, and not a lot more interesting. Ego’s a very rare and unique part of Snap—rarer with every location release—and we value that.”
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 you name a community suggestion what was actually listened to and deployed in the game?
A: Griffin “Snap Packs, High Voltage updates, Deadpool’s Diner coming this season, old Spotlight Variants to the Card Shop for Tokens, Super Premium Pass changes this season, just to share a few.”
Q: How likely is it that Snap could ever see a crossover with another IP?
A: Glenn “While Second Dinner may work with other brands at some point, the game of Marvel Snap won’t be doing that in the foreseeable future.”
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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