Marvel Snap January 29, 2026 OTA Card Balance Updates

The latest OTA update includes nerfs for a number of meta cards: Shou Lao, Maverick, Merlin (Omniversal Presence), Deafening Chord, Spider Ham, as well as buffs for rarely played cards, including Colonel America, Doom 2099, Lin Lie Iron Fist, Topaz.

Check out the full OTA update details below, as well as our analysis and breakdown of the changes that includes decks for you to play!

Marvel Snap Balance OTA Analysis and New Decks to Play – January 29, 2026

January 29th – Balance Updates

Hey folks. Today we’re going to be nerfing Shou Lao, which came in a touch too hot, as well as shave some additional outliers. After that we’ll be handing out some buffs including a recent underperforming card and making our regularly scheduled small adjustment to the Move deck. Let’s get to it!

Shou Lao

• [Old] 5/8 – On Reveal: Give the last character you played +3 Power for each turn you played 2 or more cards. (+0)
• [Change] 5/8 > 5/6

Shou Lao has been consistently one of the highest played and most winning cards since its release. Overall we’ve been happy with the card, given that it asks a medium-sized question of players with an exciting reward of a bunch of numbers and additional agency of where to produce it. That said, it is granting a lot of power, and the ability to allocate it in two different locations gives Shou Lao a distinct advantage over many other large-number options.

We like that Shou Lao requires deck building distinctions, but not too much, which has been a misstep we’ve had on some other conditional cards in recent seasons. We’re choosing to take two base Power away from Shou Lao rather than reducing his Power grant to +2 per two cards played. We want to keep the payoff strong, and this should reduce the strength of the two location pressure that Shou Lao provides.

This might seem like a fairly modest nerf of Shou Lao to some, but we’ve got some other changes coming up shortly that we think will make some smaller impact on Shou Lao’s performance. We’re going to start here and see if Shou Lao’s win rate gets into a more reasonable range for the long term.

Maverick

• [Old] 3/3 – Activate: Give the next card you play Power equal to this card’s Power.
• [Change] 3/3 > 3/2

Maverick’s ability to multiply buffs alongside the level of agency he gives players to scale has overperformed relative to our expectations. We don’t love this nerf, but we’d like to avoid adjusting Maverick’s cost if possible given how sensitive Activate cards have been to having higher Energy costs in the past.

Our hope is that this makes Maverick more of a card that you need to dedicate to buffing to realize his full potential rather than being a 3/6 (that often performs closer to a 3/10 or higher) at base.

Merlin’s Omniversal Presence

• [Old] On Reveal: Replace this location with a new one and give Merlin +2 Power.
• [Change] +2 Power > +1 Power

Our last Merlin adjustment was modest, and as expected so was his change in win rate. We don’t want to make any drastic changes that make Merlin too clunky or unfun to play with, so we’re continuing to make some small adjustments. Omniversal Presence is Merlin’s strongest spell, and as a result we’ll be removing a Power from it.

Deafening Chord

• [Old] On Reveal: Afflict an enemy character here that costs 3 or less with -1 Power and remove its text.
• [New] On Reveal: Remove the text of an enemy 3-Cost or lower character here.

Before release, we suspected Deafening Chord could be sufficiently strong without its -1 Power affliction, but we decided to keep it due to the strength of many cards that it targets at the time. Given Chord’s win rate, we’re happy to remove the affliction now that we’ve taken action against various outliers including Merlin, Victoria Hand, Human Torch, and Maverick.

Spider Ham

• [Old] 1/2 – Activate: Replace the text of a random character in your opponent’s hand with “oink!”
• [Change] 1/2 > 1/1

Frankly, we don’t view Spider Ham as the most fun card to be strong. We’re quite sensitive to when effects like this begin to creep up in win rate, and now that it has we’ll be removing a Power from it. It bears repeating that we don’t want to remove players’ ability for counterplay, but we do believe Marvel Snap is the most fun when players generally get to enact their synergies.

Colonel America

• [Old] 3/3 – Ongoing: Your other cards here have +1 Power for each turn you’ve discarded a card.
• [Change] 3/3 > 3/4

This is a small change, but Colonel America has been underperforming for a while now even after the release of Weapon H. We like his incentives to encourage slightly different play patterns than many of the traditional Discard decks, so we’ll be giving him a point of Power.

Doom 2099

• [Old] 4/5 – End of Turn: Add a DoomBot 2099 to a random location if you played (exactly) 1 card.
• [Change] 4/5 > 4/6

Doom 2099’s last buff didn’t do very much to nudge him up, so ahead of Moondragon’s release, we’re giving him an additional Power to hopefully give him some new life alongside an additional new tool.

Lin Lie Iron Fist

• [Old] 2/2 On Reveal: Add the Sword of Fu Xi to another location.
• [Change] 2/2 > 2/3

Sword of Fu Xi

• [Old] Ongoing: If Lin Lie Iron Fist is here, he has +7 Power.
• [New] Ongoing: If Lin Lie Iron Fist is here, he has +8 Power.

We think Lin Lie has the potential to be very fun, but he has a very specific ask necessitating a Move or Bounce variant. Both decks we’d view as becoming more fun if they were interested in including Lin Lie so we’re trying to give a little more juice for the squeeze, allocating two total additional points when you complete his quest of getting him to his Sword’s location.

Topaz

• [Old] 3/5 – After you play a card here, move it to the middle location.
• [Change] 3/5 > 2/3

Your regularly scheduled small Move adjustment is here with Topaz. Topaz is a unique Move enabler that has proven to be just a little too clunky for most Move decks. Hopefully this mitigates that and gives the Move another multi-moving tool that can help the deck leverage some of the payoffs that require more movement in the wake of Human Torch’s nerf.

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That’s all for today, enjoy the upcoming Guardians of the Galaxy season and happy Snapping