Table of Contents
In the new OTA update, a total of 11 cards were changed: Sunspot and Gwenpool were nerfed; Dormammu, Invisible Woman, Domino, Mobius M. Mobius, Agony, Blink and Mole Man were buffed; Black Cat was changed and Evolved The Thing was fixed.
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!
June 26th – Balance Updates
Hey folks! We hope you’ve been enjoying the debut of Grand Arena. In today’s update, we’re going to be adjusting a few cards that have been underperforming for some time, make some adjustments to Dormammu to allow his quest to be more easily achievable, and put some downward pressure on a few consistent overperformers.
Let’s jump right in.
Sunspot
- [Old] 1/1 – End of Turn: Gain +1 Power for each unspent Energy.
- [Change] 1/1 > 1/0
The “End of Turn” strategy has gotten quite the slew of toys this Season, and its win rate, especially when utilizing High Evolutionary and Fantasticar, has been consistently creeping up. Sunspot is a historically high point generator in the High Evolutionary deck, and this time is no different with his unique ability as a scaling one Cost that can help to fill locations quickly for First Steps Human Torch and First Steps The Thing as well as getting double benefit from Invisible Woman First Steps. We appreciate and want those synergies to work well together, but his number output is just a touch high with all the extra goodies he’s gotten this season, so we want to be a little cautious and tone him down.
He should still be impressive when your deck is firing on all cylinders, but hopefully his average impact is just a touch tamer to help ensure that the End of Turn strategy keeps a reasonable win rate.
Gwenpool
Decks with Gwenpool
- [Old] 4/6 – On Reveal: Pick a random character in your hand 3 times. Give +2 Power each time.
- [Change] 4/6 > 4/5
Long time players probably won’t be surprised by this change. Gwenpool has consistently been near the top of the charts in play and win rate for a long time, waxing and waning through periods where Galacta and Dr. Doom 2099 usurped her as the strongest 4 Cost.
We’ve been slowly chipping away at the outliers present at 4 Cost cost, as well as adjusting Zabu, and while things have improved considerably since the clear dominance of Galacta, Gwenpool is still left standing as a small outlier for the strong individual cards + tech cards strategy that we want to make sure to keep in relative check.
Her raw numbers output is just extremely high, and that’s ignoring when she gets synergies going with cards like Brood. She’s an enjoyable card, and we like when she does enable said synergies, but we just want to make sure she’s a little closer to other options when you’re just using her normally. Similarly with the Zabu change from last OTA, we want to slightly attack that archetype’s sensitivity to the raw number of points it generates.
Dormammu
Decks with Dormammu
Decks with Summoning Ritual 3
- [Old] 7/11 – Game Start: Begin a Summoning Ritual. (Add step 1 to hand.)
- [Change] 7/11 > 7/10
We’re adjusting Summoning Ritual 3 as well.
- [Old] 3 – On Reveal: Destroy 2 of your characters here to summon Dormammu. (step 3/3)
- [Change] 3 Cost > 2 Cost.
This is a similar change to one we’ve made a couple times now with cards like Captain Carter and The Ancient One. When cards ask players to engage in their quests, sometimes it turns out we’ve asked a little too much of players in a game that only lasts 6 turns, so we’re taking some strides to make Dormammu easier to set up and play with. Reducing the cost of Summoning Ritual 3 should make it substantially easier to weave all the Rituals into your curve as well as generate enough fuel on locations to both get Dormammu into play as well as viably contest another location to play a competitive game.
We put a lot of care into trying to make sure that Dormammu’s sequence was sufficiently difficult to execute due to his nature of functionally starting in your opening hand. There was a substantial fail case if we made the opportunity cost of executing his Rituals too low because you are not required to draw him, which would create a lot of same-iness from game-to-game if he proved too strong. That said, we missed the mark a little bit, and with more data to back it up we’re trying to assuage the difficulty in casting him. This is a fairly risky change, and we acknowledge that, so we’ll see how it goes, we might need to make more creative adjustments to get him into the right spot. Work that we think is worthwhile given his stature as a character as well as the unique nature of his design.
Black Cat
- [Old] 2/6 – End of Turn: Discard this from your hand.
- [Change] 2/6 > 1/5
The goal of our last change to Black Cat was to, in a bizarre twist, get players to actually spend Energy and put her onto the board. As it turns out, given the unreliable nature of when she’s drawn and when you’ll be able to spend Energy on her, she still remains largely a card that you leverage with Hela.
We’re taking another shot with it. This is a pretty aggressive buff as an extremely efficient 1 Cost card, and if this doesn’t prove to be a viable route for her design, we will consider some kind of rework.
Invisible Woman
Decks with Invisible Woman
- [Old] 2/3 – Ongoing: Cards you play here are not revealed until the game ends.
- [Change] 2/3 > 2/4
Domino
- [Old] 2/3 – You always draw this card on turn 2, and not before.
- [Change] 2/3 > 2/4
We’ve largely held the line that 2/3 is the maximum amount of Power for a 2 Cost that doesn’t have an explicit drawback. That said, given the relative strength of 2 Cost cards in the game at the moment, it seems fair to argue that Invisible Woman and Domino’s text boxes are difficult to play with, due to the planning or deckbuilding required that approaches drawbacks vs cards that are a little more “plug and play.”
As a result, we’ll be giving a Power to Invisible Woman and Domino, and be on the lookout for similar opportunities to raise up cards that are underplayed and are asking more than some of our most popular and near-always effective cards.
Mobius M. Mobius
Decks with Mobius M. Mobius
- [Old] 3/3 – Ongoing: Your Costs can’t be increased. Your opponent’s Costs can’t be reduced.
- [Change] 3/3 > 3/4
Many strategies are using cost reduction as an effective means to to augment their gameplan, both in combo decks as well as midrange ones. This is a normal part of SNAP, but the prominence of these cards has been steadily on the rise, and we want to make some more efforts to make sure there is counterplay to them. Our hope is that increasing Mobius’s Power, and as a result, lowering the opportunity cost to play with him, will give players more reasonable access to a tool to manage some of these Cost reduction card’s raw strength as well as helping to limit some of the difficulty in being able to effectively plan against their outputs from turn-to-turn.
Agony
- [Old] 1/2 – After you play a card here, merge this with it.
- [Change] 1/2 > 1/3
Agony is a card we think is just very fun and it has been underplayed for some time. The ability to combine it with a variety of other cards and create interesting synergies is something we always want to prop up due to the unique gameplay it encourages and the numbers here have been tame enough for us to take a swing with her.
Blink
Decks with Blink
- [Old] 5/7 – On Reveal: Swap the last card you played with a card that costs more from your deck.
- [Change] 5/7 – 5/8
We debated buffing both Lockjaw and Blink as cards that people often enjoy playing together. Both are slightly underperforming, but we took the opportunity here with Blink first given Lockjaw changed recently, as well as the weaker nature of 5 Cost cards in the game right now. We know that these types of strategies are beloved by the community, and as long as they can stay within a reasonable power band, we are happy to prop them up when appropriate. We’re going to continue to look for opportunities to buff our most exciting higher Cost cards in the game.
Evolved The Thing
Decks with High Evolutionary
- [Old] 4/6 On Reveal: Afflict 3 enemy cards here with -1 Power.
- [Change] 4/6 > 4/7
This was just an oversight from the last OTA when we changed The Thing. Now fixed!
Grand Arena
Decks with Mole Man
- Mole Man: 3/3 -> 3/4 (For all modes)
- Mole Man Skill: 1-Cost, +3 Power
- Herbie Skill: 3-Cost -> 4-Cost
Banlist additions
- Agatha
- Sera
- Cannonball
- Alioth
- Storm
- Juggernaut
- Viper
Mole Man preconstructed deck
- Cuts:
- Adds:
- Surge
- Blue Marvel
- Ancient One
Dr Doom preconstructed deck
- Cuts:
- Adds:
That’s it for today folks, we hope you enjoy the tail end of Grand Arena, and we’ll be back soon. Happy SNAPPING!
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