Marvel Snap October 30, 2025 OTA Card Balance Updates

The new OTA update introduces nerfs to powerful 1-cost cards: Black Cat, Sauron and X-23. It also includes nerfs to several Disruption Cards (Super Giant, Alioth and Mercury), and buffs for some underperforming cards.

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:

October 30th – Balance Updates

In this week’s balance update we’ll be trimming some power off the top of a couple archetypes as well as continuing to cut extraneous Power from tech cards where we feel comfortable.

Overall, we’re very pleased with where the metagame is and has been since our tech reform. We’re just looking to keep improving things as we can! Let’s go ahead and get to it!

Black Cat

• [Old] 1/5 – End of Turn: Discard this from your hand.
• [Change] 1/5 > 1/4

We’re starting by removing a Power from some rate outliers – Black Cat and Sauron. We aggressively juiced these cards a bit in an effort for them to see play. With Black Cat in particular, up until this 1/5 buff, she was essentially never actually played as a normal Marvel Snap card, and just ended up in the discard pile until her friend Hela showed up.

As-is, even though she does produce awkwardness in games from time-to-time, she’s the most efficient one Cost card in the game from a raw points perspective, and has enjoyed a lot of success in End of Turn decks where her tag also functions as a synergy. We still believe she can function in that more preferable spot as a card that actually gets staged at 1/4 and won’t function like such an outlier vs comparable 1 Costs.

Sauron

• [Old] 1/3 – On Reveal: Remove the abilities from all Ongoing cards in your deck.
• [Change] 1/3 > 1/2

Over time, Sauron strategies have gradually improved in win rate and as a result of how much impact Sauron has on a game when played on the first turn, we think we can comfortably position him with less points with him retaining his mantle of ideal starting play for his strategy.

Disruption Cards

Super Giant

• [Old] 4/7 On Reveal: All cards played next turn don’t reveal until the game ends.
• [Change] 4/7 > 4/6

As you’ve likely noticed by now, we’re keeping up the trend of trying to trim extraneous strength from tech where we think it is possible. To reiterate our position, we think Marvel Snap is a lot more fun when synergistic decks are at the top of the ladder and players have to be more thoughtful about including tech – with the intention of targeting specific strategies that are overrepresented or are particular threats to their strategy.

We still believe interaction is healthy, but don’t want the best decks in our game to be a stack of points generated through generic rate cards and the ability to shut down any strategy.

Since End of Turn burst onto the scene Super Giant has been a heavily played card as a powerful piece of interaction for that strategy as well as finding a bevy of other interactions. As we have gotten the aforementioned End of Turn deck into a better place, we feel more comfortable reducing Super Giant’s Power.

Alioth

• [Old] 6/9 – On Reveal: Remove the text from all unrevealed enemy characters here.
• [Change] 6/9 > 6/8

During the Robot takeover, we experimented with a large change to Alioth, but did ultimately decide to revert afterwards. We’re taking a more conservative approach here. While the presence of Alioth in Marvel Snap is a good thing in many regards – perhaps most notably ensuring that priority remains a dynamic part of the final turn of the game, its level of flexibility does make us comfortable with removing a Power. It is currently a little too close to the best generic 6 Cost card in the game, and we’d like that to not be true of a tech card.

Mercury

• [Old] 2/2 – You can move this once. Ongoing: Enemy cards here can’t move.
• [Change] 2/2 > 3/4

Finally, the largest change here is to Mercury. The Mercury/Cannonball combo has been a prominent part of the metagame for some time now, and although we did make a large nerf to Cannonball, that hasn’t resulted in a sufficient shift in our eyes. As it stands, Mercury is a powerful proactive card that incidentally makes it much more difficult for Move to exist in the metagame, and we would much prefer for Mercury to be a card that players turned to, perhaps still with Cannonball, if they deemed Move prevalent enough that they needed to fight back.

As it stands, Move doesn’t have much room to breathe with the amount of Mercury that players get to play “for free,” and we have chosen to address that by weakening how efficient the tech piece is.

X-23

• [Old] 1/2 – When this is discarded or destroyed, regenerate it at a random location and you get +1 Energy next turn.
• [Change] 1/2 > 1/1

Destroy has gotten some excellent tools lately and been one of the best performing decks over the past Season. We generally consider it a good sign when Destroy is one of the best Marvel Snap decks, but in the interest of shaking things up slightly we are weakening one of Destroy’s strongest cards. We chose X-23 over many other options as we felt it would make the least impact on how the deck’s game plan actually unfolds. X-23’s strongest feature is her Energy production and although the deck will feel one less point in a slight ding to win rate, it won’t affect what makes her or the deck Powerful from an archetype standpoint.

Leader

• [Old] 6/4 – On Reveal: Copy the enemy card(s) with the highest Power played this turn, but on your side
• [Change] 6/4 > 6/5

Nakia

• [Old] 3/3 – On Reveal: Give all cards in your hand +1 Power.
• [Change] 3/3 > 3/4

Peni Parker (SP/dr)

• [Old] 3/4 – On Reveal: Merge this into one of your cards here. You can move that card next turn.
• [Change] 3/4 > 3/5

Electro

• [Old] 3/4 – On Reveal: +1 Max Energy. Ongoing: You can only play 1 card a turn.
• [Change] 3/4 > 3/5

As usual, here are a few different underperforming cards that we hope can get a little more time in the spotlight in the upcoming Season. Maybe Nakia can be an exciting Superior Spider-Man enabler, or perhaps you’re interested in eliminating Electro’s draw-back with Man-Spider. Regardless, we hope you enjoy November!

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Happy Snapping!