Developer Update for the Week of June 29, 2024: Phastos Edition (25+ 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 questions such as: why was the OTA info released early, is the Hercules buff only a temporary change, is Red Guardian too strong, 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 new card Phastos! If you don’t know if this card is worth a Spotlight Cache, make sure to check out our weekly Spotlight Cache guide, as well as our Phastos Bonus Challenge guide!

Phastos Decks & Week 1 Review: Bonus Challenge Guide

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!

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: I got this great new Phoenix Force variant, but it never stays on the board so people can see it. Will this ever be changed so Phoenix Force stays visible on the board?
A: Glenn “I sympathize, and one of our learnings from Phoenix Force was to avoid similar behavior. However, it’s both creatively and mechanically meaningfully that the card remain the ‘host’ character, so we’re not currently planning to change that. It’s not out of the question, though.”

Q: With Professor X’s new text, is it intended that cards can still swap sides? I thought moving and swapping sides were different things?
A: Glenn “The new words describe the current effect fairly precisely: you can’t add or remove a card to the location except by moving that card there. Switching sides is neither a move, nor an add, nor a remove. All of those require the card to *not* already be at the location, but switching sides requires the card to already be there.

Nothing in the game implies that switching sides adds a card anywhere. White Widow doesn’t ‘switch’ a Widow's Kiss to your opponent, for example. Changing Professor X to imply that switching is adding a card would actually introduce inconsistency, not reduce it, because that implication would cast doubt on the default.

I believe this is only a misunderstanding because players are used to the previous Professor X functionality, which had different words altogether–including a load-bearing ‘etc.’ that covered switching sides.”

Q: Have you considered a full rework to Professor X since you don’t like his Lockdown style from a technical standpoint?
A: Glenn “Full reworks have a very high bar for us, because for many players it feels like we’re deleting one of their cards and we consider that a *huge* deal. To that end, we’d rather not pursue doing it unless it’s clear we can’t find a satisfying card in the existing space.”

Q: Is Red Guardian too strong? Cards like Wong and Iron Man have no place in the meta with Red Guardian stopping them.
A: Glenn “He’s a strong card with a range of playable homes, but not too problematic. Decks with Wong and Iron Man still see success; Wong is arguably at an all-time high on competitive performance since launch.”

Q: Does the existence of Annihilus make you less likely to print new negative cost cards?
A: Glenn “Likely some impact, but we already avoid making them mostly because the design space is shallow and not widely appealing.”

Q: Why do Eternals Ark and Storm read as doing the same thing but don’t? Both of them say they Flood the location, but Storm changes it to Flooding while Eternals Ark changes them to Flooded.
A: Glenn “Storm has some additional rules text, but I agree there’s potential for misunderstanding.

It was our plan for the Ark to fire on turn 4 but use Flooding, so that locations like Sanctum Sanctorum would be easier to contest, but that had some challenges. The biggest was that the location couldn’t use the reference location; we can’t show you Flooding in-game, so knowing how the sequence works would require knowing how Storm works, and not all players will. We also couldn’t fit Storm’s clarifying explainer.

Given turn 5 wouldn’t make much sense for Flooding to show up, we decided it was acceptable to deviate a bit here, at least for now. Once we have references for locations, I imagine we’ll adjust the Ark to mirror Storm in function but on turn 4, as planned.”

Q: Did Angela take the nerf bullet for Thena?
A: Glenn “No. Angela was adjusted based on her play rate, which dwarfs Thena by comparison even given the Series difference. Angela’s popularity relative to other cards in lower Series was unacceptably high, especially in conjunction with her winrate.”

Q: On the January 18th OTA, the dev notes for Hercules’s previous +1 power buff stated that the team’s goal with Herc was to “build an interesting move card at 4-cost”. This implied heavily that if simple power buffs weren’t enough, the team would consider a textbox change. But of course, now Herc is being moved to 3-cost. Is this 3-cost change temporary, to soften the blow of the move resolution change, or is this a shift in the team’s perspective on the role Herc has in the move archetype?
A: Glenn “Its purpose is to soften the blow, and I personally think it will be temporary. But if it works out, maybe we’ll keep it.”

Q: Why does Spider-Ham transform a card into a Pig instead of removing the text? Was it done to create deliberate interactions with cards like Shadow King and Mobius?
A: Glenn “The interactions were deliberate: he’s a very bizarre character, we valued having an effect that felt bizarre. However, we’re currently considering adjusting to text replacement, because it has resulted in more odd bugs than we initially expected long-term, in addition to these interactions.”

Other Questions

Q: Are anti-meta decks common?
A: Glenn “Yes, counter-cards very frequently rise and fall as the metagame shifts.”

Q: Do you track how well a deck is doing if a single player (or small group) makes a new deck that has a massive success rate?
A: Glenn “Not really; we might track down individuals within certain criteria to see their decks more specifically and how the cards perform, but that’s more just answering questions than any data evaluation. For example, we flagged Stature + Black Bolt several weeks before the first good version of that deck became a known quantity. We saw their play and win rates spike a bit at high MMR, leading us to filter for the decks causing it and keep an eye on similar clusters more specifically.

There’s really not a meaningful sample size a single player could play within a useful window, from a balance standpoint.”

Q: Why do some locations get features as the Hot Location multiple times, but other locations never get featured?
A: Glenn “Most locations are rarer because experiencing them too often is undesirable, leading us to default to avoiding them for hot/featured. The reception to Cancun and World Forge would be two interesting counterexamples, based on past reception.”

Q: Do you value player input when they suggest things like “this card needs +1 Power to be good”?
A: Glenn “While I value directional feedback (weak/strong, boring/exciting, simple/confusing, frustrating/fun, etc.) highly, we don’t put a lot of weight on specific suggestions or go looking for them. In addition to the personnel expertise we have ‘in the building’ being high, we also have data sets and playtesting resources (manual and automated) that aren’t available to players informing our work.”

Q: When can I stream this season’s music? I can’t find it on Spotify.
A: TheChrisAlan “So glad to hear you are enjoying it!  🙂  We do have plans for a Volume 3, and it’ll come once there is another album’s worth of music.  Which is actually getting pretty close, probably in the next few months!”

Q: Will future patches contain balance updates?
A: Glenn “It has been our express philosophy that OTAs are our primary balance vehicle. Patches will contain changes related to the work of other teams (VFX mostly) or that aren’t necessarily time-sensitive.

Patches will contain balance changes some times—they’re not forbidden—but we don’t prioritize them for patches because between locking any patch and setting it live is at least one OTA that could deliver it faster.”

Q: For the upcoming Character Albums, can you explain how bonus progress works for owning limited run variants?
A: Stephen “The bonus progress with make it easier for you to complete the album.  The game will treat your season pass wolverine as credit towards completion.  For example, if there are 12 daily offer shop Wolverine variants and you own 11 of the daily offer shop variants.  And you also own a season pass and conquest Wolverine variant then you would be at 13/12 and have unlocked all rewards!”

Q: How many Character Albums can we expect to see?
A: Stephen “We are starting with Deadpool and Wolverine and will see how everyone responds from a feedback and data standpoint.  If folks love them then we will roll them out as fast as we can for the rest of the characters who have enough variants to make an album around.”

Q: Do you ever see crazy or unexpected things when testing new cards that makes you change the card?
A: Glenn “Sure, we see bugs all the time. In playtesting, our goal is to quickly identify a direction to focus the design, so we may implement things less efficiently rather than spend time up front implementing new functionality. For example, we playtested Mount Vesuvius exclusively via honor system at first. Some original Arishems spawned random cards, so it’s a pretty easy winner for the craziest thing.

Change isn’t the enemy, or unexpected. Game design is iteration, so we always assume we’re going to have to change things. It’s a pleasant surprise when we don’t! For example, we started playtesting Nocturne and Blink at their current cards, and tried a lot of variations before winding up back where we started. That’s just the process of any game in action.”

Q: Will the rewards in Deadpool’s Diner be the same when it returns in the future, such as featuring a new card?
A: Glenn “We aren’t sure yet!  Depends on the response to the mode.  It will have different rewards every time it comes back.  We hope it ends up being an exciting way to release a new card.”

Q: If you had a tournament in-house, which dev is most likely to win?
A: Stephen “Probably either Glenn or Brady”

A: Rada “Brady won the last one”

Q: When the new keyword releases, will it be applied to older cards?
A: Rada “We’ll be looking to update some cards, but are explicitly avoiding cards in early series to avoid adding another thing to learn for the new player experience.”

Q: Why did you release the OTA news early? Will this be the new standard?
A: Griffin “Some of the details of the OTA were released early out of our control. Instead of allowing potentially harmful speculation of both where it came from and the entire OTA package, we decided to release them early for clarity.

We don’t intend to do this regularly.”

Q: It occurs to me that you could have “fixed” move one of two ways to make it intuitive:

1. Moves are processed immediately at the start of the turn. (You went with this.)
2. When the player submits their turn, their cards snap back to where they were at the start of the turn and are animated moving during the turn, replaying the sequence of actions the player set up before submitting.

Why did you go with way [1] instead of way [2]?
A: Glenn “2 does way more weird stuff with card interactions, in addition to being a dramatically more difficult lift to implement–probably among the hardest things we could do in the game scene.

Imagine I move Nightcrawler to fill a location and play a card, but you Juggernaut Nightcrawler’s location before my Nightcrawler has moved. Do I have 5 cards there? Can you block my move ~50% of the time? Is my staged card invisible to Juggernaut? Etc.”

Q: Is it intended that the Blue Cosmic border is missing from the border shop?
A: Stephen “It’s a bug that removed Blue Cosmic from the shop.  It will be fixed soon”

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: Question about card acquisition, too many Series 4/5 cards, and not enough Series Drops:
A: Your question has a lot of pieces involved and have had multiple answers from devs. This will be a long response, but to summarize a bit:

The team is actively aware the current spotlight system isn’t good, and they want to make it better. However, they don’t want to have a major overhaul and it be equally bad (or worse) so they are working on a change with no details to share right now.

There is scheduled to be 1-2 more Series drops this year, but no set date for them.

The team does not intend for f2p players to ever be collection complete. Season Pass players are also not likely to be collection complete. They intend for there always to be cards to chase, and for players to have a unique collection. They do hear players dismay about this system, but there is no official word if the new system they are working on will increase total cards owned for players.

Q: What happened with Firestar?
A: The team will not answer questions about datamined content. The card was datamined in 2023, but was removed from her Cache premiere before she was officially announced. Simply put, no word when she will make her debut.

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!