Hey folks! We’ve got Grand Arena right around the corner, releasing a week from today, and we’re very excited to see what everyone thinks. For today though, we’ll be making some small downward adjustments to some top meta contenders, as well as making some tweaks to a variety of cards that have fallen out of favor, several of which will be featured in the preconstructed decks that will be available for everyone to play on Grand Arena. Let’s jump right in!
Long time players might not be surprised to see Zabu warrant further adjustment. He continues to be a tricky card to balance, and today we’ll be making a small nerf to his Power. This is somewhat of a continuation of the discussion of last OTA - we’re keeping an eye on the presence of how many midrange decks are utilizing a boatload of tech cards, and the play rate of cards like Shang Chi, Enchantress, and others continues to be quite high.
We understand the importance of and want there to be ample counterplay in our game, but simultaneously we would prefer that the premier strategies of Marvel Snap be high synergy driven decks. Zabu is a critical component of these midrange decks, and overloading your deck with the aforementioned tech cards as well as rate options like Galacta, Gwenpool, and so on gives you a lot of opportunities to play two 4 Cost cards on the final turn, usually at least one of which is a powerful answer to your opponent’s strategy.
These decks aren’t without weaknesses though, and despite their ability to play a large amount of rate cards, they still aren’t typically as strong at generating raw points as their synergistic counterparts if they can’t successfully interact with their opponent. This might appear like a small nerf, but we believe that these midrange decks are especially sensitive to Power changes given their more limited ability to generate points.
Given that, we’re making this change to Zabu for now, with the expectation that we may need to make greater changes if these midrange and control decks aren’t as sensitive to the number tweaks as we would like. Again, we want to stress that counterplay is important, but it is our goal to ensure that players have agency to execute their game plans relatively frequently.
The popularity and success of Discard has waxed and waned over the last few months, but one thing has remained consistent - the strongest versions of the decks feature Bullseye, and the frequency at which Bullseye shows up is something we’re sensitive to given his interaction with Swarm.
There are a few issues here - most notably that the Swarm/Bullseye interaction can be difficult to track given how much game actions it generates, frequently creating a fast-forward segment. The tradeoffs here between making the game slow down considerably and not giving players a strong understanding of what took place during the turn.
While we could make an adjustment to Swarm, we haven’t found a satisfying rework that would keep that card’s identity intact, and ultimately there is a cool and unique element to comboing off with Bullseye, it’s just something that we don’t want to happen too frequently.
Finally, Bullseye is just really strong, so while there are a variety of other intangibles taking place, the best solution we have for now is simply to weaken him a little bit, to attack his win rate, make sure that the fast-forward action isn’t too prevalent, and give more room for other Discard cards to enter the meta-game.
We’ll continue to look for opportunities to improve the overall experience with these interactions while trying to retain as much of the fantasy and gameplay that draws players to these strategies.
We’re doing a couple of adjustments to cards today based on the increased prevalence of skills in our game. If skills had existed from the beginning, it would have likely influenced several designs that call out Cards, and we’re continuing to audit these interactions to make sure we have the most functional and fun game pieces possible.
Negasonic is extremely exploitable as skills continue to enter the game at a more rapid pace, and we want to make sure that her role remains in the game as a satisfying way to control a location.
Similarly here, Mirage will no longer be able to target a Skill in your opponent’s hand, which naturally eliminates her ability to give it Power, creating a very unsatisfying experience.
Simultaneously, we’re buffing Mirage. We believe that this is both a fun amount of variance to prop up in the game, and it gives more options for various synergies like Victoria Hand.
Hey, it’s the F4 season, so why not give the original a little love? This is an acknowledgement that our vanilla characters have long fallen behind, but more so is a buff to High Evolutionary. The Thing has fallen behind as an option in those decks, and we’ll keep reevaluating starter cards over time as we’ve discussed.
It’s a semi-frequent topic that we want to make sure our classic strategies remain as viable as possible, so it’s time for another Zoo buff. Marvel Boy is one of the most fun and unique cards in that deck, with the potential to prop up other strategies as well, so we’ll be improving it for now. We’ve got our eye on some larger adjustments we can make in the future to help Zoo out as well.
Jennifer Kale has simply been the weakest of the Energy generation options since she came out, by a sizable margin. Hopefully this gets her into a more playable state by itself, but we are also monitoring what we can do to improve the strength of 5 Cost cards generally speaking, a movement that will directly affect her. The Zabu change today starts to move the needle in that direction, but it will continue to be top of mind for us.
Green Goblin has fallen largely out of favor, given that “3 Power” is just not a particularly strong rate for 3 Energy anymore. We’re always a little nervous about making a change that directly could buff Clog decks, but we suspect there’s very little risk of ruin here, and we always want to make sure that players with a variety of interests can successfully play the decks they enjoy if they’re willing to work for it.
Speaking of changes we’re a little nervous about, we’ll be making a small buff to Doctor Doom 2099. This is a card we’ve had to nerf multiple times in the past to dethrone it from being one of the strongest rate 4 Cost cards in the game, but as a result its play rate has heavily declined to the point of barely showing up. It’s the Fantastic Four Season, and Doctor Doom is also featured in the Grand Arena, so we wanted to show his 2099 side a little love. That said, we’re being cautious, particularly with the release of First Steps Invisible Woman in a couple of weeks, who is an excellent synergy piece with Doom as well as the rest of the F4 team.
That’s all for today, we hope you enjoy the unveiling of the Grand Arena, and happy Snapping!