Hello and welcome to the first 2025 edition of Burning Questions, your weekly look at hot topics in Marvel Snap! This week we've got a new cosmetics wish list, Alliance improvements, and fun Lasher plays!
1) What new cosmetics would you like to see in 2025?
We're all waiting on acquisition changes and draft mode, but additional cosmetics are important to allow the game to be affordable and give players with large collections something to chase. Here are a few new types of cosmetics I’d love to see this year.
New Game Boards
This has been teased so it's likely coming at some point. I hope the design team takes some big swings with these. Marvel does weird very well as evidenced by Ego, the Celestials, and all of the other wonderful cosmic Jack Kirby creations. I'd love to see them get really creative and give us some really out-there game boards drawn from the Cosmic side of the Marvel universe that includes cool entities like Eternity and the Never Queen.
Collectible Voice Lines
Though these would require a substantial developer lift to implement, it would be really cool to have some unique audio in the game as it's mostly focused on unique visuals. I would pay money for a “he was in the Amazon with my mom when she was researching spiders right before she died” audio line for my Madame Web. How cool would more iconic Wolverine quotes be? Also, I'd prefer if these weren't just attached to Ultimate variants, but collectible and purchasable in other ways.
Rotating Favorites
More of a feature than a cosmetic, but I would love to be able to favorite multiple variants of a character and have the deck-builder randomly select from among them, similar to what is currently done with titles and avatars. The game has grown beyond the scope of having a single favorite variant.
More React Sets
We expect these to be part of the Character Mastery system (they are marked as such in the game files) and I'm looking forward to reacting to locations and opponents’ cards with my favorite obscure characters that most other players won't unlock.
New Avatar Borders
The Spotlight Borders aren't attractive and the Infinity Avatar borders are cool, but pretty subtle. I'd love to see something bold and distinct made available as an additional option.
More Comic Specific Titles
I know, I know. I shouldn't even put “more” and “titles” into the same sentence. But I truly would love some tiles that are smart references to comic storylines or lore deep cuts. There are a handful of titles like this, but most of the titles we get are “self-deprecating gamer” humor or feel artificially generated.
2) How can Alliances be improved?
Let's be honest, Alliances feel more like a chore than a fun social feature. That's largely thanks to repetitive bounty boards full of bounties that require you to play things you simply don't want to play.
What can be done? There are two basic ways to improve the Alliance feature. First, make more interesting bounties. Second, expand the scope of the feature beyond bounties.
More creative bounties alongside a way to drop more bounties or cycle them off of the board
We did recently get a set of new energy-spending bounties, which is nice, but the bounties need to be more inventive. Team specific bounties could be a fun way to introduce a flavor to the game that many have been clamoring for. Bounties like play X number of X-Men, win with X number of Symbiotes in your deck, hit with X number of Guardians of the Galaxy would be more interesting than “Discard X cards.” Other ideas for creative bounties include afflicting your opponent’s cards by X amount, bouncing X cards, or changing a location X number of times. Give us a truly interesting goal like filling a location with 4 copies of the same card, sacrificing Black Widow or Gamora by destroying them, or resurrecting Jean Grey with Phoenix Force. Of course any implementation of more creative bounties like these would have to come along with an increased ability to drop bounties or cycle them off of the bounty board, changes that should be implemented anyway, in my opinion.
Collaboration beyond bounties
The second way to improve Alliances is to make them about more than just mindlessly chasing bounty points. Making some incentive to share and play the decks of your Alliance-mates would be a nice way to foster cooperation. Incentivizing friendly battles with Alliance members could also be incredibly fun. For alliances to truly feel like a social feature rather than a set of hoops to be jumped through, there needs to be a lot more ways and reasons to interact with the people you share your Alliance with. Having collaborative tasks, especially ones not time-gated to a single week or tied to bounties would go a long way to breathing some freshness into Alliances. Improving the laggy, difficult to use chat would be great as well.
3) Can I send a Lasher with negative power to my opponent to boost my side?
Yep! You sure can!
https://youtube.com/shorts/P_ce8RWhNYM?si=6QhoVC1LEqj6A5sL
Lasher has proven to be an incredibly fun card. Here are a few more splashy Lasher plays.
Lasher made Beta Ray Bill go Backwards 🤣
— GreGor (@GreGor_2424) January 3, 2025
Lasher > Bruce Banner#MarvelSNAP pic.twitter.com/FReRMDX2Um
The hash-slinging Lasher! 😱 pic.twitter.com/v2VwTWei1a
— LaurenWhatevs (@LaurenWhatevs) January 1, 2025
Easily my favorite Lasher play to date. This feels like a card @LaurenWhatevs will pull some crazy combo with to do insane negative damage. pic.twitter.com/r2qDZpPoEP
— Chase Pitzer (@ChasePitzer) January 3, 2025
Now let's hop over to the official Marvel Snap discord and check out some Q&As from the Ask-The-Team channel.
4) Q: Has there ever been a card design that made you regret the initial system decision to not have a color or faction system? Sera control has always been a baffling deck to exist from a design standpoint for me, as it gets to play a universal cost reducer and every reactive tech card the player desires, which stands out as something that just wouldn’t be possible in other games.
A: Not card-specific, but I personally believe SNAP would be more fun and more robust with some form of segmentation in deckbuilding (teams would be my favorite).
-Glenn
Author’s note:
The “imbalance” patches that gave bonuses to playing certain characters together was a fun way to explore this. Hopefully they find some additional creative way to do something similar. Also, Alliance Bounties could be a way to add some of this flavor to the game without necessarily affecting design (see above).
5) Q: Expanding the HV ban list High Voltage is a great game mode where going big is the name of the game. Expanding the cards excluded from the format to include Arishem was a great move to prevent just ending your opponent's game plan. Why were other tech cards of this variety not included? It feels really bad to be setting up a Wong combo and getting it Cosmo-ed or to be playing big only to be hit by Shang in all lanes thanks to Zola. I understand the need for counterplay in the standard game of SNAP but I feel like High Voltage should be a place free of tech cards where you and your opponent just try and pull off the biggest numbers possible. Let the sandcastles be kick-free!
A: I believe the question above intended to reference Alioth, for clarity to other readers.
If we stripped all tech cards from the game, the best High Voltage deck would be the one or perhaps 1-3 decks that simply go the biggest the most often. It would reduce the diversity of the format a different way: by kicking down “medium-sized castles” that could otherwise enjoy an advantage over the big ones by being less vulnerable to disruption, or by being able to play disruption of their own.
Author's note:
Banning all tech cards would have the opposite effect that the OP would be hoping for. Games would feel both more tedious and meaningless. Instead, a rotating, seasonal-flavor-enhancing ban list when High Voltage returns is a smarter way to freshen up HV each time.
That's it for this week! Come find me on Bluesky (@scosco) or Twitter! Join in the conversation in the comments! What cosmetics do you want added? How would you increase the social feeling of Alliances?