Hello and welcome back to Burning Questions, your weekly romp through Marvel Snap's hottest topics! This week we're talking about Shou-Lao and fallen archetypes.
1) How far out of balance is Shou-Lao?
Once again we have a dominant Season Pass card. Shou-Lao is seemingly everywhere, spreading power around the board and causing mayhem. But how outside acceptable bounds is he?
Filtering to the last 7 days with the data provided by the SnapFan tracker, Shou-Lao has a strong meta share, appearing in 24.39% of matches. However, he's still not first. That honor still belongs to Merlin, despite a recent nerf! More concerning is his 59.43% drawn win rate. That's quite high, even compared to other historically dominant cards.
But let's dig deeper into what's going on here.
- Maverick is the 4th most played card at 18.37%
- Deafening Chord is the 5th most played card at 16.65%
- Kitty Pryde is the 6th most played card at 15.6%
- Scarlet Spider has a solid 11.29% play rate, but an extremely high drawn win rate at 60.1%
Is Shou-Lao enabling all these cards or are they enabling him? It's almost definitely a combination. While Kitty Pryde is clearly being elevated (she hadn't been strong recently), Maverick was already one of the best cards in the game. Maverick was being dramatically underrated before Shou-Lao's release, but he also happens to be the perfect card to ensure Shou-Lao's buffs are handed out in the most effective way. Without Maverick (and Scarlet Spider) to leverage Shou-Lao’s buffs, he would be a far weaker card.
The second key piece of context to point out is the role that powerful, low-cost skills are playing in all of this. Is Shou-Lao really the best card in the game or is he the card best positioned to play alongside, and benefit greatly from, cards like Merlin, Deafening Chord, and Majestic Wingbeat.
Other archetypes like Chamber ramp, Spectrum Ongoing, Discard, and small movers all have win rates that are nipping at Shou-Lao's heels.
Shou-Lao is too strong. So strong he's inevitably going to eat a nerf. He's versatile and is seeing play in a variety of ways. But he's also part of a strong package that could take some additional nerfs. No, it wouldn't mean they “died for Shou-Lao's sins.” Whenever Shou-Lao gets tagged with a nerf, I'm hoping it's to make him 5/6, with some changes to other cards as well, far more than I want him changed to only grant +2. It will be interesting to see where Second Dinner’s data guides them.
2) What archetypes are in need of a boost?
I believe every archetype has a place in Marvel Snap and should be strong enough to at least be played by its most dedicated fans. That doesn't mean every archetype should be equally powerful, but they should be within striking distance of an acceptable win rate. This way, enthusiasts of an archetype like, say, Clog or Lockdown can still choose to play it even if they're not dominating with it or even have a positive win rate. They can be expected to make some sacrifice to play according to their favored play style, but it should still be possible.
One archetype that has really fallen on unexpectedly hard times is Affliction. It has had turns as one of the game's dominant archetypes and it's not like it's ever completely disappeared. However, it needs some kind of boost to hold a place in our current meta that favors gigantic body after gigantic body.
However, hand-in-hand with any new cards or tweaks to the Affliction archetype should come a Luke Cage rework. He's become a design constraint not just as a blanket counter to Affliction, but as a key piece of Affliction himself. Give us some inventive new characters that can compete against the giant-card axis, but let's also fix Luke Cage while we're at it.
3) Would you take Snap as one of your desert island games?
Because Christian Donlan would. The legendary games writer shared his thoughts on Marvel Snap in a recent article. I found the article to be a fascinating insight into the mind of a non-tcg player who appreciates Marvel Snap. I recommend checking it out if you have a chance.
Now, let's hop over to the official Marvel Snap discord and grab a couple of questions from the ask-the-team channel.
4) Question:
Hello there Team, thanks for continuing to innovate and bring new ideas to the table.
Skills have been a great addition to the game, as they provide great maneuverability while not locking a spot on the board. Yet we have been facing a great deal with inconsistency with them.
A few examples of bugs and inconsistent behavior:
- Cards getting upgraded from a polimorph effect, like HV's reactor, turning into a skill and not banishing themselves (seen a lot of cards becoming Adamantium Infusion and not banishing on the last HV)
- Cosmo ability to negate a skill, but Alioth not (I know it says characters in the Allioth text)
- Shanna summoning 1 cost spell (she does not specify characters)
- A specific interaction with Nico Minoru:
2 cases that have the same foundation, location A has a Cosmo from a previous turn, and a skill being thrown into the cosmo location just for the (2 cards played) Shou Lau condition/ hand size consideration.
- Location A has Cosmo and Agony from a previous turn, in the current turn Nico is played with the transform into a demon effect in location B plus a random Merlin spell is played in Location A > Nico tries to transform the spell that didn't work because of Cosmo, Agony then tries to merge with the skill and gets DELETED from existence, not showing in the graveyard or the banished pile.
- Location A has Cosmo from a previous turn. In the current turn Nico is again played in location B with transform into a demon + a random merlin spell played in location A. Skill banishes with no effect as expected. Next turn Shou Lau is played in Location B, and fails to buff Nico even though it was the last Character played.
Answer:
We decided to approach this fairly conservatively, and start by only changing the things we knew needed to change, and addressing the rest as they come up. For example, Polymorphing wasn't clearly one way or the other until we had skills that made it happen, so we decided to let it play out.
Many of the cards you list above simply do what they say--that's not inconsistent, that's just different. Arana moves things to the right, Iron Fist moves them to the left.
- The Agony interaction is a result of Nico succeeding in changing the banished Skill to a Demon, and Agony now sees that the Skill is a character and can be merged with. That's a bug, we should fix it.
- As-is, Nico doesn't get the buff from Shou because the banished Skill-Demon is the last character played. Fixing the bug above will also fix this.
-Glenn
Scosco's Note:
There are indeed some wonky interactions with Skills. Anything that leaves an unbanished Skill on board should be changed. Sersi should not be able to transform Characters into Skills, for example. And Nico is just kind of a confusing card that may be in need of a general consistency audit.
5) Question:
Hey guys,
I’ve always understood pretty well how Luke Cage works, but I always see a lot of people who get confused, like the recent question about Shadow King.
As I read the answer on that question, I started to wonder… why not just change Luke’s wording to more accurately describe the effect? Something like “Your cards ignore negative Power modifiers.” might go a long way toward clarifying the functionality, compared to “cannot have their Power reduced,” which has led to some understandable confusion.
Is it just a matter of trying to avoid introducing a term like “Power modification” into the game’s lexicon?
Answer:
It would add vocabulary words, make the game less accessible/more verbose, and probably not meaningfully reduce the actual quantity of confusion--maybe by like 50%, optimistically? But the costs of the text change, while small, you basically pay forever, on all players, and on all similar cards. It's just not a great trade either way, so given that I'll take less words on the cards.
-Glenn
Scosco's Note:
People tend to focus on wording in Marvel Snap way too much and not on the best function for a card. Don't get me wrong, cards should have consistent wording and there should be an internal logic to the way effects are described in game, but not at the expense of the most desirable function of a card. People forget that not everyone engages with this game the same way they do. The wording on cards needs to aim for the most economical way to express what a casual player of the game would expect the function of a card to be.
Not what a seasoned card gamer or fan of game design would expect, but a casual player who has never played a similar game. To me, Luke Cage currently functions this way. Though he certainly does not necessarily function in the way an experienced card gamer might expect, he does function like a casual gamer who reads the card once and throws it into a deck might expect.
That's it for this week! Check out my YouTube channel, Fourth Location, and come back next week for another special surprise guest! Before you go, our intrepid dataminers have uncovered information pertaining to the upcoming run of Sanctum Showdown.