Hello and welcome back to Burning Questions, your romp through the main questions in Marvel Snap each week. This week we're talking about the new game mode, Eson, Joaquin Torres, and more!
1) How grindy will Sanctum Showdown be?
It's very clear from the answers that the team have given on discord, the screenshots of the new mode, and the prices we see in the shop, that you are not meant to be able to get all of the rewards as a free-to-play player. Maxing out the shop, or even half of it, isn't going to be possible, even for the grindiest of grinders.
I'm worried that when the new game mode launches and people figure this out, they'll feel like Second Dinner is being stingy. But I don't think this is the case at all. Previously, the grind in Deadpool's Diner for a single card, felt pretty arduous, especially for those who didn't think the mode itself was fun. High Voltage was better received, but it still took hours of engagement with the week-long mode and making sure not to miss too many resets, again for a single card.
This new game mode is far more generous than that. Perhaps you'll walk away with two new cards and a handful of cosmetics you like. Maybe you're going to prioritize getting one series 5 card and some borders. If you grind hard and/or win a lot you could get three brand new cards!
That's not less generous, it's more generous but just structured differently. Players will have to choose what is most important to them. To me that's far better than the rewards structure for the Diner and High Voltage, but I'm worried that Second Dinner's poor track record (philosophical opposition?) of communicating how much effort is required to earn things and weirdly unrealistic player expectations are going to combine to make what should be celebrated, poorly received instead. If the new game mode is actually fun, that would help a lot. More explicit communication about roughly what a free-to-play player can expect to earn, would help even more.
2) Can Eson be released as datamined?
He absolutely shouldn't be. There's a chance he is, but he's far too powerful. I've done a little back-of-the-napkin theory-crafting and it's quite easy to make a strong, cohesive deck that would be nearly game-breaking. Of course, we don't actually know what his “Legendary” keyword means, even if we have good guesses and we don't even know if this is still the design they're targeting for the character.
So, how would he have to change to be good, worth using Spotlight Keys for, but not so powerful he has a negative impact on the game?
The first, most obvious answer is to make him grant +1 power instead of 2, but I almost feel like that makes him a little too boring. Obviously good, but less exciting. What about “give half of them +2?” You could make him a 6/10, but that's probably not enough, or you could make him like 6/-1 or something silly. But they should choose a cost that makes it harder to build around him. 10 isn't a terrible choice since there are a lot of 10s in the game. So what's the hardest low-ish power to go without? 7? 6? 3? Experimenting with a change like that would make him more acceptable. Still terrifying, no doubt, but perhaps Celestials should be terrifying. In the comments, share a stat line that would keep Eson balanced but still make him exciting to play.
3) Have you found a great deck for Joaquin Torres?
Nope! He's alright in bounce decks, but I'm not sure how much he actually adds across larger samples. Like Frigga, it may take time and maybe even a small buff before Joaquin makes a meta impact. I do think someone will eventually find something. However, Joaquin has already given us the greatest Marvel Snap clip of the year! In a battle of highly-ranked players Cesanasz was streaming when he came across Splat who pulled off a sequence you have to see.
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2372278732?t=29h10m41s
Now let's look at the busy ask-the-team channel from the Marvel Snap discord and find a few intriguing developer answers!
4) Q: The gameplay of Sanctum is a really neat design for Marvel Snap and easily the game mode with the largest departure to how Snap normally works. I’d love any other information you’d be happy/able to share on the design and iteration process for it!
A: SNAP released before I joined the team, so I spent a lot of time thinking about it critically on my own—where it was strong, where it was weak, things I might’ve done differently, etc. I enjoyed locations like Asgard that twist players’ incentives without being as rigid as Crimson Cosmos and the like, because they get more interesting and exciting as you combine them together, not less. Once I was in the building, I sketched together a version of the game that used points to make turn-to-turn dynamics. It was fun, but we weren’t focusing on game modes at the time, so I shelved it—until I was tasked with designing a game mode.
I do believe the core gameplay of Showdown is robust enough to support its own game, with card and location designs more suited to it. I hope to design some of those for future runs!
Author's note:
Wow, it's really interesting to see that Sanctum Showdown is Glenn's brainchild. My hopes for this mode hinge entirely on the actual gameplay. Rewards are nice, but I'd love to see a mode that is genuinely enjoyable. The mechanics of Deadpool's Diner didn't add a lot to the game and the progression curve actively hurt it. High Voltage was fun enough and I personally felt like I found nearly ideal decks for the mode, but it lacked the depth and stakes of Marvel Snap. Hopefully, this is finally the mode that gives us a new way to play that is genuinely fun.
5) Q: Why do the event cards seem to match past seasons
Starting with Lasher coming in Rivals but matching to Symbiote season, it seems our special event cards are "out of sync" slightly. Laufey could have been with War of the Nine Realms, Gorgon with Dark Avengers, Uncle Ben in Spider-Verse, etc.
Did these get made as extras for specific seasons and just get shuffled around? How does something like that happen?
A: We’ve been very agile with our development of game modes, and to support that effort Design has been working on extra cards for each season theme to ensure we had a surplus. This has also given us the flexibility of deciding which cards we want to release with each season as Series 5, rather than being locked in. I’m optimistic that as we continue improving our game modes’ live ops we’ll be able to do more uniquely suited collectibles.
Author's note:
We've suspected something along these lines for a while as each month we were finding more than a season's worth of cards through data mining. This is an excellent way to improve the card development process. The team gets to make sure they're releasing the cards they want to express each season’s theme and it makes the event cards feel like a nice peek back in a seasonal system that usually just plows forward. Some of the frustration with Snap has been with its once-weekly release schedule and being able to dump batches of cards simultaneously like this is just what Snap needs to maintain freshness.
That's it for this week! Head to the comments to share your thoughts and come find me on Bluesky (@scodenim).