Hello and welcome back to Burning Questions, a weekly walk through hot topics in the Marvel Snap community. In this edition, we're talking about drops, more drops, and game design!
1) How much will the upcoming Twitch drops help with acquiring the new cards from Sanctum Showdown?
It makes a massive difference. It's worth figuring out how to acquire Twitch drops now if you've never done it. Second Dinner recently announced that there will be drops running alongside the Sanctum from February 25th to March 5th. The rewards are as follows:
Given the prices we've seen in the Charm shop (1200 for each pull for one of the three new cards, 2250 for an unowned Series 4/5 card) and that scrolls regenerate at a rate of two every eight hours, this will allow more people to get all three cards and make it so that fewer people are locked out of the mode for hours at a time. Second Dinner estimated that a free to play player with an approximately 50% win rate would be able to get 2 portal pulls. This should push that a lot closer to 3.
2) Which of the cards dropping to series 4 are worth spending 3000 tokens on?
In case you missed it, Second Dinner announced the biggest series drop ever that includes 13 cards moving to series 3 and 12 cards moving to series 4. But which of those dropping to series 4 are worth spending your hard earned resources on? There are quite a few!
Cards To Series 4 on March 4th:
My first recommendation is Cull Obsidian. In fact, you might want him for Sanctum Showdown that runs from February 25th to March 11th, but he'll cost you an extra 3000 if you get him before the patch on the 5th! Cull is useful in decks other than Surtur, but Skaar would make a solid pickup alongside Cull.
Cannonball is another solid card that I believe is worth 3000 to add to your collection. He's a solid piece in clog decks, but he's the type of card that will always work his way back into the meta from time to time.
There are a few archetypes or deck styles that are currently underappreciated. A committed rogue deck builder can absolutely still make winning decks with Black Knight, Ms Marvel, Werewolf by Night, and Annihilus, despite them not being the dominant force each of them was at one point in their history. All of these are worth 3000 if you have an idea for them.
3) What should I spend my gold on?
There is a lot of competition for your gold right now, from an amazing current bundle, a gold thirsty new game mode, and an upcoming bundle.
This current Anti-Venom bundle is solid value even if you already have Anti-Venom in your collection. If you don't and you'd like to play with him immediately, it's a no brainer.
Sanctum Showdown is technically free to play, but setting aside a bit of gold to re-up on scrolls is a pretty good idea. Scrolls will cost 40 gold and being willing to occasionally pay is going to allow you to keep grinding for charms without being locked out. Additionally, the Sanctum Shop is stocked full of interesting items, priced in Charms, that putting in extra gold will help you acquire, probably more inexpensively than after the mode ends. I don't recommend throwing a ton of gold at this mode, but a small amount will go a long way.
This bundle is a long way off and a lot can change between now and then including contents and cost, but personally I'm going to try to save up for it.
4) Q: If I'm understanding the mechanisms correctly, Arnim Zola and Taskmaster are both effectively 0-power duds from Black Vortex. 99% of the time Zola doesn't have a card to copy (because it's the *first* card played at that location), and TM unintuitively tries to copy the power of the card that was played to Black Vortex (but that card is gone).
Have you ever considered removing them from the available cards that Black Vortex can generate?
A: We generally prefer not to “hide” rules like these. For example, removing those from this pool but not X-Mansion’s is inherently unintuitive. We also do want some “duds” in these random pools. However, I’m open to the idea that we should draw some of these lines more generously.
-Glenn
Author's note:
Those locations would be a lot less interesting without these “duds.” Why not just have no locations? Players get frustrated with low-roll RNG from locations like this, but the game would be a lot poorer and less interesting without them.
5) Q: Cards like RedHulk, Ross, Super skrull, Gorr, etc have a pay-off that is dependent on the opponent rather than the player playing them. These cards feel very unsatisfying to play cuz one game Redhulk will be a 6/19, and in another game where he is worse than regular Hulk, while the player doesn't do anything differently. I also found it's not fun when playing against them cuz my opponents just get this underserving pay-off when I have to play my deck in a way that benefit them.
Have you ever thought about changing them so that they are more reliant to the player playing them? Gorr are the best out of these but even then, the different between Gorr playing against a bounce deck and against a spectrum/Surtur deck is massive.
A: These cards purposefully expand into that design space, and we’ll continue to explore it from time to time. It’s one of the ways we can craft unique risks/rewards that let players decide which tradeoffs are important to them.
Author's note:
Again, the game would be poorer without a mix of payoff types. There is a tendency by players to want everything to depend on their own actions but that's both bad design and unrealistic.
That's it for this week! Come find me on Bluesky (@scosco) for breaking Snap news, discussion, and decks, including Sanctum Showdown decks coming soon!