Hello and welcome to this week's Burning Questions, where we try to answer the questions the community has been preoccupied with most each week!
1) Can titles ever be cool?
In the early days of Snap, Avatars were pretty much just as undesirable as titles. They were both seen as the chaff you get in between real rewards. Then, we got rare avatars added to the mix. With shiny Avatar borders as the conquest reward and Spotlight Avatars as an incentive to buy new cards, the state of avatars has changed. Second Dinner pulled off the impossible by making avatars cool. There are so many rare avatars that when you pull one, it has a high chance of being one you haven't seen before. Nearly indecipherable pixel avatars have even become a hipster semi-ironic badge.
Can the same somehow be done for titles, or are they doomed to be the filler in our caches forever?
You can see a list of all of the titles here.
The Official Marvel Snap account recently asked for our favorite titles in a recent tweet.
What's the best in-game title? 🤔
— MARVEL SNAP (@MARVELSNAP) February 23, 2023
We'll go first: "This Is My Full-Time Job"#MARVELSNAPThoughts
Some of the responses criticized the “self-deprecating gamer aesthetic” of the titles, pointed out typos in them, or talked about how getting them from caches isn't a positive feeling. I don't necessarily agree that the titles have a “cringe” gamer style, but they all seem… written by the same person. Or at least they feel written by a small group of similar-minded people. Only a handful of them feel truly unique. One suggestion I've seen repeated is to make many more Marvel Comics and Marvel lore-related titles. Why do we not have “With great power comes great responsibility,” or “Excelsior!” or “Make mine Marvel!” yet? Give me "Hey, look. It's my head." We have a few titles that reference comic storylines, but getting some deep-cut comic references into the title pool would be awesome. Snap also tends to lean towards the MCU over the comics, but I think comic lore or even famous comic quotes would work better in titles than staying so close to the MCU. Making the titles more unique or varied in style would be a good start, but giving them different rarities would be the best way to make titles more desirable. One of the main reasons avatars became a little cooler is that you can feel like you have an avatar that very few people have. We have bundle titles, and those seem to get used pretty often. But what if Second Dinner sprinkled some titles into the regular mix with really low pull rates? It would be cool to pull a title you've never seen before. Another way to achieve this would be to add a lot more titles. Titles seem like they're probably easier to produce than avatars or other in-game items, so maybe a massive flood of titles could make each one feel more special. This would affect the tiny group of players that are rare variant complete negatively, but the average players would still get the same amount of variants.
Let me know in the comments how you would make titles cool and pitch some suggestions for new titles!
2) Is the game getting simpler?
Glenn Jones recently said this in response to a question about Hela:
"I think the weakening of Professor X, combined with strong decks either being linear with no counters or being excessively reliant on counters Hela can ignore, has given Hela a window.
While I could go on and on about why Hela is stronger these days (and why it's a sign of issues) I was struck by the line about “strong decks either being linear… or excessively reliant on counters.”
While Snap has always been a game about big splashy combo decks vs. decks with tech cards to a degree, this seems especially true now. I think, in particular, the idea that so many strong decks are so linear these days is particularly frightening. Gone are the days when you could play a deck of cards with a distributed curve of costs and decent abilities. Now, you must build towards a giant combo or directly counter them. Have you noticed streamers rarely do fun “draft” streams anymore? Those decks were never good, but watching a streamer pull out a couple of wins or stumble to a gold ticket was always funny. Now, those decks just get bulldozed.
So, how did we end up here?
First, the top decks got better and more streamlined at “doing their thing.” Hela got a few consistency tools and moved away from Invisible Woman/M.O.D.O.K. builds. Living Tribunal has become more consistent as well. Destroy decks are worked out to the point where we’ve figured out the perfect 11 or 12 cards. Decks feel tighter as the community figures out optimal lists.
Meanwhile, Thanos has a veritable arsenal of new tools, notably Caiera and Blob. Thanos, a deck that always felt like it could go in several directions and involved a variety of in-game choices, has been vastly narrowed in deck construction and play. Lockjaw made it so Thanos was far more about where you play your cards than choosing which card to play at a given time. You have a clear, simple goal: get out, Caiera, and win two lanes with giant cards. Hopefully, the Lockjaw change moves the needle a little bit.
Second, the disappearance of “mid-range strategies” and “scaling decks” dramatically reduces the number of player choices in a game. Big combo decks usually ask, “Did I draw the card I need?” rather than “Which is the right card to play now?” Some of these strategies have been nerfed out of the game (via nerfs to Elsa Bloodstone, Kitty Pryde, Angela, Beast, Captain Marvel, etc.), and others have been power crept out by the big gatekeepers of the format. Why play a card with 5-8 power when you could play Lockjaw and cheat out something huge? The best way Second Dinner could reverse the game's current state is to make these decks viable again. However, this is more difficult than reverting a few nerfs or changing Lockjaw. These types of decks thrived before Loki was added to the game, and if they come back, he will either feast on them again, or those cards will just become cards played alongside him.
Third, the endgame has become a lot more simple. There are only three ways to finish a game strong these days. Either you're playing the final piece of your combo to put the icing on your win (Hela, Onslaught, Knull, Zola, etc.), or you're playing Alioth or Shang. I know people hated the heyday of Leaders, but he was at least more complex than Alioth. Aero was too strong, but she had some subtleties to her play and counter-play. Alioth is just binary most of the time. We need more exciting ways to counter our opponent on the last turn than deleting their biggest card or the turn. I think it's possible that Alioth being a hyper-simple version of Leader and Aero is an intentional design goal. Newer players hated losing to those doors-slammers more than other cards because they were occasionally confusing and harder to use for themselves. Alioth and Shang are easy, as are big, linear combos. Leech should, hypothetically, be acting as a safety valve against both the big combos and the game-ending tech cards. Still, he's not doing a very good job suppressing their usage (while remaining annoying within the top decks anyway).
New cards and abilities should slowly make the game feel more complex, not less. The constriction of choice in so many top decks (both in deck building and in play) has simplified the game despite adding new cards.
3)
What is your favorite card vfx?
— Novice Force Shielder (@NoviceShielder) February 10, 2024
There are plenty of great VFX in Marvel Snap. Some effects perfectly encapsulate the card's ability and what is happening on the board, like Alioth and Rogue. Others are great representations of the characters they're connected to, like Mr. Fantastic and the Punisher.
My favorites are Goose, Arnim Zola, Snowguard, and evolved Thing.
When new VFX comes out in a patch, you can sometimes get a rundown from either Marvel Snap Center or 'Nuff Said Bob on YouTube.
That's it for this week. Head over to Twitter and let me know if you've got a burning question you want the answer to, and be sure to share your opinions in the comments!