Another week, another batch of Burning Questions. This week, we're discussing when to snap, temporary card changes, the recent OTA patch, and more!
1) When can I snap on turn 6? What about turn 1?
Snapping on turn 6 is generally inadvisable. Snapping on turn 6 when in a dominant position is colloquially known in the community as a “boomer snap.” You are costing yourself cubes since your opponent may have considered staying had you not snapped and scared them off. However, as with most rules in life, there are exceptions. If you're unsure if you will win, you can consider snapping on turn 6. If you're facing a 50/50 situation you might want to consider snapping to drive your opponent to retreat. It takes experience to know when it's really 50/50, and you're not just falling into your opponent’s trap, though. Mathematically, you'll come ahead in the long term by snapping on true coin flip situations since you add occasional opponent retreats (which can't have negative cube values) into the dataset. Another turn 6 snapping condition would be when you can make an obvious, common play, but you have an unusual alternative that you think will win. Your opponent expects one play, and you hit them with a different one. The trick is knowing what your opponent expects. Additionally, you can bluff snap on turn 6. You would typically do this when you have a clear win condition… sitting on the bottom of your deck. Say, for example, you are playing a Nimrod deck. You have just put down a 12-power Nimrod with the help of Shuri. But, somehow, your final three cards in your deck are Carnage, Venom, and Deathlok. Your opponent would never reasonably expect this. You can simulate a “boomer snap” and hope your opponent retreats. Keep in mind. However, each of the above scenarios requires you to have the meta-knowledge to evaluate the situation correctly.
As for Snapping on turn 1 is also not usually advisable, but there are plenty of situations where I'll smash that button on the first turn. In the following screenshot, my opponent was playing Thanos (I was sure since I checked how many cards were in their deck as the game started). I had a terrible hand and an awful first draw from District X. Knowing that Thanos players tend not to be very happy when District X replaces their deck, I quickly snapped to try to get a retreat — otherwise, I was very likely to lose at least one cube. Essentially, this is a +2 cube swing for me.
Other locations that I'll consider insta-snapping on are Lamentis-1 and The Peak. Sometimes, I'll turn one snap if I'm in a groove with a deck and have a great hand. The most common times to Snap are turns 3, 4, and 5, but there are plenty of reasons to snap at different times.
2) Why is Second Dinner doing “temporary” card changes like the ones to Zabu and Thanos?
The simple answer is that some cards are too strong and changing them appropriately takes time. Thanos was squeezing out too many other decks and it was vital for the long-term development of the game that Zabu and Shang Chi be decoupled, even as Zabu's play rate was dropping.
The more complicated answer concerns Second Dinner's stated goal of “metagame churn.” They want constant change and freshness because that is what modern, restless video game players demand. One way traditional CCGs achieved freshness was with rotation. Giving cards like Zabu and Thanos, which amounts to a ‘timeout,’ achieves a similar aim. It is sort of like a micro-rotation. The problem with rotation in card games is that parts of the collections that players have built up are basically lost. Instead of rotating a card like America Chavez, it can be reworked. After her initial change to 4-5, Captain Marvel immediately became one of the best cards in the game. After introducing several new cards and some significant meta changes, it was appropriate to end her timeout. Currently, Werewolf by Night is in the dog house. He was undeniably too strong in his heyday, but enough has changed I think he could be returned to his initial stats, or, at the very least, given a buff from where he currently is. In Snap, you don't have to worry about large parts of your collection rotating out, but some cards might get micro-rotation timeouts in the name of freshness and metagame churn.
3) What are your favorite Jim Lee variants?
Legendary comic artist Jim Lee is top of mind these days with X-Men ‘97 killing it in streaming. Our two X-Men ‘97 Twitch Drop variants aren't illustrated by Jim Lee (Dave Gozu created these ones), but they're inspired by the legendary 1992 Impel X-Men cards that helped make Jim Lee into even more of a superstar than he already was. Ben Brode got a complete set of these cards for the Second Dinner offices in the game's early development; their aesthetic is core to Marvel Snap.
My top 3 Jim Lee variants with art lifted from that esteemed traditing card set are:
Jean Grey, Dark Phoenix variant
Angel, Archangel variant. Sadly, this was only available in a low-value gold bundle from the game's early days (March 2023).
Magneto
Which cards would I love to see added? All of them, but let's start with these four.
Now let's dive into the official Marvel Snap discord and see what Glenn Jones and co. are chatting about. Let's start with a pair of related Darkhawk questions.
4) Q: Before the Darkhawk change a couple months ago you had nerfed the Darkhawk archetype by changing Rock Slide. In today’s OTA you said ”…there’s a delicate balance to preserve around having too many Rocks.” This makes me curious why Darkhawk himself received a nerf today rather than changing Rock Slide back to a 4/5 or 4/6 to make it harder to fill your opponents deck with rocks early. Was Darkhawk the only outlier in his decks or was this change made to nerf the package as a whole, and if so why did you choose to change Darkhawk?
A: Darkhawk was by far the strongest card in his deck, and the deck had a very favorable set of matchups. We didn't want to hit the deck too hard but it merited a nerf; 1 Power off Darkhawk was among the softest changes we could make.
-Glenn
Q: Darkhawk was not among the top 10 most played decks in community data yet still got nerfed. Was the data mismatch with yours or low-popularity cards could also get nerfed? Asking this because almost all other card games I played only nerf/ban popular cards.
A: The low play rate was part of the reason why we let the deck sit for a bit. Since it wasn't stifling much, there was less risk to seeing if its matchup spread changed over time, but it didn't.
While play rate is one meaningful criteria for balance adjustment, it's not the only one. Darkhawk was an outlier on multiple other axes for a while now.
-Glenn
Author's note:
Many of us were surprised to see Darkhawk on the list of nerfs when the patch notes first leaked. I agree that only cards with high play rates should be adjusted. It would have been nice to let the community rediscover the power of Darkhawk on our own before nerfing him. Darkhawk must have been pretty far outside on those ‘other axes’ to warrant a nerf when it was seeing such little play. That being said, the nerf was so gentle that it might actually have a buoying effect on Darkhawk’s play rate. They've shined a spotlight on him and told us he is strong.
5) Q: Has the team ever considered giving revealed cards that move some kind of priority or separate interaction phase during the reveal phase that they are queued to move? I obviously have no idea if this is possible or difficult to implement, but move interactions are the hardest for me personally to plan out and predict, mostly because any play queued before the move will proc before any movement triggers activate, but the card will still appear and be affected as if it is at the new location.
The best example I can give (and perhaps the most common) is how I've destroyed my own pheonix force a few times because I queued up a venom or carnage, then moved a ressurected multiple man into that lane thinking the destroy would happen before the move, thereby saving the pheonix force, or alternatively, multiple man's ability would proc before it was destroyed. In reality, multiple man is destroyed and no copy is made despite the fact that the card did move to a new location.
The only reason I can see that this current confusing order has to exist is to preserve the opponent's ability to shang chi a moved card before you have revealed, but making all moves proc all their interactions before cards are revealed for either player would make the whole experience more consistent and predictable. Maybe there are ways to use this interactive gray area to your benefit like the move not proccing locations, but I don't know if that's actually possible.
A: There are a number of confusing interactions and experiences due to the current implementation of "staged moves" like Vision and New York. We've identified a solution we like and you can expect to see it in a future patch.
-Glenn
Author's note:
This is great news. The various strange interactions with move are among the biggest headaches for new players and the most common interaction questions I get on Twitter. Hopefully, these changes achieve their goal of making everything more intuitive, like the success of codifying the team carried out on locations earlier in the year.
That's it for this week. Share your opinions in the comments or reach out to me on Twitter to ask your own Burning Question!