Hello and welcome back to Burning Questions, your weekly look at what's occupying the collective brainpower of the Snap community! This week we got a massive OTA, Spotlight Variants returned (kind of), and more!
1) Is Thanos dead?
Thanos has been dominating the meta game for nearly a month, but was recently hit with one change to a stone and two indirect nerfs. So, did Second Dinner slay the mad titan?
You're going to hear a lot of people over the next few days say either that the nerf was nothing and will have no impact on Thanos or that the change was too harsh and Thanos is no longer competitive. Ignore both sides—Thanos could be noticeably worse than before and still be one of the top decks. The reason I'm optimistic about this package of small changes is that it makes it harder for Thanos to rely so completely on tech cards. Ongoing Thanos took a hit from the Shield change and the change to the Time Stone too, but that deck remains largely unchanged since it was primarily a point slam deck.
Tech Thanos is going to have a slightly tougher time playing Mockingbird in some matches, will occasionally lose a Strange Supreme location by a point, and will fail to draw Shang Chi and Alioth a little bit more often. The changes are small, but they add up. Also, factor in that the player base seems to avoid recently nerfed decks, even if they're still good, and we can at least expect a respite from Thanos' reign while players try out Cerebro and Storm. If Thanos starts to rise again over the next few weeks, removing some of his power or reworking the Soul Stone would be the best next step.
2) What's going on with Spotlight variants?
Last week, we saw the release of some Spotlight variants in the Daily Offer shop for 2400 Gold. Then, we found that the dates for future Spotlights were removed from the game files. Now, Spotlight variants have all had new dates added. This implies that the release of Spotlights for 2400 Gold wasn't popular with players and that they will be released in some other way. I actually don't have a major problem with the 2400 Gold price tag, but making them somehow available for Tokens makes more sense.
The game needs more Token sinks for whales, the Spotlights used to cost keys, and 2400 Gold just doesn't look appealing next to 700 and 1200 Gold variants. They're supposed to be pretty exclusive cosmetics so a price of 3000 Tokens wouldn't seem unreasonable to me, especially if they came with the Spotlight avatar. Additionally, re-marrying these variants to the release of new cards would help make them feel special, so some way to pull them from Snap Packs would be a good solution too.
I wouldn't even have an issue with the entire concept of Spotlight variants being eliminated and shifting the already commissioned assets to Super Rare variants, but feedback I've seen seems to show that a lot of players still want this category to exist in the game.
3) Did Makkari really deserve a nerf?
Makkari was underrated for a long time and she started to really break out recently. She could have developed into a menace in a variety of decks with Storm, Silver Surfer, or Cerebro. I'm not sure if she definitely needed to be hit, but she remains a cool card even with the power loss.
Check out this amazing Makkari clip from user xcombox on Reddit.
Now, let's hop over to the ask-the-team channel on the official Marvel Snap discord and grab a couple of questions and answers!
4) Q: The Storm -> War Machine -> Legion still works because Legion will just copy Flooded which got no changes. Was this intended? As it is the line the change stops is just the Storm -> Legion line which was never an issue to begin with.
Follow up to this:
Why does the team want this combo in the game? Does the team feel it promotes interesting and interactive gameplay? I’m just frankly very confused as to why this change was made. Were people asking for this combo back?
A: The change is that if you Legion the turn after Storm, only the current "Flooding" location closes next turn. The new locations created by Legion stay as "Flooding" for the next turn.
The "perfect curve" of Storm -> War Machine -> Legion still works as before and is intended.
-Griffin
Full explanation is in the OTA post/blog:
"We previously changed Storm to 4/5 primarily to weaken her synergy with Legion, as a War Machine + Legion deck was proving popular and frustrating. That gave us the opportunity to explore different potential executions on the way Storm worked, but along the way we also decided to evaluate how Legion should work with similarly timed locations, as Flooding itself was inconsistent. We built it that way in part because so many playtesters expected Legion to flood the board in a single turn.
In the end, rather than change the explicit functionality of Storm, we decided that copies of locations would not inherit the turn timing status of the original. This will weaken the interaction with Legion by delaying the copies of Flooding for another turn, meaning we can safely move Storm back to 3-Cost.”
Author's Note:
As someone who has played quite a bit of Storm/Legion decks, I don't recall Storm>Legion being a common play line. The ideal play line is Storm>War Machine>Legion, but I don't think Storm>Legion was the most common plan B. Rather, the deck had other backup plans. I'm not exactly complaining, since I like Storm, but this does seem like a negligible change from Storm's prior form. Perhaps a full change that makes it so that Legion creates flooding locations from flooded rather than an immediate lock would be a better solution to decouple the two.
5) Q: From reports I have seen online, the Chinese server seems to have quite a few features and QOL improvements I would personally would love to see in the US version. I know the version of the game is operated and developed by a different team in China, but I was curious how much cross-collaboration there is between the them and SD. Any chance we will see some of their features come our way anytime soon? If not, does SD use their ideas as motivation for new features/designs in our version?
A: We're watching with a keen eye at how updates and features for Snap in China perform and how they're received by players. While it's a great piece of data that can and will help inform how the future of SNAP will look, it's also a bespoke design with unique challenges for a unique region and we have to evaluate whether or not those ideas work for the global Snap community as a whole.
Author's note:
If Second Dinner is truly getting data about the Chinese client, that would be good news for some sort of draft mode—the Chinese one seems quite popular. I would like to dispel the notion that the Chinese version is better. It is significantly worse in most ways, including acquisition and polish. I do love their quick-and-dirty limited time game modes, Infinite Draft and Genosha Party Mode, though. You can check out video of those modes plus a tour of the Chinese client here.
That's it for this week! Come find me on social media for more Snap and comic book talk! Hop in the comments and let me know what you think of the OTA!