Hello and welcome back to Burning Questions, your weekly run through Snap's hottest topics! This week we got a giant-sized OTA and Sanctum Showdown started!
1) Was Lockjaw nerfed or buffed?
I saw a lot of head scratching when the OTA dropped yesterday. Many were saying Lockjaw was dead since he can now only pull one card out of your deck per game, but in the patch notes Second Dinner said “this might be a larger buff than we are expecting, but we also suspect that this will get the creative juices flowing and encourage some cool new decks.” So which is it? Was he nerfed into the ground or buffed to the heavens?
Lockjaw was solidly in the bottom 10 in play rate, so if you were playing a lot of Lockjaw you were definitely nearly alone. Given that, it's definitely a buff. It's a nerf to his previous use, but he's going to be used in totally different ways now. He's not an engine to pull giant cards out of your deck, he's a combo piece. Lockjaw simply wasn't performing in decks fully built around him, so I applaud the effort to give him a totally new role. So, how are we going to use the Inhuman dog now?
One of the reasons I'm a fan of this change is that it divorces him from Thanos. Instead of swapping a ton of small cards, you want to swap exactly one small card for something better. The ideas that come to mind first are Evolved Wasp, Hammers, M’Baku, The Hood, and Electro. The other thing to keep in mind is that Lockjaw is no longer location specific. That makes a huge difference. You can indeed tuck an M'Baku into your deck and pull out a Galactus! Try these!
Green Jaw
Shhhhhh!
Dog Hand
GIANT M'BAKU
2) Should Second Dinner nerf and buff cards based on other media?
Ironheart got a small buff in this OTA, the same week her new Disney+ show debuted. It's not official that this buff was timed to coincide with the show, but it's something they've done in the past. But should they let outside media dictate game balance changes?
Yes! Absolutely! Of course they should do this! The point of OTA balance changes is to make the game fun and exciting. Sure, there will always be nerfs to cards that are dominating the game in play rate, but that still leaves plenty of room for them to buffs like this. Assuming Ironheart was already on the waiting list for a buff, it's definitely smarter to do that the week the show comes out as opposed to the month before or after. Part of the allure of Snap is acting out battles with your favorite Marvel characters and timing changes this way is an excellent way to enhance that. I would actually advocate for them doing this more often (once again, White Widow shouldn't have been unplayable when Thunderbolts* came out!).
Who else could they do this with in the near future? Fantastic Four is getting a whole new set of cards, so I don't think they're to buff any of the existing ones. There's an Eyes of Wakanda animated series coming on August 6th and while there aren't any existing Snap characters scheduled to appear, Okoye and Nakia are always buff candidates since they so often reside at the bottom in play rate.
3) Who won the interior art contest from last week?
Last week, I talked about how awesome it would be to include more interior art from comics in Snap. I gave out some PAX codes to three lucky winners that submitted proposals for Snap variants. Here are the winning entries!
Bill Sienkiewicz has long been one of my most wanted artist additions, so the Kingpin was an easy choice. The Doctor Strange is by Tradd Moore and leans into something Snap needs a lot more of: weirdness. Snap variants are best when they stand out and Moore's art definitely does that. The Storm by Stefano Caselli is a little less obvious. I chose this one for two reasons: Storms hair design in this era is my favorite of all time (the panel is from X-Men Red #7 in the Krakoa era). Second, I wanted to choose a panel with a speech bubble. Snap should fully lean into the comic book aesthetic and even go as far as including speech bubbles on the art!
Now let's grab a couple of developer questions and answers from the official Marvel Snap discord.
4) Q: Why did you make Mercury so strong?
Mercury is far too strong a card. I don’t just mean the overused combo with Cannonball. Mercury punishes the Move archetype so heavily. An archetype which never ever dominates the metagame. An archetype which, to be skilled enough to consistently win with, takes a lot of skill. An archetype that simply did not need to be punished like this.
I suggest the card should either stay a two cost card but not be able to move itself, or keep all its abilities and cost 4. As it is currently, it’s just too cheap and versatile. I’d love to see a nerf or hear some reasoning on why not.
A: Move (and cards that move) have quite often been strong, so having a solid release valve available in the metagame is quite useful to us. We've nerfed quite a few cards to keep Human Torch around as-is that Mercury might've been able to avoid.
Mercury's winrate and cuberate, while positive, are both quite modest. She is *well* below the thresholds for a nerf on all counts.
Author's note:
Mercury is an example of a card that was released at the perfect power level. New cards should be impactful! They should win some games and you should lose to them sometimes! Mercury has certainly not felt oppressive, but she's felt good and playable.
5) Q: Will frequent and back to back LTGMs be common going forward?
Without going into a subjective ramble, personally LTGMs aren’t my cup of tea. but I know a lot of others love them. Did the team do this as an experiment or was it backed by player feedback? Should this feel more common with the increase of new cards being a thing?
Bonus Question: Are LTGMs the only new ways for the game to offer new cards or are there other methods being cooked up?
A: It is both an experiment and based on player feedback. We're looking at other methods to connect players with new cards beyond LTGMs, but we have found linking them to LTGMs to be one of the most widely enjoyed ways to do that.
-Glenn
Author's note:
I saw a lot of this sentiment this week. The idea is that Second Dinner shouldn't burn their players out with so many game modes. This is a misidentification of the problem. The actual complaint is, once again, about the game economy and acquisition anxiety. Snap has long had far too little to do in the game. We need way more game modes, not fewer.
What does need to change is the grind involved to get new cards via these modes. It's reasonable to ask players to meaningfully engage with a game mode to get the best prizes, but it's not acceptable to demand three logins per day and hundreds of games to do it. The change that needs to be made is to the rewards structures and prices within game modes, not providing less playable content.
That's it for this week! Come find me on social media for more Snap and comics talk! Hit the comments to share your best Lockjaw ideas!