Hello and welcome back to Burning Questions! Each week we take a look at the hottest topics that are burning up the Marvel Snap community! This week, we got a massive OTA that shook up not just the ladder meta, but Grand Arena as well! Let's dive in!
1) What is the point of +1 buffs and -1 nerfs?
They are surprisingly effective at their goal. Every OTA, there is healthy skepticism of the small one point adjustments to cards, especially cards with powerful effects beyond their Power. However, most of the time the nerfs achieve their primary goal: lower the play rate of a card. For a variety of reasons, players are reluctant to play with cards that have just been nerfed and, so, the play rate drops even if the card or deck in question is still good.
So is it all player psychology and perception? Not exactly. If a deck loses a point of power or two, that represents some percentage of games it will now lose that it was previously winning. Even if it's a very small percentage, or even a half of a percentage point, that still represents a volume of games that affect that deck and the decks it faces. It's a game of points and one or two points can make a surprising difference. Players, especially those at the very top of the MMR tables, are going to notice small differences like this and make different decisions. Sometimes a recently nerfed card gets revisited quickly, but often players move on to new builds that then diffuse throughout the playerbase.
For buffs, on the other hand, they should take bigger swings. Even if they put too much power on an underplayed card, that will still feel novel at first and they can bring it back down by a single point later on. The April 2023 Enchantress buff was such a fun change and that wasn't diminished by the fact that she went back down to 4/5 two weeks later. I think 1-Power nerfs are effective for balance, but that 1-Power buffs aren't great at generating excitement.
2) Will Grand Arena stay fresh with the new bans?
We got a whole slew of new bans on cards that were dominating the mode like Alioth, Sera, Viper, and Cannonball. I know I was personally benefitting from playing those cards and they were exceptionally powerful in this mode. I love Second Dinner’s approach to limited time mode bans, where they allow the community to experiment and find the strategies that can dominate the mode and then ban based on a week of data. I think it's a superior method than being too heavy with the bans upfront. I found the initial state of Sanctum Showdown to be quite fun, but the bans really helped that mode have more life available for future runs. I think the same will be true for Grand Arena.
However, I still don't think we're quite there yet, and there's one card that is at the center of the imbalance. H.E.R.B.I.E. may have been invented for a Saturday morning cartoon, but when he was first brought to the comics he was a bad little traitor ‘bot (he was possessed). He's definitely the villain of Grand Arena. Even after nerfing his skill to 4-Cost, he's still easily the best champion and also the champion able to facilitate the most experimentation and include the most interaction because of the extra energy he provides while still putting out raw power. Perhaps making the skill cost 5 would do the trick, but it's a little tricky to balance H.E.R.B.I.E. himself without affecting his viability outside of Grand Arena. I would love to see Second Dinner develop the technical ability to do mode-specific nerfs. The health of the mode will depend on figuring out a way to bring the little guy down to earth.
3) Who was Galactus’ best herald?
Norrin Rad, the Silver Surfer, is Galactus’ most famous Herald and Shalla-Bal is his newest in the Fantastic Four: First Steps movie, but what about some Heralds that are not from Zenn-La? As we get set to kick off the Heralds of Galactus Marvel Snap season, let's celebrate Galactus' best Herald: Frankie Raye.
Frankie Raye is my favorite Herald because her storyline that played out slowly in the pages of John Byrne’s 1980s Fantastic Four run is so good and so heartbreaking that it left a lasting memory. Frankie was an effective Herald because she wasn't just straight up evil like Terrax, but she was just immoral enough to still be willing to find worlds for Galactus to devour.
There are also some fun “unofficial” Heralds from What If stories and alternate timelines, including heavy hitters like Rogue and Deadpool. Did you know that Aunt May was once a Herald? (well, kind of)
Now let's go over to the official Marvel Snap discord and grab some developer Q and As!
4) Q: To start this off, I think Grand Arena has been your best LTM so far - by a wide margin. BUT, there's one thing that keeps gnawing away at the experience for me as I get closer and closer to "being done" with it.
Was the LTM designed to let tech cards shine? It feels like every single matchup has at least 2 or 3 in one deck - and that's the low end. 2 or 3 in a deck as small as Snap's are is a big number, and they all directly "ruin" the fun the champion cards are designed to enhance. So my question is simple: Was the LTM designed knowing tech card-heavy decks would be more powerful and limit the desire to play some of the champions?
I know, I know. You're probably thinking "well duh, of course not, that's absurd". But then you'll see Echo and Enchantress in one deck, effectively eliminating MFFS. Or you'll see Cosmo or Alioth in another, eliminating HTFS. Then you'll see Shang Chi sprinkled throughout to eliminate TTFS and any deck focused on "going big". It's kind of hard to imagine the conversations in your design rooms where someone says "well, the tech cards eliminate the entire purpose of these decks" and the decision makers shrugging their shoulders and letting it slide, but here we are.
This LTM is very solid. Best one yet. But it's suffering under the weight of what a deck focused mostly on tech cards is capable of accomplishing.
A:
Tech cards having the capacity to limit champions lets us a) push the strength of each champion higher, because the metagame can react to them, and b) helps support a more diverse metagame overall by spreading the range of weaknesses and strengths in multiple directions.
I think we’ve seen that some tech cards and decks able to use them wound up stronger than we’d like in the game mode, though the impact has been a bit overstated. We never expected the first Grand Arena to be a flawless metagame—you all played more games with each champion than we played with all of them in the first 5 minutes the mode was live, it’s just not feasible for us to cover that kind of ground and get every guess right. That’s what live balance has always been for.
-Glenn
Author's note:
The premise is a bit flawed. If people are putting both Echo and Enchantress in a deck it means that Ongoing can be so powerful that multiple options are needed to compete with it. If you eliminate interactive cards like Shang Chi, metagames will narrow, not widen. Cards like these allow less powerful options to compete with highly synergistic decks that put out a ton of points. Without Shang Chi and Enchantress, everyone would gravitate to the one or two decks that just put out the highest amount of power. The role of interaction is to prevent a metagame from focusing on a single, powerful strategy.
As Glenn specifically states above, having answers like these allows them to make the champions more powerful and splashy. The issue with these interactive cards occurs when one deck is able to play all of them without being punished for not creating its own power. This was the case for Sera control decks way back in the day, it was true of the “tech Thanos” lists recently, and it is true of H.E.R.B.I.E. now in Grand Arena. H.E.R.B.I.E. is the problem that needs to be addressed, not the interaction cards themselves.
5) Q: I was wondering if we've reached the point yet where there are enough "bonus energy" cards and locations to justify having a tech card against it.
A: I think so.
-Glenn
Author's note:
This seems like the perfect type of card to design and release as a direct Series 4 release. What form would it take? Something like “Your opponent can't increase their Max Energy” or “Your opponent can have a maximum of 6 Energy” are possibilities, but I hope they come up with something a little more clever and fun. How about “This card gains +5 Power whenever your opponent generates extra energy,” similar to Red Hulk or “Whenever your opponent gets extra energy, they discard a card” to punish decks that rely on this strategy?
That's it for this week! Come join me on Bluesky (@scosco) where I talk Snap and comics and even occasionally give out some free Snap codes!