Hello and welcome back to Burning Questions, where we explore the hottest topics in the Marvel Snap community! This week we're talking about Activate, classic comic covers, and character overlap.
1) What do you think of the new Activate keyword?
We finally got our hands on the first card with the new Activate ability, Symbiote Spider-Man.
Players have found some pretty cool combos from the ones that were predicted before release like Galactus, Namora, and Black Panther to disruptive abilities like Juggernaut, Cannonball, and even Master Mold.
Symbiote Spider-Man has a drawn win rate of 59.11%. That number includes matches against bots, and if you filter to post-infinite only, that falls to 50.39%—though it should be noted that it's early enough in the season that there isn't a large amount of post-infinite data to draw from. Essentially, I think Symbiote Spider-Man is a cool card, but that the existing uses of him are extremely counterable. Cards like Red Guardian, Cosmo, Juggernaut, Polaris, White Widow, and Acid Arrow can all thwart an opponent's plan for the Symbiote. While I don't think exploration and experimentation with Symbiote Spider-Man has concluded, it seems like more of a fun combo card than a powerful one, for now. Of course that could all change as new cards are released.
Symbiote Spider-Man is our first activate card and now that I've had a chance to play around with the mechanic, I'm excited and optimistic about upcoming Activate cards and the mechanic as a whole. The ability to layer your actions in the order that you perform them has proven both extremely fun and brings a pleasant level of added complexity to Snap. I think it was also clever of Second Dinner to give us Symbiote Spider-Man alone as the only Activate card. Symbiote Spider-Man has been the perfect card to train the player base on the new mechanic since the order of operations is so critical to his gameplay. It will really get fun when Black Swan and Hellcow get Activate added to their text boxes, presumably with the September 17th patch.
2) What classic covers would you like to see as variants?
Hot new deck pic.twitter.com/ZaqwgM7dwN
— Scott Denham (@scodenim) September 4, 2024
We finally got a full deck list worth of classic cover variants! I love picking these up whenever they come out. As many people pointed out to me on Twitter, there's no real synergy between them (other than Galactus and Symbiote Spider-Man!) and very few of the cards are especially meta-relevant or see a large amount of play. So here are a few suggestions for classic cover variants for cards that have high play rates!
[Avengers West Coast #89 by David Ross]
[Uncanny X-Men #232 by Marc Silvestri]
[Tomb of Dracula #23 by Gene Conlan]
[Fantastic Four #256 by John Byrne]
[Avengers #110 by Gil Kane]
[Silver Surfer #17 by Herb Trimpe]
In celebration of the 12th classic cover variant, I'm giving away one Mystery Variant and one Premium Mystery Variant! To win the Premium Mystery Variant code, leave a comment below with which comic cover you’d love to see added to the game! To be eligible you must list ONE specific issue AND the artist(s). I will choose one commenter at random to win on Sunday night!
I'll be giving out the Mystery variant code on my Twitter. Leave a picture of a cover you'd like to see added to the game as a reply on my pinned post! I'll be randomly choosing one winner there!
3) Which cards have the best animations when upgraded?
The Mockingbird variant currently available in Spotlight caches has one of the best animations we've seen so far!
We also have a new feature here on SnapFan. On any card variant page you can toggle between Animated and Static for both released variants and unreleased ones! Be sure to try it out!
My three personal favorite card animations are:
Nicoletta Baldari is an amazing artist and the animated lightning seals this as my favorite Storm variant in the game, which is saying a lot—Storm has a really strong assortment of variants!
A lot of Hipp variants look great animated because he uses such bold colors to denote energy. The magical pink looks otherworldly when animated.
Mordo may not be the most useful Snap card but this Pantheon variant looks menacing when animated!
Now let's go over to the official Marvel Snap discord and peek in on some developer Q&As.
4) Q: I asked this question almost a year ago today and was wondering if there was any development on the topic of creating new in-game backgrounds besides the space rock?
A: It's definitely something that we've discussed but we don't have anything to share right now.
-Griffin
Author's note:
“Discussed but nothing to share right now” makes this seem pretty far off. What would make a cool background? It's a little tricky because this is a game that already has locations, so making a background that is, for example, the Baxter Building, wouldn't make a lot of sense in a game that already uses that in a different way. I think the best way would be to make more generic backgrounds like the “space rock” and focus on visual pleasantness without being intrusive. Something like a meadow or an ocean would feel nice and chill to play on.
5) Q: Unless I'm mistaken, Symbiote Spider-Man is the first card to just straight up be another costume for an existing card. Is this going to be more common, or are we going to keep getting mostly unique cards?
A: We're exploring that question ourselves with this card, and we do have plans for some similar future cards.
-Glenn
Author's note:
Personally I'd have preferred they call it “Symbiote Suit” or “Symbiote Costume,” but I understand the marketing advantages of calling it Spider-Man. I also think it's important that they not feel boxed in by convention. They should feel free to make anything that is interesting and cool. We already know from datamines that there is an upcoming Bruce Banner card (who possibly transforms) and a Rocket & Groot card. Other future overlap possibilities that would be neat are Superior Spider-Man, Patch, Citizen V, Ronin, Cosmic Ghost Rider, Archangel, the Maker and Dark Beast. They're never going to run out of interesting characters to add to the game, but there's no reason not to explore each character fully also to take advantage of the rich depth of the Marvel Universe.
That's it for this week! Come find me on Twitter and I'll see you next week to answer more Burning Questions!