Hello and welcome back to Burning Questions, your weekly exploration of Marvel Snap’s hottest topics. This week we're talking about Mystique, the OTA balance changes, and art we want to see in the game!
1) What has led to Mystique’s sharp rise in play?
When filtering to the last seven days of ladder play, Mystique is currently the second highest played card in the game (behind only Agent Venom) at a 21.65% play rate! That is astonishing and dramatically higher than Mystique had been for the past several months. So what happened?
Agent Venom
First, the aforementioned Agent Venom was released. Agent Venom is easily the strongest card in the game at the moment (I wouldn't count on that 2/4 stat line holding too much longer). Agent Venom helps Mystique in a variety of ways. Mystique having no power has always been a pretty strong drawback and Agent Venom often erases that downside. Agent Venom also dramatically helps Mystique’s best target, Iron Man. Iron Man currently sits in 3rd place in play rate at 18.7%, so this three card package is 1-2-3 in play rate. They form the core of the current best deck in Snap.
Cosmo
Agent Venom isn't the only reason for the rise of Mystique, though. The metagame developed in a way that Cosmo has become incredibly important and is the 5th highest played card in the game (Shang Chi is 4th). Playing Cosmo into Mystique had always been a possible play, but it wasn't very good. Now, thanks to Agent Venom and some meta considerations listed below, it's become a pretty strong turn 6 play. Cosmo has been seeing a lot of play for a few weeks now as defense against Shadow King and to protect ongoing cards from Red Guardian and Rogue. Alioth has also grown in use and Cosmo can be valuable against the purple cloud as well when placed well. Now, with the buff to Shadow King, the release of Toxin, and a sharp increase in bounce decks Cosmo feels necessary and decks that can play him naturally (Agent Venom and Move, among others) are having a lot of success. Additionally, Cosmo plus Mystique can be crippling to certain decks that are otherwise quite strong at the moment, namely Namora and Silver Surfer.
Mystique is definitely having a moment. Agent Venom, Iron Man, and Cosmo are helping out with that. But just being a 3-cost card is working exceptionally well for her right now. Playing Mystique to copy Iron Man, Cosmo, or Klaw in one lane and a Sage, Cassandra Nova, Juggernaut, or USAgent in another lane is winning a lot of games in the current environment. Raven Darkholme looks to be here for a while.
2) Was the Storm change justified?
| Date | Cost | Power | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2024-10-24 |
4
|
5
|
On Reveal: Flood this location. Next turn is the last turn cards can
be played here.
|
| 2024-03-21 |
3
|
2
|
Curr: On Reveal: Flood this location. Next turn is the last turn cards can
be played here.
Prev: On Reveal: Flood this location. Next turn is the last turn cards can be played here.
AvX: Once you play 4, X-Men have +1 Power.
|
| 2024-03-14 |
3
|
2
|
Curr: On Reveal: Flood this location. Next turn is the last turn cards can be played here. AvX: Once you play 4, X-Men have +1 Power.
Prev: On Reveal: Flood this location. Next turn is the last turn cards can
be played here.
|
|
Released
2022-05-24
|
3 | 2 | On Reveal: Flood this location. Next turn is the last turn cards can be played here. |
I think that the Storm, War Machine, Legion combo was fun personally, but I understand that it was unpopular. However, changing the long-established series 2 card to protect the series 4 and 5 cards is a poor way to address a new, unpopular play pattern. Legion or War Machine should have been changed instead. Furthermore, it's easy to foresee decks that fight to establish an early board presence and then play Storm into Legion just becoming the next lockdown deck to draw the balance team's attention. If anything, this change now inextricably links Storm and Legion rather than making an attempt to let each card develop an identity.
3) What artist would you most like to see added to Marvel Snap?
The most glaring omission in my mind is the art of Bill Sienkiewicz. Here's a selection of Bill's work from last week's New York Comic Con, including a truly incredible Magik variant.
Bill Sienkiewicz doing his particular brand of magic at NYCC 2024 #xmen pic.twitter.com/LWikLXxo4D
— Ross X-Zombie Rising From The Ashes '75 💙💛 (@RPHutch1975) October 21, 2024
If Snap ever wants to add some Bill S. art, there are plenty of classic covers to choose from. Here are some personal favorites.
Now let's go over to the official Marvel Snap discord and find some intriguing developer questions and answers.
4) Q: It feels like the team uses power adjustments to try to fix broken interactions without concern that it breaks cerebro decks. This happens over and over, is this ever considered?
These two changes feel like they've killed the archetype completely.
A: We have stated as such—it’s not a constraint we can justify living under in order to best balance the game. Various Cerebro decks will rise and fall over time, that’s just a necessary concession to having live balance at the frequency and impact that we do.
-Glenn
Author's note:
Balancing around Cerebro would be an incredibly poor decision. That being said, Cerebro is probably going to need something to stay viable in the long-term as power inevitably creeps up. I've been advocating for a 2/0 Cerebro—I think it would be a blast! In the short term, I recommend trying Cerebro 3. The OTA may have negatively impacted Cerebro 2, but Cerebro 3 just got a whole lot stronger!
5) Q: Has it ever been considered to do small scale changes, then do an OTA weekly? I understand thats a lot more work for the balancing and competitive testing team, but small buffs like baron mordo dropping the “on turn 6”, or adding a boost of 1 power and checking if it helps the card would be interesting imo.
As a player its fun and adds more new stuff to the game, but is there an idea of why its bad? Like too many changes may leave returning players confused or anything?
A: We already balance the game at a much higher frequency than anyone else. It’s not practical or more useful to increase that speed, in part because we’d be planning changes with no ability to measure the results of the most recent ones. We do also believe there are costs to confusing players, stressing our own tech and process, etc.
-Glenn
Author’s Notes
I don't think balancing more often is the answer. However, I think that the OTAs have been less exciting lately. The best OTAs solve issues with decks that are overly powerful, while giving us some new pieces to play around with and be excited by. Sorry, but giving Heimdall an extra power doesn't achieve that. The last few OTAs have felt more out of touch with what's actually going on in-game while also changing existing cards far less.
That's it for this week! Come back next week for more Burning Questions. Also, make sure to come find me on Twitter and Bluesky (scosco.bsky.social) where I'll be giving away some season passes and variants right after this article goes up!