Hello and welcome back to Burning Questions, your weekly romp through Marvel Snap’s hottest topics. We finally got a peek at the upcoming December cards and variants and we just had a “super-sized” OTA. Let's dive in.
1) Are the December cards too strong?
We finally have abilities and images for next month's season, a cross-promotion with the upcoming Marvel Rivals game.
The abilities are powerful and creative. I especially love the multiple and complex nature of Peni Parker. I like concepts like they're tacking on incidental move to Rocket & Groot making him more just more useful generally interesting, but enhancing his ability just a hair in the process.
As for Banner, Doom 2099, Luna Snow, and Galacta, they're certainly novel designs, but are they too strong?
Banner
Bruce Banner is clearly powerful. He will provide 12 power for 2 energy in most games, assuming “Hulk out” means he transforms into a 12 power Hulk (which, I should point out, is unconfirmed). My worry with Banner is how his variance will feel. Will it feel exciting when he Hulks out? Being on the high or low variance end of the Danger Room location can be entertaining, even if it's occasionally frustrating. But Danger Room isn't a part of every game and there are ways to mitigate its variance. Banner will likely be one of the new “feels bad” cards whether you lose to him or lose with him. I don't think such a powerful pure variance card is great for the game. My proposal: Make him a 1/1 so Elektra and Killmonger have a shot at taking him out.
Doom 2099
If you play Doom 2099 on turn 4 and he generates a Bot after 4, another on 5, then 6 you'll have 17 power on board that you've only paid 4 energy for. This is clearly too powerful. Either he needs to not generate a Bot on the turn he's played or he needs to move to 5-Cost. I think then he would remain interesting and still be powerful enough to see play. When things become really silly is if you add in Dr. Doom. Keep in mind, we don't have confirmation that he works with regular Doom or his DoomBots, but he certainly does seem to be worded that way. My proposal: Make him 5/3 and specify the Bots boost Doom 2099 and 2099 DoomBots only.
Luna Snow
Luna Snow is a 3/5 that gives you an extra energy each turn. The supposed downside is that her Ice Cube takes up a board spot, can be destroyed, and benefits your opponent as well. None of these are particularly powerful downsides as you will presumably put her in a deck that can take full advantage of that extra energy more than your opponent or have a way to destroy their Cube. She's just a ridiculously powerful, efficient, and reliable energy accelerator. My proposal: Make her 3/3.
Galacta
Personally, I don't mind if the team misses a little high on a season pass card. It's better than having a weak season pass card that we have to try to do fun things with all month long. But I do think Galacta is overtuned. A card that adds 3 twice shouldn't also have a 4/6 body itself. 4-costs are tricky to design since they need to be powerful enough to be played late and still have an impact. We've seen numerous examples of 4-Cost cards that later needed to be changed because their cost just made them too slow or unreliable. But Galacta is an effective 4/12 with plenty of abusable synergies. You can use her alongside cards like Forge and Araña to make Galactus huge—not exactly a prospect I'm excited for. Also, Galacta’s interaction with Brood genuinely frightens me. My proposal: Make her 4/3.
I think every December card, as currently datamined, is clearly quite powerful, Rocket & Groot and Peni Parker included. However, bear in mind that these are unofficial, preliminary versions and are subject to change. Hopefully Second Dinner's internal testing reigns these designs in a bit because they are clever and fun, just a bit too powerful with the numbers we see now.
2) What comic storyline would you like to see a season based on?
We've had seasons roughly based on storylines from the comics quite a few times before and we're getting a Dark Avengers season in January followed by Avengers 1,000,000 BC sometime early next year (subject to change). I love it when they incorporate comic book stories into Snap and I'd love to see a season based on the 2006 Annihilation storyline. In this event Annihilus amasses a huge armada that does battle with most of Marvel’s Cosmic heroes. This storyline established the modern Guardians of the Galaxy and is a big bombastic cosmic epic. It would be a great way to introduce characters like Quasar, Moondragon, and Firelord, while celebrating Annihilus, Nova, Martyr, and the Guardians of the Galaxy with cool variants.
3) What are the best upcoming variants from new artists?
The datamines of the latest patch revealed work from quite a few established artists that are new to Snap. Generally, I try to prioritize the work of commissioned, individual artists over studio or licenced variants when making purchases. Here are a few upcoming favorites to keep an eye out for.
Brett Bean’s Beast
Jessica Fong’s Pixie
Creees Lee's Cosmo
Now it's time to hop over to the official Marvel Snap discord and look at a couple of developer answers.
4) Q: I know the devs typically don't like to comment on stuff like this, but it was in the patch notes, so I think it's fair game. You mentioned that you were hoping AV would provide support for cards that were "struggling to find their place." But instead, AV mostly boosted existing strong archetypes.
Can you say what cards/archetypes you had in mind that AV could support that didn't end up working out? How does this new version of the card better support those game pieces?
A: Ones with low base Power, generally. We saw some of that, like Rocket Raccoon.
The issue is that the best Agent Venom decks were playing a lot of cards like Klaw, Sera, Speed, and using existing strong cards to capitalize on Agent Venom directly, like Sage and Cassandra Nova--they weren't reaching for anything new, because the existing good stuff wasn't hurt. For example, Klaw outperformed Iron Man in those decks.
By lowering the Power-setting, we reduce how many cards are neutral-to-lightly affected by Agent Venom, while maintaining a large enough difference for the cards that go from 0 or 1 up to 3 to meaningfully benefit from his impact.
-Glen
5) Q: When SK was buffed a lot of community members were as it turns out accurate in saying that AV was going to continue to be a problem and it was too prevalent in too many decks. Even though at the time AV didn't cross internal balance thresholds based on todays patch notes it seems like the expectation was that his play rate would decrease rather than continue to increase, with the addition of Toxin adding additional synergy to his strongest deck and having general compatibility with AV, why did the team believe AV's play rate would decrease with a synergy card on the way? Looking back with hindsight would the team nerf AV in that previous OTA even if only to avoid the current situation? Are there any considerations for how to avoid situations where the season pass card is nerfed in the OTA following it leaving the season pass?
A: As the notes stated, the reason we changed Agent Venom was largely that "existing good deck + Agent Venom" weren't the primary decks we wanted Agent Venom fueling. If a Toxin deck was the most popular AV deck, we might not be nerfing him today. But it's 3rd place and not the best one, either.
I consider players' reactions an opportunity to learn and reflect on our decisions, certainly. But making balance decisions with the express goal of avoiding negative reactions is both impractical and frankly does a disservice to the players by lowering the quality of the game.
It's true we prefer not to nerf new releases, I've said that. There are many reasons. One of them is that players just got a new toy--we don't want to mess with that toy unless we have to. Another is that we have much less data for a new card relative to older ones, and the next new card will immediately outdate most of it.
So yes, we could've nerfed Agent Venom in October. But a) it might unnecessarily upset players, b) we might not hit the right spot, and c) it might require a follow-up change on 11/14 anyway--as you note, Toxin was coming out. And we *really* strive to avoid changing new cards multiple times.
The only way I could guarantee we won't nerf an SP card would be to release them all weaker than we think they could be. And that's going to wind up with waaay less fun SPs! Look at this year: we've buffed multiple Season Passes. The process that developed all of them is *the same process* that developed Agent Venom.
Game design is imperfect--we will miss high and low on balance. Our goal is to target an acceptable "miss range" with good dials for balance. If that range means a "high" miss can't ever be too good, then a "low" miss would often be totally unplayable.
-Glenn
Author's note:
Glenn gives us two lengthy answers about the process of Agent Venom's nerf. I also thought it was a mistake to leave Agent Venom unchanged in October, but Glenn's well-articulated answer has me convinced they dealt with him correctly. The change to Shadow King (along with the misguided change to Storm) probably had me overly worried that the balance team was out of touch with what was happening in the game. Letting things play out was probably the correct decision as far as Agent Venom goes. I expect Agent Venom will still be a meta game menace, but hopefully not quite as impressive (he would still be good at 2/4 +3). I think, because we all play this game so much, it's easy to get overly impatient with a particular card or deck.
That's it for this week. Come find me on Twitter and Bluesky for more Snap and Comic Book content! Also checkout the articles I've got over on our Pokémon Pocket sister site.