Hello and welcome back to Burning Questions where we discuss the hottest Marvel Snap topics each week. This week we're talking about Marvel Snap’s competition, Agent Venom, and… Agent Coulsen?!
1) What does Snap have to do to fend off its competitors?
A lot of games that target the same audience as Snap have appeared recently. At the end of September, the deck-builder Balatro released on mobile, Pokémon TCG Pocket just ended its soft launch period and is currently available worldwide, long-awaited card auto-battler The Bazaar just entered its beta period, and Marvel Rivals has a target release date of December 6th. In many ways these games aren't direct competitors for Snap—there are key differences with each of them. However, they all compete for attention, play-time, and engagement and each of them will appeal to segments of the Snap player-base (and streamer base!). So what must Second Dinner do to ensure its game remains appealing and retains its audience in the face of these new options?
- Lean into fast, snappy gameplay. Snap having the giant “play” button on the home screen is a huge advantage. The game has always been easy to just pick up and play. Making all players feel like they can play and win is important. High Voltage also took advantage of this, but that format was about to become stale. Bring it back with a couple of modifications to make it fresh and some smart bans to keep it diverse. Make sure future game modes lean into this as well and get those new modes out quick!
- Maintain a healthy and diverse environment through clever balance changes and reworks. I've historically been among the most vocal that balance OTAs are Snap's greatest strength, but I'm also not the only one that has felt underwhelmed or perplexed by some of the recent ones. Get back to OTAs that feel ingenious and shake up the meta in positive, meaningful ways.
- Improve acquisition and the returning player experience. I think Snap has quietly vastly improved the new player experience, but the existing and returning experiences still leave a lot to be desired. I don't profess to know the details of Second Dinner’s finances and anyone who does is just speculating. But they seem to feel the game's economy can't handle being significantly more generous. The negative perception of the acquisition system is incredibly difficult to counteract, but they're going to need to come up with some satisfying and creative ways to do that. Second Dinner needs to start stacking PR wins.
2) What should be done about Agent Venom?
When filtering to either the last 7 days of the last 30, Agent Venom is easily the most played card in the game (around 23% for both). He also sports very healthy win and cube rates. I think it's clear that Agent Venom is the best card in the game, not only for what he does directly, but also because the cards he enables also happen to be well-positioned right now.
There are a few issues with balancing Agent Venom. Second Dinner’s first, extremely gentle attempt to reign him in was to buff Shadow King. Unfortunately, most higher level players were already playing Shadow King and Agent Venom has been a primary beneficiary of and impetus behind Cosmo's rise. I think this was a misguided effort that didn't move the needle.
I understand the elegance of him being 2/4 and buffing to 4 looks nice and works in Cerebro 4, but giving a 2/4 stat line to a card that enhances Mysterio, Iron Man, Mystique, and others so dramatically is just too much. He's so good at the moment that it's hard to justify playing a deck that's not built around him and he's going to invalidate so many new releases if they don't work alongside him.
I know there is sensitivity about nerfing a Season Pass card right after his season concludes, but Agent Venom needs a change, whether it's to 2/2 (my preference), 3/4, or something more creative. I strongly feel they dropped the ball by not changing him in the last OTA and now they've put themselves in a position for another negative perception. There is a patch on November 12th and an OTA on November 14th and I really hope the balance team finds a way to nail it this time.
3) What are the most frightening symbiote variants to use?
Halloween may have passed, but there's still a few more days of Symbiotes season left to show off your spookiest Symbiotes. Looking to make your deck a little more menacing? Try these Venomized, Carnageized, and Knullified variants!
4) Q: You mentioned in another question that improving how fast players acquire cards is not a goal, but what about improving the posssibility of acquiring a specific card?
Currently every month players get a free series 3 card of their choosing (altough you have to wait until it appears on rotation) but the rest of series 3 is up to RNG. It takes 7-8 months to be series 3 complete, which means you can only target 7 cards out of over 100 over the course of half a year.
It's harder to get specific series 3 cards than it is to get series 4 and 5 cards. Because the latter you can get somewhat reliably with tokens or spotlight keys.
A: You have misconstrued my response to a different question. I didn’t say that improving the speed isn’t a goal. My intent in that previous post was to clarify that if we have released 3x more cards, it necessarily would have to be meaningfully slower to collect all the cards than it is now. That doesn’t mean it would be 3x slower, just that it has to be slower. Relative speed can increase.
Personally, I believe much of the joy in a CCG is the moment of acquiring new content, and how SNAP handles this in Series 1/2 is integral to its success. I’m optimistic about bringing a little more of that joy to endgame collection.
As for your question about specific, the simple truth of CCGs (and games like them) is that agency and value are inversely linked. You can make randomized content easier to get, which tends to be better for players because a) getting new content is often fun, even if it’s not exactly what you wanted and b) it reduces “wait time” on new toys. I do think on both counts SNAP has room to improve, and we’re trying. In addition to internal efforts we’re not ready to present, game modes housing new cards is one recent way we’re taking aim at this issue.
Adding more agency or velocity to Series 3 might be an effective shift to make as it grows. And I know many players are really eager for change, and we hear you. However, as a designer my focus is currently on thinking about ways we might sustainably revise these systems, rather than spending engineering resources on temporary or uncertain improvements. I’m a “measure twice, cut once” kind of person in that way.
-Glenn
Author's note:
Glenn gives an excellent and thoughtful answer here. It is reasonable, even positive, that as more cards are added, getting closer to collection complete will take longer. Additionally, for those unaware, the rate of new card acquisition for those who are not series 3 complete is light-years faster than it was before the spotlight system. It's definitely giving out more cards to those players than the previous system.
However, the OP made an important point about how the increasing size of series 3 is diminishing player agency in acquisition. Make the rotating series 3 card per month a choice of any missing series 3 card—remove the unnecessary hurdle of the rotation. It's still just one free card per month, so you can't just select all of the ones you want immediately, but if a player just really wants Death or Patriot or whatever other piece and can't get it because of the shop rotation, that player may just give up on the game. This seems like an easy first step.
5) Q: When Loki was reworked, the team's stated reasoning was to uncouple card generators with Loki so that they could be made more interesting and werent just "Loki food". It's been almost three months, and there haven't been any changes yet relating to card generators. Currently, Coulson does see play in Arishem, and Cable is played in Mill, but otherwise the card generators (such as Mirage, which I remember was specifically mentioned when Loki was changed) have languished without much viability. Is the team still planning to change these cards and/or add new content that makes them more appealing, or has the team's philosophy here shifted at all?
A: We already have content planned that will improve some of these cards, and we'll continue monitoring their ongoing gameplay in the interim.
However, you may want to have some more respect for Phil--his performance numbers are pretty strong in our most recent data.
-Glenn
Author's note:
I think Loki’s recent rework to 3/5 and drawing a card was really fun and generically powerful enough that it could work in a variety of decks. Unfortunately, it's just too powerful to give a tool like that to Arishem. Somehow, the team needs to find a way to decouple those two. I want a fun and powerful Loki design. Creating a new card that synergizes with Loki better than Arishem, when making sure that new card doesn't also just slot into an Arishem deck, would be an excellent way to achieve that.
Glenn's note about Coulsen is interesting. I've found him to be vital in Arishem decks and now I'm wondering if he might just be able to slide into other decks as a cube-equity card! Time to let Phil Coulsen out of the cage?
That's it for this week! Come find me on Twitter and Bluesky where I post decklists, lore-related content, and Marvel Snap news. Also, if you are interested in Pokémon Pocket, we have launched a new site to focus on that game (yes, they will have datamines!) and I've already got a few articles up with more to come. Oh, and keep an eye out for what we have planned for Marvel Rivals as well!