Hello and welcome back to Burning Questions, your weekly look at Marvel Snap's hottest topics. Second Dinner just released a set of short-term card acquisition fixes and Doom 2099 made his triumphant debut!
1) What will the impact of the announced changes to the acquisition system be?
Here is the news release from Second Dinner on short-term card acquisition changes:
“As Marvel SNAP grows we’ve seen how acquiring cards has become progressively more difficult. Your feedback has been heard loud and clear. It’s helped us identify and prioritize a number of major concerns:
- Overall lack of agency in acquiring new cards
- New users struggling to “get to the meta” faster as it takes too long to earn of all Series 3’s cards
- Returning players struggling to catch up after missing a season or more of new cards and rewards
- The randomness of the Spotlight Cache system feeling frustrating
We take these concerns seriously and are in the process of improving the ways players can acquire cards in the game. We currently have a design we think addresses many of the above issues. However, rebuilding some core aspects of SNAP takes time to get right. We are in the process of gathering additional feedback on the design while the work continues in production. We don’t have exact dates of completion yet, but it will take a few months.
In the meantime, we are taking some steps near term to improve quality of life around card acquisition.
In January's patch, we will be:
- Doubling the drop rate of Series 3 cards in Collector's Reserves, from 2 out of every 9 to 4 out of every 9.
- This will substantially reduce the time newer players need to acquire all S3 cards.
- This is a band-aid fix, but something we can do quickly
- Increasing the token payout from Spotlight Cache duplicates from 1000 tokens to 2000 tokens
- We know there are multiple issues with the Spotlight Cache system, but one of the biggest complaints is pulling a duplicate from the fourth slot with a hard-earned Spotlight Key.
Again, this change is a band-aid but fairly straightforward, so we can release it quickly
As previously mentioned, we’re planning for an even bigger Series Drop in the first quarter of 2025.”
From the release, it sounds like Second Dinner is committed to a dramatic rework to the acquisition system sometime in the next several months. I'm glad that they've given us a timetable and I would prefer they take the time to get something like that right rather than rush it. But with players feeling the pinch of the acquisition system, it was vital that they do something in the short-term as well. An increase from 1000 tokens to 2000 is pretty sizable, so I'm personally pleased with that alongside more series drops early next year.
However, lower collection levels players are the ones that are really going to benefit. The increase from 2 series 3 cards per 9 caches to 4 per 9 caches is a massive change. I've always thought they should make the pace of series 3 much faster, preferably closer to that of series 2. When you're in that early stage of the game it's exciting to always feel like you have new cards to tinker with. When that slows to a drip upon hitting series 3, it feels like a massive letdown. I think it takes a lot of air out of the fun balloon. Now, series 3 incomplete players who are free-to-play can expect 4-5 new cards every week from the 11-ish Collector's Reserves they earn naturally. This also gives players far more incentive to buy credit-heavy bundles since they're more likely to get an immediate series 3 card by spending those credits. Between Spotlight Caches and the collection track, most lower-CL players can get a new card almost daily. That sounds really fun!
This is a major improvement for new and returning players, but the benefits for end-game players is minimal. Hopefully the acquisition system changes they have in the works are worth the wait. People need to feel like they have a reasonable path to getting the new cards.
2) How can we beat Doom 2099?
The recent release of Galacta and cards like Peni Parker ushered in a boom for mid-range, “good cards” decks. This is among my favorite types of deck to play and a lot of long-term players feel the same way. Unfortunately, Doom 2099 performs very well against these decks. I think part of why Doom has felt strong and why you may see content creators saying it's too powerful is that it beats this type of deck by being surprisingly resilient to tech and going wide across three lanes so well. I agree that Doom is probably too strong (4/1 in January’s OTA?), but he's hardly unbeatable.
The types of decks that beat Doom 2099 with some consistency are those that can go tall, preferably extremely tall, in two lanes. The decks that do this best are some of the most classic archetypes in the game. Destroy can do this very efficiently with multiple routes to achieve it. Classic Heimdall move, Phoenix Force, and Discard decks are able to do this as well. Both bounce and bounce move can easily go over the top of Doom 2099 decks if they draw very hot. The Doom decks currently being played don't tend to interact much, so decks like Tribunal, Hela, and Negative have a good shot as well. The meta is in flux right now because of the introduction of Doom 2099, but I expect people to start finding ways to beat it, Doom 2099 itself to develop less all-in strategies, and mid-range to find new ways to elbow its way back in.
Anti-2099 Destroy
3) Which What If versions of characters would you like to see as variants?
On Sunday, season 3 of What If…? premiers on Disney+. To celebrate, here are 3 classic 90s What If…? covers that I think would make great Marvel Snap variants.
Now let's jump over to the official Marvel Snap discord and check out some developer questions and answers.
4) Q: Currently every 9 reserves has
2 cards
3 cosmetics
100 tokens
3 sets of credits
With 2 more cards being added to the patch, which set of rewards are being replaced?
A: Here's what the the new Reserves will look like:
In a group of 9 Reserve Pulls:
- 4 x S3 Card Reserves (If S3 complete: 25% of 100 Tokens, Gold Ticket, Avatar, Title)
- 1 x 100 Tokens
- 3 x Credit Reserve: 50% of 150 Credits or 200 Credits
- 1 x Random Variant
-Griffin
Author's note:
I want to point out also that the team has confirmed that Collector's Reserve contents are determined when you open them, so you can feel free to hoard your reserves until the January patch if you're not series 3 complete yet.
5) Q: What's the balance difference between Martyr and Hydra Bob?
Bob’s been out a while and is one of the generically good darlings of SNAP. What I’ve always been confused about after his 1/5 buff is why exactly Martyr would be reasonably desirable to play in any way over Bob?
Bob’s snap move is very rarely a downside and even is occasionally used like a weird stat stick nightcrawler. In fact risking more cubes just to get an enemy Bob in bad position seems more trouble than it’s worth. His movement is also neutral and random while Martyr ACTIVELY tries to lose you the game unless you jump through hoops to stop her.
A: Martyr predated Bob, so she didn’t need to compete with him at the time. In making Bob, one of our goals was to fuel some decks that might want to play multiple 1-Cost cards of that nature, such as Dracula decks that play their hand to discard an Infinaut at the end of the game. Martyr is largely worse than Bob, but not 100%, and it’s possible to want both. And that’s only true because of the buff—he was failing to meet that goal at 1/4.
That said, I do think Martyr merits a revision eventually, to build more space all her own.
-Glenn
Author's note:
I really like the concept and design for Martyr, but she never managed to be quite good enough. Professor X was one of her better partners until he was changed and Bob has just outshined her in every way since he was buffed to 1/5. Ironically, if it weren't for Bob she'd see quite a bit of play these days as we're in a format where a lot of decks are filling up the spaces on their board more. Before release, she was datamined as a 2/6. I thought she'd be a very playable card at 2/6, but the Second Dinner team noted that there was hardly ever any tension about her moving at 2/6, which I agree isn't great from a design perspective. The best thing that could happen for Martyr would be a Bob nerf, but it's questionable if Bob would be able to survive a loss of a point of power. Martyr is going to be a difficult card to buff and it's going to take some creativity.
That's it for this week! Hop in the comments and share your thoughts! Come find me on social media (@scosco on Bluesky or Twitter in my bio below)!