Welcome back to Glenn Jones' Diary! We have some exciting game design concepts today. Also, why are location appearance odds private?
Q: Marvel Snap has been out for a while. Sometimes, when you're working on a project for a long time, your dreams start to reflect that. Have any of you found yourselves dreaming of your job, Marvel Snap, or any of the Marvel characters since you've started work on this project? Any funny dreams to share?
A: Oddly enough, I completely stopped dreaming shortly after high school and haven't for over a decade now. I do often wake up with card designs (and occasionally entire games) in my brain though, so something's going on up there. If memory serves, the structure for Phoenix Force and Grand Master were both conceived this way.
-Glenn
**Well, now we're starting to learn about Glenn. As someone who spends too much time thinking about Marvel Snap, I dream about it much more than I'd like.
Q: Was the fact that at 3/4 Beast would be competing with the Season Pass card Black Swan in bounce decks part of the motivation to change Beast at this point in time?
A: We decided we wanted to change Beast to work like this in late October, when we were hitting the issue in a variety of future-facing work.
After looking at the timeline, we decided to align it with Black Swan because that gave the change a longer runway (maybe something changes our minds) while also ensuring 1-Cost-based decks received an interesting option to help them adapt.
Generally, when I have to weaken a card, I like to try and find ways to ensure the game is changing in interesting ways for decks that were using the card. That way there’s a new puzzle, rather than just a missing piece.
-Glenn
**After playing with Beast a bit this season, I feel like he's actually stronger in many ways, especially with traditional bounce lists. I was pleasantly surprised because I was a bit worried about this change. This was a clever way to ensure both Beast and Black Swan had their own space.
Q: White Queen in my personal opinion has all banger variants but honestly I can’t justify playing her (maybe I’m not going about playing her correctly??). I know she is a card for new/low collections but it’d be nice to put that card in my deck without feeling embarrassed about it. Are you guys happy with the card where it is or is it on the list of cards that will get something done to it in the future?
A: White Queen is on our radar, but we view her as something of a “canary in a coal mine” and are examining some options with that in mind.
-Glenn
Q: Glenn, could you expand on what you mean by using White Queen as a "canary"? What are you using her to test?
A: I mean that White Queen being a weak card is indicative of an inaccuracy in Costing and Power more generally. I've previously discussed how Black Swan isn't as pure upside as some have said, given the deckbuilding has a fairly real opportunity cost and 1-Costs need support to thrive. White Queen isn't the case; a 4/7 White Queen would be purely upside, but I'm also not sure a 4/7 is playable. That's weird.
-Glenn
**White Queen should be better. I find this answer fascinating because my proposed change for White Queen was to give her an extra point of power, but after reading Glenn's response, I have to agree that she still wouldn't see much play. The “coal mine” in which White Queen is a “canary” warning of danger is, I believe, the relative strengths and weaknesses of 3 and 4 cost cards and how they are often unintuitive. This is an emerging puzzle that gets repeated several times in other answers from this week below.
Q: Played a match just now where I had Sera and Zabu on the board, so I was able to play Legion and Shang-Chi on T6. I had priority. Legion was played first, into Nidavellir. Opponent had two Visions mid, which they moved left into the lane where Shang-Chi was. But the power of their cards in the left lane didn't change until priority flipped, so they read as 8 power on my turn and 13 power on the opponent's turn. This cost me the match. Is this an expected interaction of how locations work in Marvel Snap?
A: This is a function of how movement works in combination with Ongoing effects. Cards move in the same way they're staged--they get put at the location, but don't "resolve" until their owner has priority and it's that card's turn to do so, at which point Ongoing effects begin to affect them. It is not intuitive in some specific cases like this one, and we're looking at a change to this part of the system.
-Glenn
**The number two complaint I hear from new players (after card acquisition) is about the inconsistencies with movement and locations. They've improved some of the logic with locations recently and I hope they take a new pass as move mechanics to find a way to make them more intuitive to new players.
Q: I've found it really interesting to observe the reversal of fortune that Gladiator has enjoyed since his buff to 3/8. At 7 power, he was considered a very mediocre card at best and really wasn't played anywhere for the first month or so of his existence. Now, it seems fair to say he is considered one of the best cards in the game, finding his way into many top tier decks and fulfilling a role that is difficult to replace.
I have no problem with the card, but I'm curious if it's concerning that incrementing a card by what seems like the smallest margin you have access to can have such a large impact on its balance? Are there more factors at play here in this case?
For instance, was Gladiator underrated in your view and the momentum of the buff gave him enough experimentation for people to "figure him out?" Or maybe it has something to do with the fact that Gladiator gets a double benefit from a power increase due to his ability? I think it's an interesting case study and I'm curious what the team's perspective is. Thanks.
A: Gladiator's jump was also a symptom of his play environment changing a fair bit, as the metagame shifted. I wouldn't call it concerning, but certainly it demonstrates that 1 Power is a real value to gain and lose.
**Gladiator was alright at 7 but is much better at 8. This isn't just because one point of power can be very relevant (see Captain Marvel), but also because more cards can be destroyed by him (and even more were brought under that threshold when he's been hit by Forge). Also the change to Maximus is relevant here as Maximus could be chosen over Gladiator in some decks before they were both changed.
Q: Why did you make ghost cost 3. If nobody played them at 1 and their best to play early why increase their cost?
A: Because one of the reasons Ghost was weak was providing a small amount of Power. Increasing the Cost let us increase the Power more substantially, and the effect is most important on turns 5 and 6 anyway.
-Glenn
**Ghost is better now by more than I thought she would be. I still think she's barely playable, but at least I can envision a future metagame where she's relevant.
Q: Why do you not want to make location odds public?
A: There are a variety of reasons, but ultimately locations are numerous enough that it's not meaningfully assistive to gameplay and changes so often (new location every week) that communicating it isn't a good use of time or effort.
-Glenn
**This is very interesting. I hadn't realized that the location odds were kept secret. I know they are organized into more common, less common, rare, and ultra rare, but I had presumed those correlated to pretty well-known odds. This brings up some questions. Are all of the common locations equally common? How much more rare are the rare locations than the uncommon ones? It often doesn't seem like a large gap.
Q: As far as I know, a vanilla 3-cost card's power is 4, 4-cost is 6. In the latest Black Order trailer, we can see Black Swan is 3/5 and Proxima Midnight is 4/7. However, this two cards has zero downside so why they have premium stats? Curious what's the design choice here.
A: The vanilla stat line in any game should be worse than stat lines you actually make when combined with their effect. In the case of 3/4 and 4/6, we believe both of those are (relatively) farther from playable than other stats. We expect to make future changes based on this premise, but in the interim cards like these will be fun to play with and help explore different ranges.
-Glenn
Q: I know you answered a question earlier in regards to effect card statlines vs vanilla card statlines. But individually I wonder why the team settled on 3/5. I've usually regarded 3/5 as a premium statline that has a potentially negative affect attached to it or even an affect that's symmetrical (Like Wave granting both players discounts or Spiderman moving cards randomly). Black Swan discounting cards to the "0 Cost category" seems pretty positive. I thought this sort of affect would've landed at 3/4. I was pretty surprised.
Is Mobius a prime reason to give Swan this big stat stick? Is the affect more underwhelming than it seems on the surface or is this sort of an "aim high then nerf later if its an issue"? I mean no disrespect as I get why you'd want to use that philosophy, I'm just curious.
Thanks
A: We committed last year to testing Season Pass cards more rigorously for competitive play. That process determined Black Swan merited additional rate, in large part because the decks she fuels wielding lots of 1-Cost cards are a little low on stats themselves. Recall how commonly Bounce decks use something like Werewolf or Darkhawk—they need the beef, and a 3/4 wasn’t necessarily strong enough to earn its slot. We’re more confident a 3/5 is.
-Glenn
**First, people need to give up on their idea of vanilla cards vs. cards with either an upside or a downside. These concepts make sense in Magic: The Gathering and Hearthstone, games with much larger decks and typically far more turns.
Second, I think it's important to remember that Marvel Snap is a very new card game concept. I think Glenn and the team are starting to realize some of the peculiarities of this game. Far more than in other games, the opportunity cost of adding a card to your deck (as opposed to another card) is an enormous factor. Because there are only 12 cards, every card you add is like adding a restriction. Black Swan is a fascinating case. She's not simply 3/5 with upside, she has a massive cost: a deck building cost. She needs to be played alongside many 1-drops to be helpful, and they need to be 1-drops that you're happy to play late. To justify her spot in a list she needs more than 3/3 or 3/4. So far, she's barely justifying taking up a deck space at 3/5. The most significant cost of any card in this game is the valuable deck spot they take up. That's why America Chavez was one of the best cards in the game, while Kang and Howard the Duck were among the worst.
Have you noticed that 3 costs are bad and 4 costs are good, often game-winners? Or that 2 costs tend to be outstanding, while 1 costs need to be very powerful to see play? 5 costs are weird and hard to include in almost any list if they're not instant game-winners. 6 drops need to be game-winners, or they end up seeing no play. Cards like Zabu, Sera, and Silver Surfer complicate the issue further. The card cost becomes hyper-important because there are certain combinations of costs you can play on certain turns. Zabu is one of the best cards in the game because he lets you play a 4-cost card early on turn 3 and then two 4-cost cards on turn 6, when 4-cost cards are, by necessity, so much more potent than 3-cost cards. That's why Cull Obsidian doesn't feel broken at 4/10, and cards like Ghost can still see so little play at 3/5. That's why a card like White Queen can still seem unplayable at 4/7. She's not a game-winner like Shang Chi, Enchantress, or Ms. Marvel, so why play her? She hasn't been power crept out of the meta, she was only playable in the meta where she was trying to steal your opponent's game-winner (Leader usually).
I think we are just starting to scratch the surface of the complexities of deck space and the dynamics of card cost, but I'm glad someone as thoughtful as Glenn is analyzing it.
Q: Hey I remember you mentioning that the new albums will sometimes contain less than 12 variants in them. Is this the case for any of the upcoming albums ( maybe not the artgerm because he will get new artgerm variants) but any of the other ones?
A: One of the albums releasing in February will indeed have less than 12 variants
-Chris
**Albums need more to make them engaging or actively fun than just a variation in the number of variants required.
Q: How many cards do you think you have planned in advance?
A: We're about to start working on cards for October, which is standard for our process. So 40+ at any given time in some shape or another.
-Glenn
A: To piggyback off of Glenn's answer, at the start of a new season I'll have friends ask me questions about just-released cards and I'll have to remind them that I'm like 4+ months in the future. I often need a refresher on what actually released and what the final ability/numbers are because they'll be referencing something that I'll have completely forgotten about sometimes.
-Addison
**Wow, that is a much more significant number than I thought. Addison's answer, in particular, makes me want access to their internal test server and all the wacky things going on there so badly! Marvel Snap is at its best when it's hilarious, and new untested cards will surely be hilarious.
That's it for this week. Head over to the official Marvel Snap discord and submit a question in the ask-the-team channel to potentially have your question answered here!