Team Answers Recap for Dev QAs - 10/27
Welcome back to Glenn Jones' Diary, our weekly look at the Dev team Questions and Answers from the Marvel Snap discord. This week we're talking about Captain Marvel, Sauron, and themed variants!
15)
Q: Is the team considering relocating the spell icon for Nico? All her variants cover her face with the spell icon.
A: We have some VFX changes coming in a future patch that will address this issue.
-Glenn
14)
Q: Can Werewolf By Night trigger more than once?
A: Yes, unless they say otherwise our trigger abilities will keep triggering throughout the game.
-Rada
13)
Q: Is the Rogue Winter Vacation variant coming back?
A: The winter variants will come back during Winterverse 2023!
-Stephen
**As one of the people who opened several other Winterverse cards but missed out on Rogue, this pleases me immensely.
12)
Q: I feel like Captain Marvel was great at 4/5, was super excited with that change. And now she sees literally 0 play, being 4/4. Any thoughts to bring her back to 4/5?
A: She doesn't see zero play; she's a winning card with a moderate amount of play. When we tried her at 4/5 she was one of the 5 best performing cards in the whole game in a way that wasn't very comfortable, so this is one of those situations where we really wish we had "half a Power" to get the balance just right. Instead, I imagine you'll see Carol move around over time, depending on how she can best compete. 3/4 and 6/...10? are both costs I'm interested in exploring at some point, for example.
-Glenn
11)
Q: This question is in reference to the captain marvel question and how you guys had to nerf her when she was 4/5, are there any times when even though statistically a card is over performing, it can be in a healthy way based on player feedback and enjoyability since captain marvel is a fun card to mess around with? Just wanted to get your thoughts, thanks!
A: We don't mind high-performing cards in reasonably-performing decks. When a high-performing card is in a deck that's also performing too well, that's when it's a nerf candidate. In Captain Marvel's case, she was in the two best decks at the time shortly after her buff to 4/5, and we needed to weaken both of those decks.
-Glenn
**Captain Marvel was ridiculously good right after her change to 4/5. I was playing her in basically every deck that month. 4/4 and a new meta has her feeling sub optimal. Am I crazy to think she should just be moved back to 5 cost? I feel like at 3/4 she'd be very good, but I think flavor wise she makes way more sense as a big closer.
10)
Q: For low-cost cards, the appropriate power value falls in a fairly obvious range. But for cards like Attuma, Typhoid Mary, Red Skull, etc -- essentially cards that can be Shanged as they are -- it's not so clear. How do you guys decide on the power values for cards like those?
A: Mostly, we play with them and compare them to existing cards or combos at similar costs, then track their performance to see if they need a nudge or not.
-Glenn
9)
Q: Is Shocker on the radar, or at least the High Evo version? Not that High Evo as a deck necessarily needs help, but with the new variant from Twitch drops, I’ve seen a lot of people try and make him work and it just seems like such a dud card most of the time. From my understanding, Shocker was the least used and the least powerful card in the High Evo family even before Mobius’ release, which directly countered it. Is there any hope for him in the near future?
A: Evolved Shocker hasn't always been the least used card--Abomination and The Thing have also had some time at the bottom. His effect isn't weak and something has to be #7, so we'd rather give the deck opportunities to change than try and pin him just perfect, especially given the rest of the shell is so consistently a strong performer.
-Glenn
8)
Q: In Glenn's response to "Thoughts on Captain Marvel," he talked about how "this is one of those situations where we really wish we had "half a Power" to get the balance just right.What is stopping Snap from having a card with 4.5 power? This isn't the same as a card *costing* 4.5 which usually doesn't make sense, but a card having 4.5 power is understandable.
A: There’s a fair amount of data on the strength of integers in games. Introducing decimal points, in addition to being a UX nightmare for sizing, is just inherently off-putting and inaccessible. No interest in doing it except as a one-off on someone like a Micronaut. Not to say player-facing fractional values are always wrong for a game, but they’re usually wrong.
-Glenn
7)
Q: Are there going to be more variant events in the shop, like the Dan Hipp and the midnight suns for other artists? And if yes, how often are you expecting to have them?
A: Yes we plan to do more of these! Roughly 1/season that everyone gets to experience together! In addition, we are looking into making personal ones that happen more randomly for each player individually
-Stephen
**Peach Momoko shop takeover in December please!
6)
Q: I noticed that this season's Nightforged variants favor Discard-type cards: Apoc, Black Knight, Blade, Drac, Ghost Rider and Sif. I do not really see a pattern in other sets except the Savage Land variants, and that is themed more for characters than card type. Do you intend future new sets to have themes as well?
A: We have a goal we are striving towards for some sets of variants that are centered around a deck type so a player could in theory build an entire deck utilizing those variants. We aren't quite there yet but it's something we hope to build towards.
-Stephen
**This is a really cool goal. I like to match variants and split effects in a deck and it's nice to know that Second Dinner is thinking about this.
5)
Q: Shuri Sauron deck has been a very (very very) solid deck in the meta for a long time, with its particular feature of having 2 strong fields, using Red Skull/Typhoid Mary/Taskmaster and the other good cards the set offers. Now, after the second OTA in a month that cards in this deck are targeted for a nerf, I would ask: how a total of -2 power should affect the whole deck function? I would dare to say these "nerfs" could actually be a potential buff, as the deck can play around losing priority and keeping the big cards safe from counters played the same turn.
A: Losing Power is fundamentally a nerf to these decks, though as you note situations can arise where it isn’t—though Shuri is one example where the opponent usually knows if they want priority and can fairly easily take it or leave it. In addition to the actual impact—which is small, but real—nerfs also have the effect of temporarily reducing popularity, which helps address decks with especially high play rates.
-Glenn
**It is interesting how much an OTA nerf affects the play rate of a card. People really seem reluctant to play with recently nerfed cards, even if the nerf is quite small.
4)
Q: Sauron himself is often our highest winrate card. Does this line from the OTA notes mean that Sauron was the best card to draw in Shuri Sauron, or was the nerf targeted at Sauron to not affect other decks?
A: Sauron was often both the highest winrate card in the game (or at least top 5) and among the 2-3 highest winrate cards in Shuri specifically. Those are both fine—but the Shuri Sauron deck itself crossed a line on some of our metrics, just barely but for a while. Nerfing Sauron was the cleanest way to impact only that deck without damaging other archetypes.
-Glenn
3)
Q: What determines what you reply to? Is it what you feel most comfortable replying to or do you slow go thru all the post? Just curious if this is a for sure way of asking the team things or more of a throw it into the void and hope i get a reply.
A: As we use spare time to engage here, I tend to look for solid questions I can answer while loading software, eating lunch, between meetings, that sort of thing. I also only answer questions in my purview as a game design lead--I can't know everything we're up to perfectly, and it would be too disruptive to investigate everything. So timing, content, and tone of the question all impact whether or not I'll answer it, at least.
-Glenn
Like Glenn, I look for things I can answer that I have knowledge of within my discipline or more often I'll answer fluff-oriented questions because very few folks ever ask QA specific things in ask-the-team haha.
-Addison
2)
Q: Are there powerful decks or archetypes within the currently available cards that are yet to be discovered? In other words, are you aware internally of effective decks that the community has not yet figured out?
A: Yep
-Rada
1)
Q: To clarify the answer above:
Is it a matter of decks doing well for a few people in the data that have not been widely picked up by the community as a whole? Or more that conceptually there are some card synergies that the team is aware of that have not been noticed by *anyone* at all? Both?
A: The former certainly exists. The latter could plausibly exist, but we don’t actively monitor for it and it would be very rare.
-Glenn
**I personally believe that Marvel Snap has never had a totally "solved" meta, unlike most other card games. Mostly because things change so frequently, but I also think the player base is relatively conservative with their deck choices. I think fear of slipping down the ladder probably contributes to this. It's good to know that there are some hidden gems out there.
https://twitter.com/Glenn_Jones_/status/1717693863564050485?t=6ZoOhoh-EiEN9X1Glpngvw&s=19
That's all for this week. Head to the Marvel Snap discord and ask a question to potentially be featured here.