Hello and welcome back to Burning Questions. Each week we go through the hottest topics in Marvel Snap. This week saw the release of a bunch of new cards and the introduction of Snap Packs! We're also discussing new season ideas and MCU moments!
1) What is the best of the new cards?
We don't normally get four new cards in a week, but the introduction of the new acquisition system brought us a quartet of new move cards! It's been a bit tricky to evaluate them between high release-week usage rates, the inevitable hard counters, and the hot location, but so far they've all seemed pretty playable. There's a clear winner, though and he's a leaping former French Legionnaire.
There are plenty of reasons to love Georges Batroc. He can quickly scale out of control, he's not your primary game plan so losing him to opposing tech isn't nearly as devastating as losing a Human Torch, and he's also just really darned fun. But my favorite thing about Batroc so far is how he can fit into so many different decks as a low-investment stat stick. He slots alongside Scream, in Affliction decks, with small movers packages, in more traditional move decks, and wacky experimental decks. There are enough Batroc enablers like Sam Wilson, Silk, Werewolf by Night, and so many more that a wide variety of decks are able to accommodate him. It may be a while until I play a deck with the French leaper.
Coogarrr Toxic Batroc
Nerdherder's Georges
SMLZ Scream
Benjamin Roller's Bird Bat
Zodrex Ongoing Move
Scosco's Bat Wiccan
2) What comic storyline would you like to see as a season theme?
Obviously, there are thousands of amazing storylines to choose from, but I'm just going to choose a single example. I want something that has enough characters that aren't already in the game (so probably not something like the Dark Phoenix Saga or Kraven's Last Hunt), but also something that has enough depth that would make for compelling locations, variants, and visuals (so probably not something like Civil War). I'm also going to choose something more modern since it's always tempting for me to go with my beloved retro eras.
The comic storyline War of Kings would easily provide enough to mine for an entire season. Annihilation and Annihilation: Conquest, largely by the same authors as War of Kings are arguably much better stories, but a lot of the major players from that are in Snap already. War of Kings draws heavily from the events in those stories as well as X-Men comics of that time and contains dozens of characters and locations that are unlikely to make their way into Snap in other ways. Because it's such a massive sprawling cosmic epic, it has enough depth to include a variety of new locations and the name alone feels eminently marketable.
Here are some of the characters the season could include:
- Vulcan
- Lilandra
- Rachel Summers
- Blastaar
- Talon
- Deathbird
- Korvus
- Karnak
- The Phalanx
- Raza Longknife, Ch’od, Hepzibah, and any other Starjammers (though I'd love to see an entire Starjammers season).
For locations we could use a variety of planets and interstellar locations. Here are a few ideas: Sacrosanct, The Babel Spire, and The Mindlight.
3) What memes or MCU moments would you like to see turned into emotes?
The development team does a great job of making emotes out of recognizable cultural touchstones like memes and moments from Marvel content.
Here are a few more iconic, but hilarious MCU moments that they should try to make into emotes. These are a little more challenging than some of the ones they've done before, since they involve more than one character, but the team is up to the challenge of finding creative ways to make these work as emotes.
Now let's head over to the official Marvel Snap discord for a couple of developer questions and answers.
4) Q: Snap packs still come with a high degree of randomness in terms of how large the pool of cards they have in them. For getting specific cards the token shop rotation is the only method and this can take weeks or even months for newer players, is the team planning on addressing this concern? The expressed goal of this change is to give players greater agency in choosing what cards they want to purchase but the current token shop rotation method runs counterintuitive to this.
A: Snap Packs have a much greater level of agency than the previous system. You can target cards in 5 different packs with different pools of cards while also still having the rotating cards.
As always, we’ll be watching how Snap Packs performs and listening to your feedback.
-Griffin
Author's note:
As people get their hands on the new system and figure out the details of how it functions, the increase to agency will become more clear. There is increased agency in the form of more tokens and more rotating spots in the shop, but Snap Packs themselves have some hidden agency buffs themselves. The ability to organize and curate your pools over time is where the primary increase in agency from Snap Packs comes in and I believe it's an underestimated part of this system.
For low series players, opening from a pool rich with desired targets will outperform the random extra card from spotlights by a considerable degree. For higher series players, spending some time and resources to shrink one of the two series 5 pools as small as possible will eventually mean getting more cards you want at a significant discount. Spotlights brought a new card, cards chosen by the developers with significant and unpredictable gaps between appearances, and occasional totally random unowned cards.
The increase in agency in this system is absolutely not exclusively in the increased tokens that allow direct purchases; the division of the random cards into different pools means the randomness of this system, while still definitely present, is much easier to control and map. Players' collections will be far more reflective of what they are aiming for than in the previous system and that's one of the most important aspects of this change.
5) Q: I own Anti-Venom, X-23, and Elsa Bloodstone through variants but not their base cards. I know the blog post specifically mentioned that we would own the base cards in a future update, but I noticed that I don't currently see these in the Series 4/5 packs as unowned. Is that intentional design? If so, it's fantastic, I just wanted to make sure that I won't have to be worried about pulling those.
A: This is intended!!! While we work on delivering base cards for Variants you own in a future update we wanted to ensure you didn't pull it from a Snap Pack in the meantime.
-Griffin
Author's note:
Early indications were that this wouldn't be live yet, so I'm really happy the team found a way to protect Snap Packs from pulling base cards of already owned variants. Another side note on this topic: It appears some people have Ultimate Variants rotating through their ship for cards they don't yet own the base variant. When they add this update later, you'll be given the base card if you already own any variant. This might be an excellent way to directly purchase that card and essentially get the ultimate variant at a discount. Keep an eye out!
2024 PAX Bundle
If did not collect the PAX Captain America variant from last year we got you covered! Go to the Nuverse Marvel Snap Shop and redeem the code PAXCAP in the webshop. You will receive the Captain America variant below!
That's it for this week! Come find me on social media (@scosco on Bluesky) and check out the recent tour I did of the Chinese version Marvel Snap! Head to the comments and join the conversation!