I hope everyone had a wonderful end to 2023 and that everything is going well in 2024. This will be the first time cards will be balanced in 2024, and it coincides with the release of the series drops that were previously announced. It's exciting to see what new and unique deck lists will emerge as a result of these changes, and which cards that have been dominant in the meta will be tamed. Before we get into the card updates, let's take a look at the functionality change to transforming.
Functionality Change: Transformed Cards Didn't Start in Your Deck
Previously, when a card from your starting deck transformed, it still counted as starting in your deck. Transformation was a change to that card, rather than a new card. However, playtesting the change to Loki above highlighted to us how confusing that was–our playtesters strongly felt a transformed card didn't seem like the original object, and we agreed. Moving forward, transforming a card will dissociate it from its past life and be considered a new card. However, transforming a card is still not a zone change, which is why Loki's update will prevent The Collector from receiving a buff. Currently, this change only affects Quinjet.
Loki
- [Old] 4/5 – On Reveal: Replace your hand with cards from your opponent’s starting deck. Give them -1 cost.
- [New] 4/5 – On Reveal: Transform your hand into cards from your opponent’s starting deck and give them -1 Cost.
Developer Notes: Loki has been a force since release, fueling a new archetype that dominated the metagame for a solid stretch. Loki shrugged off our OTA nerf to 4/5–it was a small hit, but probably about half as effective as we’d hoped. We needed another patch to implement a second change, so we took the time to play with some fairly different changes and monitor the metagame. As December began, we even saw Loki falter–Darkhawk, Bounce, and Destroy were all winning the matchup convincingly. Blob-Thanos shook things up a bit, and Loki was able to squeak back into the mix on top.
Once we saw all that, we decided to soften our approach rather than pursue a larger rework. This adjustment will remove The Collector’s role as a massive source of Power for Loki decks. The winningest card overall in the Loki decks has rarely actually been Loki–it was usually The Collector. That’s actually fairly surprising because drawing The Collector earlier is much better than later when compared to Loki, meaning more “loser” Collectors are in the data. This change will be good for The Collector long-term, because future patches will be able to balance The Collector around its strength in other decks without the burden of Loki’s glorious purpose.
Ms. Marvel
- [Old] 4/5 – Ongoing: Adjacent locations where your cards have unique Costs have +5 Power.
- [New] 4/4 – Ongoing: Your adjacent locations with 2+ cards and no repeated Costs have +5 Power.
Developer Notes: This is a small change in scope, but we expect it to have a meaningful impact. We released Ms. Marvel without requiring two cards in adjacent locations in part because we found it difficult to clearly communicate the effect when it had multiple conditions. However, something we learned from players was that for many of them, the default assumption was that two cards would be necessary anyway! Because we also weren’t psyched about how well Ms. Marvel synergized with Professor X, this change captures better gameplay while shaving off a bit of the strength. Even though we adjusted the words, the card is otherwise the same as before–you just need two cards at an adjacent location instead of one.
Annihilus
- [Old] 5/7 – On Reveal: Your cards with 0 or less Power switch sides. Destroy those that can’t.
- [New] 5/6 – On Reveal: Your cards with Power below 0 switch sides. Destroy those that can’t.
Developer Notes: Even though internal playtests successfully “found” most of the Annihilus decks we’ve seen on top of the metagame, their performance was surprising. In particular, the strength of just playing Annihilus with Sentry and/or Hood in decks with no other synergies has been very good. During design, we widened Annihilus’s condition to include 0 in part because we were worried it wouldn’t be strong enough restricted to such a tight set of targets, but clearly that’s sufficiently strong. Given that’s the case, we’re restoring our preferred design that requires cards to have negative Power, and taking a little base Power away from Annihilus. That might seem heavy, but Annihilus has been one of the most significant outliers in our card performance data for weeks now, at every level of play. Even more surprising, Annihilus was performing better in our most competitive samples than anywhere else–usually strength flattens up there.
Dracula
- [Old] 4/0 – At the end of the game, discard a card from your hand. This has its Power.
- [New] 4/1 – At the end of the game, discard a card from your hand to gain its Power.
Developer Notes: We’re still monitoring the Discard decks’ performance in the wake of losing America Chavez, and one of the cards most damaged by that change was Dracula. In addition to this minor buff, reworking Dracula this way makes his text more clear and provides us with additional balance knobs to buff or nerf him as necessary in the future. We like having more dials to turn.
Angel
- [Old] 1/2 – When one of your cards is destroyed, this flies out of your deck to replace it.
- [New] 1/2 – When one of your cards is destroyed, this flies out of your hand or deck to replace it.
Developer Notes: Hey, we did it! This change has been in the queue for a while, but we’ve delayed it to ensure we could implement and test the VFX. Angel’s a card we give to players early, so we wanted to be sure we weren’t breaking a charming piece of that new player experience.
Quake
- [Old] 2/3 – On Reveal: If this is at the middle location, swap the positions of each location.
- [New] 2/3 – On Reveal: Swap the positions of the other two locations.
Developer Notes: This is very similar to Angel, although our solution might have been less obvious. We expect Quake might become an interesting alternative to Scarlet Witch and a potent tech card against strategies relying on Storm or Legion.
Kingpin
- [Old] 3/4 – When a card moves here on turn 6, destroy it.
- [New] 2/3 – When an enemy card moves here, afflict it with -2 Power.
Developer Notes: One of the few remaining “loose ends” in our change to the move mechanic during the last patch was that Kingpin and Fisk Tower remained able to destroy cards thanks to Juggernaut. It’s always been a source of confusion for some players, regardless of the outcome, and Kingpin’s been weak enough that a rework was worth pursuing. This change makes the interaction with Juggernaut match existing expectations, because we consistently don’t let unrevealed cards have their Power modified by other effects. We also made the effect asymmetrical and tried out an aggressive set of numbers to see if we could convince players to consider pairing Kingpin with Polaris or Spider-Man, in addition to being a tech card against cards like Phoenix and Silk. Another upside of this change is it adds good ways to adjust Kingpin via OTA and find the perfect spot.
America Chavez (text only)
- [Old] 2/3 – On Reveal: The top card of your deck gets +2 Power.
- [New] 2/3 – On Reveal: Give the top card of your deck +2 Power.
Developer Notes: This is a non-functional text update, just to make America better match our default choices for cards.
Bugfix: “After you play a card here…” and similar effects
We have a handful of non-intuitive interactions around “After you play” triggers for complicated coding reasons. The most prominent has been Angela, who would receive her Power when a card that was played to her location but revealed at a different one, thanks to something like Juggernaut. This doesn’t match intuition around other uses of the word “play,” which typically care about where a card finishes resolving, such as Death’s Domain. But, if she worked “the right way” in that case, it would mean working “the wrong way” with stuff like Spider-Man (she would not get the buff from Spiderman after he moves away). So either way, something would act unintuitively.
To solve that, we implemented a new functionality in this patch that allows us to track where a card began to reveal rather than just where it finished revealing. That means effects like the two above work more intuitively now–Juggernaut will stop unrevealed cards from buffing Angela and she’ll now be able to get buffed by Spider-Man, even though he moves away before resolving. This is also going to fix a few of the bugs we’ve had with Luke’s Bar, as cards that got bounced sometimes became untrackable for other triggers.
In the vast majority of cases, this change won’t affect your gameplay experience at all. It really did only matter for a few corner cases. However, we’re providing the list of cards and locations that have slightly different behavior now below.
Cards
- Angela
- Titania
- Silk
- Elsa Bloodstone
- Negasonic Teenage Warhead
- Werewolf By Night
- Echo
- Lockjaw
Locations
- Altar of Death
- Aunt May’s
- Bar Sinister
- Cloning Vats
- Danger Room
- Death’s Domain
- Hotel Inferno
- Lechuguilla
- Luke’s Bar
- Machineworld
- Noor Dimension
- Orchis Forge
- Quantum Realm
- Quantum Tunnel
- Shuri’s Lab
- Sinister London
- Tarnax
- Vibranium Mines
- Vormir
Location Updates
- [Old] When a card moves here, destroy it.
- [New] When a card moves here, afflict it with -4 Power.
Developer Notes: All of the notes for Kingpin above basically apply here. We still want a location that plays spoiler to movement, but without the confusing elements created by occasionally destroying unrevealed cards.
Let me know in the comments what change you are excited about most and have a BEWDiful Day!