Patch Notes - March 4, 2025
PATCH HIGHLIGHTS
Series Drops have arrived!
While these Series Drops will help many players along their journey, it’s not intended to fix the core issues around Card acquisition. The team remains focused on a larger, long-term solution.
To Series 3:
- Knull
- Zabu
- MODOK
- Nimrod
- Ghost Spider
- Nebula
- Silk
- Spider Ham
- Lady Deathstrike
- Mobius M Mobius
- Havok
- Selene
- Hercules
To Series 4:
- Loki
- Blob
- Sebastian Shaw
- Elsa Bloodstone
- Ms Marvel
- Werewolf By Night
- Skaar
- Black Knight
- Corvus Glaive
- Cull Obsidian
- Cannonball
- Annihilus
GAMEPLAY
SKILL CARD TYPE
Since Marvel SNAP’s release two and a half years ago, all cards have fundamentally worked the same way, but not anymore! Agamotto’s Ancient Arcana are the first peek at a new type of card. Skills don’t have Power, and are banished (gone forever) after taking effect. That allows them to cost less Energy than analogous character cards, as well as leaving extra card slots at locations to enable plays like triggering Hope Summers additional times. For more details, see the FAQ at the end.
You can expect to see more skills in the future representing all sorts of concepts that demonstrate an action or ability, opening up the possibilities to bring all the coolest parts of Marvel into SNAP!
BANISH
This is a new term and zone for cards that are gone for good: unlike destroyed and discarded cards, they won’t be hopping back into the match after they’re gone. To start: all skill cards are banished after they resolve their effects, and we’re making a couple of updates to old cards and locations to banish cards, but expect more new effects to come!
DISCARDED, DESTROYED, & BANISHED PILES
Because skills don’t stay at a location very long to read, we prioritized some upgrades to the three piles you can view in-match from the player profiles: cards here will now display their current stats and you can select them to zoom in, just like a card in play. This is a great way to remind yourself what a particular skill does or see what an opposing Hela might bring back.
CARD TOOLTIPS AND CLARITY
And while you’re zooming in on cards you’ll notice a new [Question Mark Icon] by many of their descriptions. Tapping anywhere in such a card’s description will pop up tooltips explaining some details of their text. We try to make cards’ functions clear on first read, but there isn’t room to clarify every point of potential confusion. We saw some players struggling with the details of Activate back when we introduced that ability, and so took pains to find a better place for more information to live as we introduce new concepts like skills and banish.
Tooltips also let us unify and shorten some wording that would otherwise have been just a smidge too hard to understand. Cards and locations that used to trigger “After each turn” will now read “End of Turn:” (no functional difference).
Abilities that used to care about “cards that didn’t start in your deck” will now care about “created cards.” This is a small functional difference: they’ll only impact cards that weren’t in EITHER player’s starting deck. That means they’ll no longer count a Green Goblin that switched sides, but will still count cards created at the start of the game like Thanos’ Infinity Stones. More on that below!
Skills and Banish FAQ
Will banished cards count for Death?
Banished is its own separate state; nothing that cares about discarded or destroyed cards will look at banished ones, and vice versa.
When exactly are skills banished?
After their own On Reveal effects, but before any cards or locations that take effect after a card is played. Basically other cards will see them as played cards, but they won’t remain in play to be affected by other things. For example, playing a Skill at Angela’s location will first banish it, then give Angela Power. So playing one by Lockjaw, the skill won’t be around anymore to swap.
What is a skill’s Power?
It doesn’t have one! Anything that tries to affect its Power…won’t. So Cassandra Nova won’t be able to steal anything from it, Ravonna Renslayer won’t discount it, and Phastos will always reduce its cost.
Do skills have the lowest-Power?
Since skills have no Power stat at all, it’s neither highest nor lowest. Cards sorting Power that way (like Silver Samurai) will only pick a skill if all of the options are skills.
ART & VISUAL EFFECTS
Sped up the VFX resolution of Sebastian Shaw and Doom 2099
BALANCE UPDATES
CARD UPDATES
- [Old] 1/2 - On Reveal: Destroy the card that costs the least in your opponent’s deck.
- [New] 1/2 - On Reveal: Banish the card that costs the least in your opponent’s deck.
Developer Notes
We found “destroy” spanning multiple zones but being distinct from discard led to unintuitive interactions like Yondu destroying Deadpool, but leaving him dead. While this change does remove Yondu’s synergistic interaction with cards like Death, it also allows him to get rid of problematic cards for good and opens the door for new synergies down the line as more cards banish.
- [Old] 2/3 - Ongoing: Your opponent’s cards that didn’t start in their deck cost 1 more. (maximum 6)
- [New] 2/3 - Ongoing: Your opponent’s created cards cost 1 more. (maximum 6)
- [Old] 1/2 - Activate: Draw a card from your deck that didn’t start there.
- [New] 1/2 - Activate: Draw a created card from your deck.
- [Old] 1/2 - Ongoing: Cards that didn’t start in your deck cost 1 less. (minimum 1)
- [New] 1/2 - Ongoing: Your created cards cost 1 less. (minimum 1)
- [Old] 6/9 - Costs 1 less for each of your cards in play that didn’t start in your deck.
- [New] 6/9 - Costs 1 less for each of your created cards in play.
Developer Notes
We found this old category to be a lot harder to parse in text, leaving our early attempts at wording cards like Mockingbird difficult to comprehend. We also found the narrow distinction between these cards and Victoria Hand confused even more players. Cards that were created during the game form a clearer conceptual unit, and now we can clear up the questions they raise with tooltips! So while this change will remove the affected cards’ synergistic interaction with ones like Cable, it’s also opened up opportunities for upcoming cards to play into created card synergies in new and interesting ways!
Non-functional Wording Changes to use “End of Turn:”
- Sunspot
- Hydra Bob
- Adam Warlock
- Havok
- Thena
- Bruce Banner
- Thaddeus Thunderbolt Ross
- Marvel Boy
- Makkari
- Doom 2099
- Attuma
- Black Cat
- Red Hulk
- Evolved Misty Knight
- Evolved Cyclops
- Evolved Hulk
Tooltips also gave us an opportunity to unify the growing number of cards that take effect after everything else in a turn. We’d worded most of these effects with “After each turn” to help clarify that they didn’t happen right when you hit the “End Turn” button, but with tooltips to clarify that point, we can avoid ambiguity about which turn these effects occur during and make them easier to parse at a glance.
LOCATION UPDATES
- [Old] After you play a card here this turn, destroy the top card of your opponent’s deck.
- [New] After you play a card here this turn, banish the top card of your opponent’s deck.
- [Old] Cards that didn’t start in your deck cost 1 more. (max 6)
- [New] Created cards cost 1 more. (max 6)
- [Old] Cards that didn't start in your deck get +2 Power here.
- [New] Created cards here have +2 Power.
Non-functional Wording Changes to use “End of Turn:”
- Great Web
- Jotunheim
- Madripoor
- Muir Island
- Rickety Bridge
- Warrior Falls
- Yggdrasil
I banish you to the comment section to let me know what you think about this patch!