One of the main reasons players say locations are just as important as the cards in a game is because of their impact. Locations can single-handedly bring cripple one archetype while serving another the win on a silver platter. Death's Domain is a brilliant location for Destroy decks, while Spider Island will favor Move.
As such, it's extremely rare to see a location effectively get removed from the game, which leads us to Tokyo 2099. On December 23, the devs on Marvel Snap's official Discord server informed us they won't release this location in its current state after hearing community feedback. So, what went wrong?
The Excessive Hate Against Discard
There are a couple of archetype-withholding locations in the game right now—Wakanda stops Destroy, The Sandbar stops Arishem, and Isle of Silence stops Ongoing decks. However, a common thing among these locations is how to play around them. You can simply ignore them and play a match as you normally would so that restrictiveness is somewhat minimized.
That's not the case with Tokyo 2099. Once it appears, you cannot discard anything anywhere for the rest of the game, and this effectively kills any Hela, Apocalypse, or Moon Knight/Blackbolt deck. These decks don't even have any location-manipulating cards, so once Tokyo 2099 appears, they're finished.
The one-dimensional nature of this location is very off-putting. If no one is playing Discard, this won't do a single thing. However, if someone is playing Discard, having this location appear is an instant Snap or Retreat—it goes against basic design principles. Even with Death's Domain, you'll see non-Destroy decks win against Destroy, and vice versa if Wakanda appears. Unfortunately, there's just no comeback with Tokyo 2099—you win or die.
弃牌
You also need to consider that Discard decks are among the most popular in the game at all ranks, including high-Infinite. Apocalypse's version of Discard, especially, is massive with a 4.92% Play Rate and 57.31% Win Rate. Therefore, Tokyo 2099 affects many players, and not in a good way. Imagine getting Tokyo 2099 as a Hot Location; that would definitely cause some uproar.
The Offset Doesn't Justify The Location
There are a ton of locations in Marvel Snap that play around certain mechanics. You have locations that destroy, move, transform, add or remove cards, grant or reduce Energy, and much more. However, when you consider locations purely around discard, only two come to mind: Sokovia and Weapon X Facility.
None of these locations entirely favor or oppose Discard decks. Although Discard decks indeed want discarding, several cards in the deck don't—you can easily lose a valuable M.O.D.O.K., Hela, or Dracula on these locations. With Tokyo 2099, Second Dinner was releasing the first location to actively stop Discard decks.
So, you end up in a situation where a location is too harsh AND doesn't even have anything to balance the pain. For reference, here are a couple of locations that distinctly favor or oppose other popular archetypes:
Arishem
- Favored By: Panoptichron
- Opposed By: The Sandbar
Destroy
- Favored By: Death's Domain, Altar of Death
- Opposed By: Wakanda, Knowhere
Ongoing
- Favored By: Onslaught's Citadel
- Opposed By: Isle of Silence
Zoo
- Favored By: The Big House, Lake Hellas
- Opposed By: Hellfire Club, Crimson Cosmos
You'll notice how the number of locations opposing a certain archetype is roughly the same as the number of locations favoring it. Thus, there's a balance, and, going back to the original point, they're not complete game-changers.
Tokyo 2099 doesn't have an alternative yet that justifies its existence. For a location to be this harsh, there likely needs to be another location in the game that discards whichever card you want. This would let Discard decks snatch the win. However, that'd be a terrible design philosophy, so a location like that shouldn't exist, and neither should Tokyo 2099.
What Could've Been Done
After dissecting the flaws in Tokyo 2099's intended state, it's time to see how it could have worked. The location's text definitely needs to be refined to make it a little less broad and binary. Of course, you can't give it the Wakanda treatment by making it location-specific, like "Cards played here can't be discarded", because discarded cards won't be played anyway.
Still, what you CAN do is make it turn-specific, like "Cards can't be discarded on even turns." Not letting cards be discarded on even turns is much fairer than odd turns because it allows you to play M.O.D.O.K. and Lady Sif.
Another way to fix Tokyo 2099 is to make it affect Power, like "Give discarded cards -2 Power", similar to what Hela already does. If you want to be a little harsher, change it to "Each time you discard something, give it -2 Power" for an ever-growing effect. However, that kind of text feels like it belongs on a card rather than a location, so it may need some fine-tuning.
On top of refining Tokyo 2099's text, Second Dinner would've also needed to release a Discard-favoring location in the near future. This would balance things out and give one of the most popular in-game decks a solid fighting chance.
Conclusion
To answer the question, Tokyo 2099 was simply too harsh with no counter-balancing option in Marvel Snap. It bluntly shut down a deck with the third-highest Play Rate, so it would seriously anger a large part of the playerbase. Heck, even Knowhere is a problem for Discard because most of its cards are On-Reveal, so there's nothing but trouble for this deck on all sides.
Either that or it wouldn't affect a match with a Discard deck, essentially adding nothing to the game. While you could say that for other explicit locations like Death's Domain or The Sandbar, you have to consider that they affect both players and add a dynamic aspect.
I hope Second Dinner learns from this and makes these meant-as-specific locations either less broad, less harsh, or both. Credit where it's due, though, I'm glad they heard the community feedback and acted swiftly, removing Tokyo 2099 before it was too late. It's just a shame that it had to happen to an extremely well-made location in Marvel Rivals.