Marvel Snap Topic 23: Nova Enough Bubs

We were reluctant to limit Uatu's vision when we first changed the effect to work from the deck, but it felt needlessly risky to remove a lot of the tension and mystery from locations for players earning Uatu early on. However, we've grown comfortable with the idea and hope fans enjoy Watching the whole field on turn 1 in the future.

Moon Knight's a great character, but has struggled to find a good home even when discard is popular. We've kept "improve Moon Knight" on the whiteboard for a while, and today we're crossing that off. We did debate redesigning the card, but we've also heard your feedback when we do that in a way that fundamentally changes the card for fans it already has, as we did with Adam Warlock. This tweak aims to make the card a more suitable pairing with Stature, one of the most popular ways to play Moon Knight already, as well as Swarm and Apocalypse. It may also make Moon Knight a useful threat against decks that rely on single 6-Cost threats, like Red Hulk.

The interaction of Luke Cage stopping Shadow King and various other corner cases which result in Shadow King adding negative or positive modifier have proven confusing for players. Weve decided to adjust Shadow King because this effect specifically feels like it should be cleansing modifiers, not adding more to counterbalance whats already there. Were keeping this distinct from Valkyrie because that effect does specifically add a modifier to other cards, and feels like fair game for Luke Cage to prevent it

We've made two changes to Blink. The first is functional: we've adjusted the ability to check the cards in your deck based on what they currently cost, not their original Cost. This means that she'll see cards the same way that Jane Foster sees them. It's not an inconsistency that came up much in gameplay, but it didn't make sense that Jane and Blink could both grab a Negative Iron Man that's a 0/5. However, like all cards already do, Blink will still care about the original Cost of the card in play to determine the one from the deck.

What cards are coming in the Spotlight today? I couldnt find them

With the update my zemo credits mission turned into a gwenpool gold mission so I just raced to finish that before the flip

Wow these solo rewards are awful for the Alliance. 4000 points in a week and the reward is 150 credits and 130 boosters.

That's like 2 daily quests.

I just grinded a mission to win 8 games with Thor/Odin and it was 250 points. So they expect you to do 2 of those caliber quests a day just to get 3500 points.

Yeah you get points from cubes too but this is probably the grindiest system they've released so far with basically no reward.

Also, from reddit:

In order to get the mystery variant every week (120k points) a full clan of 30 needs to average ~571 points per person per day.

So yeah don't look forward to us completing that each week lol.

It took a few shots to land Loki in the right spot, but the goal had been accomplished. However, as time has passed, our preference for using Loki as a buildaround for decks that generate extra cards has shifted. It's proven too stifling to cards like Snowguard and Agent Coulson, who can't really stand on their own anywhere, as well as future designs we've worked on internally. Given Loki's recent resurgence alongside Arishem, it felt like the right time to try capturing that fantasy without diminishing those other cards. We don't want to "banish Loki from Asgard" with this change, so we're erring stronger to avoid that. If we need to come back for a buff or nerf, or if this rework doesn't succeed for other reasons, we'll consider something else.

This has been a tricky card for us to land where we want it. The last change proved we had enough overlap from other effects to avoid leaning on Leech as an all-purpose answer. However, the function has primarily been a tool for letting decks brute force their strongest stuff through defenses, rather than answering otherwise overpowering strategies. We're going to try narrowing it further and targeting a more specific scope of threats. We're also going to aim weak, in case we're underestimating the effect, to give most honest folk a break from getting Leeched.

The good Doctor had settled into a career as a niche player in the SNAP metagame for quite a while, until Arishem showed up. While Arishem is enabling more aggressive Ock plays, the true lesson has been that when Ock is seeing a lot of play . . . that can get fairly frustrating. Given we find ourselves in a spot where we have a card we kind of don't want people playing in volume, that makes it a solid candidate for a rework. Our goal here isn't specifically a nerf, but rather to continue capturing the fantasy of the card with an implementation that's more fun and will be a healthier addition to the metagame. Plus, 4/8 is a pretty great statline for creative reasons.

Enough time has passed for White Widow to see the breadth of the card's impact, and it's showing up more often than we aimed for, and in a wider variety of decks. The strength doesn't feel especially far off, so this small tweak down on the effect should help balance things out.

One of the winningest cards in Arishem decks has continued to be Blob. The specifics of that gameplay aren't very satisfying, because Blob tends to wind up fairly close to a 6/17 or better without a drawback in these decks. Our goal with Blob is to encourage some meaningful deckbuilding differences or charge a steeper price for the strength, so that's not working out. Turning the knob down will weaken Blob in Arishem while leaving some strength to build around in 12-card decks.

War Machine hasn't found a consistent home, indicating there's room to add extra Power. A larger contributor to the low play rate may be our revision to Professor X leaving players without enough incentive to find a slot for War Machine, but either way this buff carries fairly little risk.

We took some Power away from Apocalypse a while ago, when Discard had reached perhaps the peak of its all-time strength. Since then the metagame has continued to evolve, and Discard has slid backwards. This won't fully reverse the trend, but it's a solid step and we'd like to monitor the results before making additional updates.