Board 8 > Marvel Snap Topic 22: Gotta Sasquatch 'em All!

(+) Yeah! (+)

We've seen glimpses of the danger Professor X could pose over the last year or so, but rarely realized that potential. In many decks where Professor X was popular, such as Thanos, Professor X wasn't often one of the better cards. However, some things have changed and over the last month Professor X has reached new heights. And that's not just because it solves other threatsXavier is doing significant work against a sea of matchups. Given the gameplay of Professor X isn't something we want becoming a dominant element of the metagame, we decided to make a change once the existing card pool failed to effectively counter Professor X. This change removes two ways Professor X shut down locations: switching sides and movement. The latter is the most meaningful, as cards that can move will now be able to challenge Professor X, while Cannonballa dominant card in its own rightwill no longer create a combo. We may arrive at a better solution in the future, as we know this weakens the "story" of the card considerably.

Speaking of Cannonball, that card has spent weeks as one of the top cards in the game, and seen a ton of play to boot. While we're optimistic that removing Professor X will blunt that strength enough, Cannonball's dominance has been thorough and in enough different decks that we're taking away one Power. This should help ensure the metagame does shift and that a few other 5-Costs can return to the fray. If this hits Cannonball too hard, we can always revert it.

We've spoken at length on Hela in various forums. The deck has passionate fans and detractors alike, and has largely stayed within the tolerances we established for it. However, something else that's important to our definition of a balanced metagame is that players have options where they find problems. That's the foundational idea behind creating "release valves" within the card pool that can address various pressures. Whether Death and Sera are strong or not, Mobius is there for players who feel such threats merit special attention. Moving Leech to 4-Cost was one of the ways we've tried to address this, but in that case the cure proved worse than the disease. We've tried subtler things, but have yet to see the kind of success we'd hoped for. We've also debated a variety of cards we could add to the game to serve this role , but new cards take time to get into players' hands. So today we're taking action very similar to what we did with Galactus, and adding functionality that will create a better balance dial on the card itself.

This change is technically impactful to Hela, but that's not why we're making it. We've been happy to see Black Knight find plenty of homes after a soft start, but have decided that giving the Ebony Blade complete protection from interference is unnecessarily strong. Having a large card that's immune to Shang-Chi is novel and powerful enough to see play, and it wasn't trivial to let the Blade freely dodge locations like Negative Zone, either.

It is with a heavy, fiery heart that we're sanding a touch more strength off Red Hulk. The goal for this card was to position it as a simple "big monster" with ranging strength, but that range hasn't been wide enough to ensure sufficient healthy competition with other 6-Cost cards. This is a fairly small tweak, but the card doesn't look like it's super far ahead in the data. There are plenty of novel decks playing 6-Cost cards that aren't Red Hulk, it's just been the default for a few too many decks aiming to make Power without leaning on heavy synergies.

After seeing a few of our big cards go "too big," we were more careful with Gilgamesh. The occasional Blob or Red Hulk will happen, but positioning such a card as the Season Pass would be a little more worrisome. However, after the first week of play, it looks like we were too careful. This is a fairly fast turnaround to make on a new card, but the low cube rate of the card was in particular a large concern for us. We always want to ensure that the Season Pass card feels like a great addition to players' collection, but its performance thus far hasn't met that bar. While Gilgamesh and Blue Marvel get Very Large, the backup combos are weaker than expected and there are fewer other decks to slot into, so this change should ensure Gilgamesh's card communicates his canonical strength in-game.

Just a small tweak to Captain America here. We hit the Spectrum Ongoing deck slightly harder than we wanted to during the last OTA, and we'd like to ensure Cap is an appealing card for early and endgame Ongoing decks alike.

Wow, a legitimate great OTA. It's really funny seeing all the Prof. X/Cannonball abusers crying.

Yup 100 credits. Definitely preset to that.

A move/surfer deck? C3 maybe? Who knows.

Holy shit can people in infinite stop retreating on turn 6 so I can win all 3 locations in a match. My progress on this is 1/4 and you can't even leave on turn 4 to get this one either because you have to win the match.