Balance Updates: August 28, 2025

Today we’re going to make some more adjustments to the End of Turn strategy, weakening some consistently performing, and often frustrating, cards that interrupt and interact with your opponent’s game plan, and making a variety of buffs to some underperformers. Let’s get started!

Fenris Wolf

[Old] 2/3 – Activate: Resurrect your opponent’s highest-Power discarded or destroyed card on your side of this location.
[New] 2/3 > 3/4

Cannonball

[Old] 5/8 – On Reveal: Move the highest-Power enemy card here away. If you can’t, destroy it with a Rock.
[New] 5/8 > 5/6

Frequently, but not always paired together, Fenris Wolf and Cannonball often represent a ton of points with very little counterplay. In particular, the curve of Fenris Wolf into Negasonic Teenage Warhead is incredibly powerful for generating both a ton of points and virtual points through your opponent’s card being destroyed and then revived.

Fenris Wolf in particular is a rather unique card in the game that plays a novel role, but the ease of weaving it into your gameplan is just too low relative to its impact. The aforementioned curving with Negasonic is the easiest example of how much potential Fenris has to loom over the game, starting on turn 2.

We sometimes make buffs to make cards less clunky and easier to realize their synergies, and we’re taking the opposite route today to ensure that Wolf keeps his identity in Marvel Snap, but to make it more difficult to realize his point potential without incurring some kind of opportunity cost by committing him on turn 3 and then trying to realize his synergy.

The Cannonball/Mercury combo has been tearing up the ladder for a while now, and can be a rather frustrating experience to play against too frequently. As-is, playing Cannonball largely ensures that you are going to lane wherever you play him, and our hope is that a sizable nerf to his Power will make that outcome less guaranteed, with the Fenris Wolf making a small but meaningful impact to Cannonball’s total strength as well.

We know that there is an inherent frustration to losing to your own cards, particularly when there’s even more added randomness factored in, and our belief is that these changes will do good work to lower the frequency at which that happens in an unsatisfying manner.

Juggernaut

[Old] 3/3 – On Reveal: Move away all enemy cards played here this turn. (including unrevealed cards)
[New] 3/3 > 4/5

Rounding out the “pretty frustrating” category, we’re making a sizable change to Juggernaut. As-is, Juggernaut’s play pattern is typically to play it on turn 6, badly disrupting your opponent, and more often than not allowing the Juggernaut player to play another Character to lock up the game. All the while being a target for Silver Surfer.

Our hope is that this change will primarily encourage engaging with Juggernaut before the final turn of the game, now that it is very difficult to play two cards in the same turn with it. Increasing the variety of the guessing-game with Juggernaut to not be the final play of the game should open up the tactics of playing with and against Juggernaut substantially overall making the experience more dynamic, even as a nerf.

Fantasticar

[Old] 4/7 – Activate: Give your End of Turn cards +2 Power.
[New] 4/7 > 4/5

We wanted to start with making changes incrementally last OTA with the End of Turn deck given how large of a change the Mr. Fantastic First Steps and Ghost rework were. We’ve seen significant inroads from a few short weeks ago, but we still believe that the End of Turn deck is worthy of further action in an attempt to provide more diversity to the metagame.

As a result, we’re shaving a significant amount of Power from Fantasticar, with the belief that it can still output plenty of points when your synergies are operating at full capacity, but that the more median output from the deck will be much easier to compete with, thus putting some pressure on the metagame to further correct.

We will monitor things to take further action if necessary, but our hope is that ladder deck diversity will improve substantially between this change and the nerfs to Cannonball.

Mad Thinker

[Old] 1/1 – At the start of each turn (after drawing), +2 Power if your hand is full.
[New] 1/1 > 1/2

Nightmare

[Old] 3/-1- On Reveal: Replace the text of each card in your hand with text from a random card of the same Cost.
[New] 3/-1 > 3/1

Silver Surfer First Steps

[Old] 3/4 – End of Turn: If you’re winning this location with an On Reveal card, copy its text.
[New] 3/4 > 3/5

Ok, finally on to some buffs! All three of these cards represent a pretty similar theme – relatively unique effects that we thought could give a little more love.

For Mad Thinker, we weren’t entirely sure what the average outcome of this card would realistically be given the large deck building ask, but it’s become clear that he, and one drops in general as we’ll get to, can get a little more strength overall.

Nightmare was the car we were most intentionally cautious with. This is the type of card that fans of the effect will absolutely love, but its involvement does make following what’s happening in a normal game of Snap more difficult, and as a result we wanted to hedge against it having too much metagame share. Given that it does have such fans and its win rate, we think we can loosen things up just a tad to give it a slightly more respectable stat-line.

Silver Surfer First Steps is, by design, a card that has a lot of potential with her original Silver Surfer card. We wanted to hedge a little against that interaction being too strong, but that hasn’t shaken out, and First Steps has a lot of interesting interactions that we’d like to promote players to experiment with.

America Chavez

[Old] 1/2 – On Reveal: Give the top card of your deck +2 Power.
[New] 1/2 – On Reveal: Give the top card of your deck +3 Power.

Nearly every OTA we’re on the look out for refreshing old favorites and today we felt it was finally America Chavez’s time. In general, adding more buffing to the game is something we want to encourage to allow players to create fun emergent combos and synergies, and although +3 Power is a very large buff, as proven out by cards like Galacta, we feel the distinct lack of targeting for Chavez gives her more room to be strong.

Ghost Spider

[Old] 1/2 – On Reveal: The last card you played moves here.
[New] 1/2 > 1/3

Closing out, we wanted to make some more incremental changes to the Move package. Understandably, there was a fairly mixed reaction to the Vulture and Human Torch swap from last OTA. As we noted then, we want to remain committed to making sure the archetype remains healthy for the game in the long term, as well as fresh and fun for its fans.

Move has had a natural predator with the Mercury/Cannonball combo tearing up the ladder, and we hope that the nerfs there will naturally help out the deck, but we still think there’s room to keep improving Move. We want to keep the changes relatively incremental, but we’re committed to making sure that Snap’s synergy decks remain viable to play.

We’ll keep moving forward with that plan today by buffing fan favorite Ghost Spider, and we’ll continue to see how things shake out.

That’s all for today, happy Snapping!