Balance Updates: December 4, 2025

Hello! We hope that everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday. Today is going to be a big one – we’ll be taking an iconic Move outlier down a peg or two, as well as addressing a powerful lock piece combo deck that’s been steadily picking up steam. Additionally we’ll be doing the usual fare of a few small buffs to cards that can use it, and then we’re rounding out by making Spider-Man Noir much easier to play with.

Let’s get to it!

Human Torch

[Old] 3/3 – When this moves, double its Power.
[Change] 3/3 > 3/2

So, this is a large nerf. Human Torch and Move are tricky. Move is a difficult deck to play, but it consistently over performs at the highest levels of play due to the amount of points and agency that it gives its pilots. Human Torch specifically is a very difficult card to balance, being capable of some of the largest point outputs in Marvel Snap.

Our original intention with the Vulture and Human Torch Cost swap was to make it considerably harder to go wild with the card due to its increased clunkiness. While that is true to some extent, it isn’t totally clear that it was even a net nerf as it lost a natural predator in Killmonger.

It is clear that Human Torch as a 3/3 is an outlier in the game, and as we’ve stated before we would love to live in a world where the strength of the Move archetype was better widely allocated amongst the cards in the deck. Move has also been strong throughout the Arachnid Anarchy season, having picked up another powerful piece in Spider-Punk.

For those reasons we’ll be making a large nerf to Human Torch now in the interest of making Move a healthier archetype in the long term.

We debated going to 4/3 or even 4/4 as an additional step to make it more difficult to move Torch repeatedly, but we ultimately felt we weren’t confident that 4/4 would even be a sufficient nerf given how sensitive “Doubling” is to Power changes. For now we’re going to make the large change to Human Torch to get a sense of what the lower limit of his strength is.

As we’ve said many times when it comes to the Move archetype, we’ll keep monitoring it and try to get it into the most fun spot that it can be. Ideally, this change will help Move become less homogeneous and rely on a variety of Move payoffs rather than relying so much on Human Torch as its primary points piece.

War Machine

[Old] 4/6 – Ongoing: Nothing can stop you from playing cards anywhere.
[Change] 4/6 > 5/9

War Machine/Storm/Legion decks have been tearing it up for the better part of two months now. We recently made a change to Storm with the hope that it would contribute meaningfully to lowering the deck’s play numbers, but a small change wasn’t sufficient to do so.

By nerfing War Machine to 5 cost, our goal is to meaningfully move the needle on those play numbers and encourage less lock-out gameplay that can be frustrating for many players.

In the future we might revisit War Machine alongside a rework to Storm. We’ve long felt that such a popular character shouldn’t be promoting such a frustrating play pattern, similar to Spider-Man in the past. That said, we haven’t landed on a design that we love for Storm yet, so we’ll be adjusting War Machine in the short term.

Morgan le Fay

[Old] 4/7 – On Reveal: Return all your discarded and destroyed cards to hand with +3 Power.
[Change] 4/7 > 3/4

Morgan is a unique and compelling build around that offers a new spin on our classic discard and destroy archetypes. While her payoff is strong, it can be very difficult to achieve all the steps necessary to realize her potential in a six turn game – enabling her with discard or destroy cards, playing Morgan, and finally deploying your hand of powered up cards.

In a similar vein to several build-arounds we’ve buffed in the past, we’ll be lowering her Cost to make weaving in all these steps more achievable.

As we’ll be seeing shortly here with Spider-Man Noir, we’ll be more vigilant on how large an ask it is of our players to try to enable these tricky deckbuilding puzzle pay off cards.

Elsa Bloodstone

[Old] 3/4 – Each card you play to fill your side of a location gains +2 Power.
[Change] 3/4 > 3/5

Sword Master

[Old] 3/6 – On Reveal: Discard an odd-costed card from your hand.
[Change] 3/6 > 3/7

Helicarrier

[Old] 6/10 – When you discard this, fill your hand with random cards.
[Change] 6/10 > 6/12

Dormammu

[Old] 7/12 – Game Start: Begin a Summoning Ritual. (Add step 1 to hand.)
[Change] 7/12 > 7/13

Before we get to Noir though, a few buffs. A few things to call out, while Elsa Bloodstone has been performing poorly for some time, we thought she might be a touch risky to buff when the Zombie season was at the height of its powers and popularity. Now that the Horde deck has been fully fleshed out and settled into its current win rate, we feel comfortable with buffing Elsa even if she injects that deck with slightly more power.

Sword Master has been one of the weakest discard enablers for some time, so we figured it finally appropriate to give it an extra point, particularly with its friend Weapon H soon on the horizon.

Helicarrier and Dormammu are just a few more expensive cards we think can handle the extra power. As we’ve been for some time now, we’ll keep looking for opportunities to higher Cost cards to buff.

Spider-Man Noir

[Old] 4/6 – On Reveal: If your other cards in play cost exactly 8 total, add the top card of your deck here. Set its Power to 8. (0/8)
[New] 4/4 – On Reveal: Set the top card of your deck’s Power to 8. If your other cards in play cost exactly 8 total, add it here.

We’re reworking Spider-Man Noir by dramatically improving its floor. Now even if you do fail in achieving his quest, he’ll still be setting the Power of the top of your deck.

A couple things here.

We missed the mark on how difficult his quest was to achieve. As we alluded to previously with Morgan, this has happened a few times recently, and we’ll be taking a harder look at where we can incur some risk on making deckbuilding quests easier to achieve while still maintaining that those cards have exciting textboxes and payoffs.

We also wanted to make sure that our adjustment stayed true to his original vision as a build-around – we didn’t want to dramatically change the card’s incentives. It was and is one of Noir’s goals that you play with different cards than something like Jubilee – rather than trying to achieve the most expensive or powerful option from the top of your deck, we want you to choose different inclusions, cards like Mr. Sinister, Brood, or Iron Man.

Now even if you aren’t able to achieve the 8 other total costs, if you happen to spike one of aforementioned cards with a Power buff, Noir can still have an exciting impact on the game.

We aren’t quite sure whether this change will be sufficient, but it should be a big learning moment for both us and the players, and will help us get a better sense of where we should oscillate a card’s floor and ceiling.

We hope you had a wonderful and safe holiday. That’s it for today, happy Snapping!