April 10th – Balance Updates
In this week’s balance update, we’ll be weakening Rocket & Groot, redistributing some of the power in the Discard deck by nerfing M.O.D.O.K. while buffing The First Ghost Rider, and making some improvements to Bishop, Devil Dinosaur, Patriot, and Redwing.
Let’s go ahead and get started.
Rocket&Groot
- [Old] 3/3 – You can move this once. After your opponent plays a card here, steal 1 Power from it.
- [Change] 3/3 > 3/2
Ever since their display of prowess at the beginning of Sanctum Showdown, Rocket & Groot have been picking up steam, becoming more ubiquitous as the best curve filler on 3 Energy across a vast array of archetypes.
This is another example of a fun card with incentives that we really like, but it’s just a touch too high in total impact on average. The amount of agency that R&G affords can frequently allow skillful play to generate 3 or more triggers, and while that is something we still want to encourage, we don’t want the card to also outshine the average 3 Energy card when you can only manage to pull off 1-2 triggers. As is, even the latter scenarios are translating to too many total functional points, so we’ll be moving them to 3/2.
M.O.D.O.K.
- [Old] 5/8 – On Reveal: Discard your hand.
- [Change] 5/8 > 5/7
The First Ghost Rider
- [Old] 2/5 – On Reveal: Discard the lowest-Power card from your hand. Remove that card’s Power from this..
- [Change] 2/5 > 2/6
These sets of changes represent a slight tweak in power across the Discard strategies and are somewhat emblematic of a desire continued from last OTA to encourage more diverse discard strategies.
As with our buff to OG Ghost Rider, the hope is that propping up The First Ghost Rider can help to target some more specific Reanimation strategies involving the aforementioned Ghost Rider and Khonshu.
The ding to M.O.D.O.K itself is tricky. He is a powerful enabler that subsidizes many of the Discard payoffs in the game, and he continues to scale in power as the cardpool grows, but we want to make sure he remains a strong component of the strategy given his accessibility. At this time we feel like 8 Power is just a touch too high given the amount of synergy he has with the entirety of the Discard package, basically no matter which portion of it you choose to play.
We’ll keep an eye on M.O.D.O.K,, but for now we like shaking up the distribution of Power in discard but keeping the net points across the Discard deck the same if you’re engaging with a wide swath of cards and incentives.
Devil Dinosaur
- [Old] 5/3 – Ongoing: +2 Power for each card in your hand.
- [Change] 5/3 > 5/4
Bishop
- [Old] 3/1 – After you play a card, this gains +1 Power.
- [Change] 3/1 > 3/2
Speaking of accessible cards, these are some Series 1 cards that could use a little love. As we often note when buffing starter cards, we both want to make sure they can remain interesting options as Snap’s cardpool grows while also not having too much of an outsized impact on the low collection level metagame. Perhaps this duo can show up in the newer created card decks, or with the just released Kahhori.
Patriot
- [Old] 3/1 – Ongoing: Your cards with no abilities have +2 Power.
- [Change] 3/1 > 3/2
Zoo and other token strategies that have leveraged Patriot in the past are either on the decline, or have slowly cut Patriot from their decks. We always want to do our best to make sure that classic beloved Snap strategies can stay justifiable as options for their fans, so we’ll be giving Patriot a Power today in hopes that we can move the needle towards that end.
Redwing
- [Old] 3/4 – The first time this moves, add a card from your hand to the old location.
- [Change] 3/4 > 3/5
We’re always on the hunt for giving unique build-arounds to our premier mechanical archetypes, allowing players interesting new options to build decks and hybridize existing strategies. Simultaneously, a card like Redwing does carry inherent risk – naturally, the ability to cheat out a card from your hand is powerful. While Redwing did show up and produce some fun decks in February, it hasn’t been very sticky in the competitive Snap metagame. We feel comfortable giving Redwing an additional power and seeing if that lowers the opportunity cost of putting it in your deck enough to encourage some less all-in strategies leveraging the card than the ones we’ve seen so far.
That’s all for today, happy Snapping!
