Balance Update – February 8, 2023
MARVEL SNAP is making balance changes today to two cards. Second Dinner game designer, Glenn Jones, shares behind-the-scenes insights on how our team thinks about making changes to cards.
Balance Update: Zabu and Silver Surfer
Today’s balance changes mark our first “over the air” change to card content without using a patch. Many of you may be wondering why we’re taking this action, so I’m going to walk you through some of our balance philosophy, the metrics that led to these changes, and the adjustments we’re making to Zabu and Silver Surfer.
Why Do We Balance?
MARVEL SNAP’s content release model gives our metagame a unique texture. By releasing a new card each week, we hope to constantly provide something new and exciting to look forward to for players. That requires a diverse metagame featuring opportunity for innovation and exploration. This game is at its most fun with a large variety of viable decks featuring many different cards. It’s awesome to see individual cards succeed, but we need that success to exist within a spectrum that also allows many other cards to flourish.
Balancing Act
Let’s talk about our general process for balancing SNAP. Every week, our design group looks at metrics for both individual cards and “clusters,” the groups of cards that most commonly make up various decks.
- For individual cards, we focus on win percentage when drawn, popularity, and cube contribution, the number of cubes a card yields.
- For clusters, we focus on win percentage against the field, average cubes per game, the percentage of all games using that cluster, and its matchups.
Each of these values has tolerances, and that’s what determines whether we make a balance change. Exceeding one tolerance doesn’t mandate a buff or a nerf, but it does build the “watchlist” you may have heard about. When a card goes on watch, we discuss potential changes and begin playtesting them, just in case. If things don’t improve on the live game, that’s when we’ll make the change.
But which change to make? Our goal is to find a version of each card that makes the game more fun, not just turn strong cards into weak ones. If one of our adjustments prevents too many players from enjoying their card, we’ll revisit it later.
Card Changes
Weakening these two Season Pass cards wasn’t a light decision. It’s paramount that we protect our gameplay, but our team also takes seriously that players trust us to be responsible stewards of that content. These changes aren’t meant to “delete” Zabu or SIlver Surfer–just give other cards more room.
Zabu
Zabu’s individual card performance was strong, but not amazing. It didn’t crack our Top 5 cards for most of January, which is usually where you find troublemakers. Zabu’s dominance only became apparent in evaluating its clusters, which is data that takes longer to surface. In mid-January we saw three distinct Zabu decks gaining steam near the top of our rankings on winrate, cube gain, and population. That was when we knew a change would be necessary, but the next patch was already locked, which brings us to today.
- 3/2 – Ongoing: Your 4-Cost cards cost 2 less. (minimum 1)
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- 2/2 – Ongoing: Your 4-Cost cards cost 1 less. (minimum 1)
Moving Zabu’s cost reduction from 2 to 1 reduces the potential Energy reduction of the cat, making it harder to hide game-winning amounts of Power until turn 6 or empty your hand for Dracula. It also breaks up the Spider-Man/Absorbing Man combo, which was stronger than we’d like. Sliding him down to 2-Cost hopefully refunds enough tempo to retain the fun of building around various 4-Cost cards. We expect Zabu decks to look a bit different, but still have competitive builds.
Silver Surfer
Silver Surfer’s change is oddly linked to Zabu’s. It’s been a Top 5 card in a Top 5 deck since release, but steadied and gained cubes slower once players adapted . . . until Zabu. During Savage Lands, “Sera Surfer” was an unlikely hero and the best overall deck. However, it also had positive matchups against over 75% of the field, which meant it threatened to become too dominant once we adjusted Zabu.
- 3/0 – On Reveal: Give your other 3-Cost cards +3 Power.
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- 3/2 – On Reveal: Give your other 3-Cost cards +2 Power.
This change aims to keep mostly the same Surfer decks viable, just weaker. We’re specifically happy to carry Power on Surfer himself, because it makes figuring out where he’ll be played more interesting for both players and lets us fine-tune his strength. Those gains unfortunately come at the expense of some cool Mister Negative decks we enjoyed seeing.
Future Balance Changes
For now, we still expect patches to be the primary way to deliver balance changes. Our internal processes aren’t designed to do these impromptu changes regularly yet, and we’ll often want to make more substantial changes than this tool allows. However, we may experiment with slightly more frequent balance on a small scale, to see if there’s an even better experience for players at our fingertips. Thanks for reading, and good luck on your next snap!
