This week we’ll be making large adjustments to Thanos, Galacta, and Lockjaw with a smattering of other smaller changes.

Overall, the SNAP metagame is quite healthy, but there has been a large presence of strong generic decks that incorporate a variety of tech cards that wax and wane for some time now.  This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, we want there to be counterplay for strategies when something rises up to be more dominant, but the ability for decks to not invest in synergistic pieces to execute their own cohesive gameplan goes against some of our core philosophy for making SNAP.  We want players, for the most part, to be able to regularly execute their gameplan unless their opponent is paying a reasonable cost to try to counter a specific metagame.

Thanos is the largest contributor by far to this, so we’ll be making adjustments for the long term health of the game, even if it creates some bumps in the road for the short term.  Let’s go ahead and look at all the changes for Thanos and the Infinity Stones.

Thanos

• [Old] 6/12 – Game Start: Draw Thanos and shuffle the six Infinity Stones into your deck.
• [New] 6/12 – Game Start: Shuffle the six Infinity Stones into your deck.

Space Stone

• [Old] 1/2 – On Reveal: Draw a card. Ongoing: Nothing can stop you from playing or moving Thanos.
• [New] 1/3 – On Reveal: Draw Thanos. Ongoing: Nothing can stop you from playing Thanos.

Time Stone

• [Old] 1/1 – On Reveal: Give Thanos -1 Cost.
• [New] 1/1 – On Reveal: Draw a card. Give Thanos -1 Cost.

Reality Stone

• [Old] 1/1 On Reveal: Replace this location with a new one.
• [Changes] 1/1 > 1/2

Although we want to encourage Thanos getting into play, having him start in your opening hand is a high floor of strength that we don’t believe will be sustainable in the long term.  This gives control decks a guaranteed late-game character that is comparable to other strategies with plenty of real estate in their deck to incorporate those aforementioned tech cards.

So we’re taking some steps to rebalance Thanos around remaining in your deck at the start of the game.  It’s still a critical component of Thanos’s core fantasy that you can both find him and assemble all six of his stones, so to that end we’re changing Space Stone to find Thanos specifically, so that you can still properly work towards the amplified Power Stone in many of your games.

We are also reverting our Time Stone change, as it is no longer clearly the strongest stone when cost reducing Thanos isn’t guaranteed to generate value anymore.

Finally, we’re adding some additional Power to the stones to further compensate.  This is a large scale set of changes, and we’ll keep an eye on how this lands, but ultimately our goal is that Thanos’s core play pattern is more centered on playing out many or all of his Stones and investing cards into mitigating the potential downside of filling out so much of your location space. We want players to pay a larger cost for filling their deck full of tech cards to widely promote as much synergistic gameplay in SNAP as possible.

Galacta

• [Old] 4/5 – Each turn, the first card you play at another location reveals with +3 Power.
• [New] 4/6 – Each turn, the first card you play another location reveals with +2 Power.

Galacta has sustained high play and win numbers since her release, and we’ve tried to hold off on changing how impactful her ability is due to +3 Power breakpoint being one of the more unique aspects of the card in SNAP’s ecosystem, but we think it is finally time to adjust her to only grant +2 Power.

Some of the motivation here is that she has been an outlier for some time, but we’ve also found internally that she has been blocking to creating synergistic Power scaling cards, given that she has such a large impact on any card that engages with the game in that manner (like Brood or Sebastian Shaw).  We would rather live in a world where we can make a variety of exciting cards without fearing having to balance around Galacta specifically, and we suspect that this change will still keep her relevant, just at play rate that will give more synergistic 4 Energy cards room to shine.

Red Guardian

• [Old] 3/3 – On Reveal: Afflict the lowest-Power enemy card here with -2 Power and remove its text.
• [Changes] 3/3 > 3/2

Here’s a more direct response to the tech card “issue.”  Again, despite a lot of talk and nerfs through the lens of trying to reduce the power and presence of tech cards slightly, we still want to make it clear that we believe and acknowledge that these types of cards are important for allowing a healthy metagame that churns.  We just think their impact is a touch too high, and Red Guardian is exemplary of this.

Given that Red Guardian is a functional 3/5 at base that is effective against almost every strategy while often skewing much higher in effective Power production when he targets an opposing scaler, we’re finding that Red Guardian is simply too efficient given its flexibility.

We want the average 3 Energy card played to be more clearly stronger than Red Guardian except when he hits an important card in a matchup.

Next up, some more quick hits number changes.

Misery

• [Old] 4/8 – On Reveal: Repeat the On Reveal abilities of your other cards here, then destroy them.
• [Changes] 4/8 > 4/9

Absorbing Man

• [Old] 4/4 – On Reveal: If the last card you played has an On Reveal, copy its text. (if able)
• [Changes] 4/4 > 4/5

With the competition easing up at 4 Energy, we wanted to give a leg up on some synergy cards that are well loved.  Misery and Absorbing Man can engage in a variety of fun shenanigans, but have had middling numbers recently and we’d like to prop them up some more given that they ask you to pursue novel interactions and make exciting decks.

Wolfsbane

• [Old] 3/1 – On Reveal: +2 Power for each other card you have here.
• [Changes] 3/1 > 3/2

Rhino

• [Old] 3/6 – On Reveal: Add a Rock to your side of this location.
• [Changes] 3/6 > 2/5

Wolfsbane and Rhino are early Series cards that have struggled for a long time.  We did rework Rhino recently, but it turned out that we were a little conservative.  We’re taking a bigger swing here, largely because we think the pattern he encourages – turning a drawback into a synergy through creative deckbuilding, is really fun and we’d like to give cards like that a chance to shine.  While it’s true that we don’t think the Wolfsbane buff here is going to be blowing the doors off at the top of Infinite, we always want to make the early collector level experience a little smoother whenever we can as long as it doesn’t come at the expense of the new player metagame becoming unstable, and this is just another opportunity to keep tweaking that.

The Ancient One

• 3/5 – On Reveal: Add Tao Mandala to your hand.

Tao Mandala

• [Old] 3 – On Reveal: Copy the text of one of your Ongoing cards here onto your other characters here..
• [Changes] 3 > 2

This change isn’t purely fueled by win rate, although The Ancient One is underperforming, but similarly to our motivation for changing Captain Carter several OTA’s ago, playing with the Tao Mandala is just a little clunky.  Naturally, this will make the card stronger, but we also just hope that this will unlock interactions and increase the ease of play for sequencing your cards and executing on your synergies.  Ongoing decks have been considerable players recently, so we were hesitant to make a huge change before receiving more data, but we’ll keep making incremental changes as necessary.

Ironheart

• [Old] 3/0 – On Reveal: Give 3 of your other cards +2 Power.
• [New] 3/0 – On Reveal: Give 2 of your other cards +3 Power.

Speaking of early Series cards that we think are fun, we’re ever so slightly reworking Ironheart.  Savvy readers might gawk at saying that Galacta was blocking us building in more interesting Power synergies granting +3 Power while simultaneously pushing out this change, but the ask here in terms of both sequencing your cards and the potential for randomness means that we are more comfortable trying this swing vs Galacta’s guaranteed value.

Our hope here is that Ironheart can land in a more satisfying place given that you can more easily play her on curve and extract full value, which was previously very difficult to do without playing specific cards, as well as try to set up tricky combinations.

Professor X

• [Old] 5/2- Ongoing: Moving is the only way to add or remove a card from here.
• [New] 5/2 – Ongoing: Moving is the only way to add or remove a character from here.

This is a pretty small tweak, but the goal here is to give the game a little more flexibility with how to interact with this classic card and we’re going to continue to be on the lookout to tweak our cards to work with Skills as intuitively as possible.  For now, maybe Polymorph can provide some surprises in final turn scenarios, but as we introduce more Skill cards to the game, this subtle tweak might open up some more exciting possibilities for using Professor X!

Lockjaw

• [Old] 4/5 – After you play a card here, swap it with a card in your deck.
• [Changes] 2/2 – Activate: After you play your next card, swap it with a card in your deck.

Arguably our largest swing of the OTA, this is a pretty big change to Lockjaw.  Activate has given us the means to take more focused attempts at high synergy interactions that are naturally gated by their one time use.  Given Lockjaw’s current presence in the metagame, his textbox seemed like a great opportunity to try something new.

This might be a larger buff than we are expecting, but we also suspect that this will get the creative juices flowing and encourage some cool new decks, so we’re excited to see what players cook up.

That’s all for today, Happy Snapping!