April 6th – OTA Balance Updates
For those unaware, “OTA” stands for “over the air” and refers to a hotfix change we’re making to content outside of our usual semi-monthly patch schedule. This week, we’re making four changes in an ongoing effort to encourage a more diverse spread of decks and individual cards being played. To set expectations, this patch won’t cure all the metagame’s ills, but it should represent an improvement until our next, action-packed patch.
Balance Updates
- Red Skull
5/13 -> 5/12
Ongoing: Enemy cards at this location have +1 Power.
As our previous patch notes discussed, we last adjusted Red Skull to weaken specifically his interactions with Shuri and Taskmaster. Our goal was to keep his strength otherwise flat or even slightly improved and see how things settled once we’d softened Thanos’s grip on the metagame. We know many players disagreed with that approach, and we’re weighing that feedback as we continue to debate internally how “aggressive” our balance updates should be.
In this case, things settled into an improved metagame, but with decks based around Shuri and Taskmaster still too strong for our liking. We recognize Shuri is clearly the true offender here, and we have a balance change for Shuri ready. However, that change to Shuri needs a patch to be implemented–we can’t make it via OTA. So this is an interim adjustment to weaken the Shuri deck just a bit more. We do expect Shuri to remain viable after this Red Skull tweak, but we don’t want to drastically nerf multiple “innocent” cards when we have an incoming nerf to Shuri herself.
Once that change to Shuri is live, will we revert this or previous Red Skull changes? Maybe, but we’re going to give that some time because we’d rather ensure a larger shift in the metagame.
- Sunspot
1/1 -> 1/0
At the end of each turn, gain +1 Power for each unspent Energy.
Sunspot is one of the most heavily-played cards in the game. The why is obvious: he’s strong, he’s in Series 2, and he has powerful synergies with other cards like She-Hulk and Infinaut. The opportunity cost for having him in your deck is also very low, since you only have to have 1 spare Energy on any turn to unlock his strength floor, and the ceiling can be very high.
All of this adds up to a solid criteria for a minor nerf, creating space for less-played cards to compete more often for slots in decks. We were curious if nerfing She-Hulk would have any impact on Sunspot, but truthfully we didn’t expect any change and assumed we’d be making this adjustment sooner rather than later. We did evaluate some other changes to Sunspot, but for Series 2 cards we want to retain the elegance of the original design, just a touch weaker. As a default card in both Shuri and Thanos, this change does impact those decks a bit more than others, too.
- Shadow King
4/3 -> 3/3
On Reveal: Set all cards here to their original base Power.
Shadow King’s whole purpose is to fight back against exactly the kind of thing that Shuri’s doing, but this card simply released too weak to be a consideration for most decks. We recognize his status as a Series 4 card that’s used to answer powerful decks, rather than fuel them, might limit his potential to impact the metagame. However, we’re happy to just give him this boost and see where things land from there.
- Sentry
BEFORE:
4/8 – You can’t play this at the right location. On Reveal: Add a -8 Power Void to the right location.
NOW:
4/10 – You can’t play this at the right location. On Reveal: Add a -10 Power Void to the right location.
Sentry’s a card that just hasn’t found a great home yet. While these number changes aren’t an obviously impactful buff, it does increase the potential reward for running Sentry and the potential damage donating your Void with Viper can do. This is just a change we’ve been interested to try out, so we’re making it here.
Our Balance Future
Speaking of changes we’re interested in trying out, we have an exciting announcement about the future of card balance for MARVEL SNAP! Starting with our upcoming April patch–currently scheduled for 4/18–we’ll be making weekly changes to cards in the game. Our patch every four weeks will continue to release on Tuesdays and include card updates as well, but the intervening weeks will each feature changes going live on Thursdays via OTA.
We know this is just the sort of balance attention and prioritization that many of you have clamored for, so thanks for your passionate feedback! It’s been a multi-team effort to get this process buttoned up over the last month, and we all hope you’re as excited as we are.
Let’s go ahead and address some of the questions that should be popular:
Why Thursdays?
Why not? Actually, Thursdays are just a good day to slide into the rest of our schedule and ensure our QA team has enough time to verify these updates. It also avoids stepping on new card releases or hot/featured locations.
What kind of changes will we make?
Our OTA tool gives us the ability to make changes within about a week or two, but it is limited in what we can change. We’re continuing to develop the tool and expand its limitations, but for now you can expect weekly Thursday changes to be numbers-only like the above, with our larger patches still addressing most major changes to card functionality and VFX.
Will we be nerfing or buffing cards?
Ah! Well, as you can see with Sentry and Shadow King, we do intend to buff cards through OTA. In fact, we’re going to guarantee at least one buff in each of these updates. We will also use this method to balance the metagame with nerfs, but only when it’s deemed necessary.
How many cards will change each week?
Our target is 2 to 4 cards each week. On patch weeks it’s possible we’ll change more, as that’s a unique access point for us.
How will we pick which cards to change?
We have a list of buffs (and a very small list of nerfs) that we’re making to existing content. We’re prioritizing them based on how we expect the individual changes to affect the metagame or even combine with new cards and locations, but we’ll shift them around based on the live metagame.
Why not just make all those changes now?
One of the things we’re wary of with balance patches is “how much change is too much?” We’ve avoided changing more than a handful of cards at a time for a while now, and we think that’s a good thing because they’re easier to digest. Plus, pacing out these changes lets us lightly freshen the metagame periodically, rather than shake it all up at once and then watch things settle into a new state of stasis.
How long will we do this?
We’ve planned a trial period for May, and depending on how it goes we may continue onward. We’re optimistic about that at the moment.
That’s all we’ve got for now!
We hope you’re stoked for the future of weekly balance updates, and we’ll see you in a couple weeks as we turn the page on a new SNAPter in the book of digital balance!
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