No lengthy preamble this week! We’ve got a handful of buffs and nerfs to freshen up the metagame as the season comes to a close, so let’s dive in.

The “Move Bounce” deck has been a top contender at high Infinite for a while now, but that strength wasn’t really proliferating down into the wider metagame for the most part. Given that, we decided to “let them fight” and see if the top players could crack their own metagame. However, over the last few weeks we’ve seen the deck solidify its position and even start to surge across other audiences, so we’ve decided to take some balance action instead. This change will reduce the ceiling on Dagger, one of the deck’s strongest options for scaling Power.

In addition to the Dagger change, this softer nerf specifically aims to weaken Araña’s synergy with Human Torch. Tucking an extra point of Power into Araña won’t damage the card in other use cases very much, so it’s just a soft hedge on top of the Dagger change.

One of the things we love to do with OTAs is push up underperforming archetypes. The Ongoing deck had quite the heyday in 2024, but since then we’ve seen it slide back into the shadows. Moonstone was a unique and helpful boost this season, and we’ll see a few more additions release in February that we think an improved Spectrum could better support.

Similarly, the “Namora deck” is a fun and unique archetype in SNAP that we want to keep positioned as an option. Peni Parker aimed to give that deck slightly more support as another way to develop single-card Power as well as some mobility on the board, but we didn’t see quite as much lift as we’d hoped for. An extra point of Power should help.

Once a metagame terror, Leader has languished of late as one of our least popular 6-Cost cards. While Leader is among the best at countering an enemy 6-Cost, the metagame has been hostile enough to them that this capacity wasn’t very useful. An extra Power won’t suddenly shift Leader to the top of the metagame, but it will help account for the softer impact the card has been having.

Sandman’s new form hasn’t provided enough metagame pressure against decks flooding the board on turn 6, so we’re pouring on more sand. We don’t want to push Sandman so far that the card becomes the default disruptive option–cards like Legion, Aero, and Vision are a little more fun–but we do want to have the card performing the job of sheriff on some of these strategies a little better.

Nothing too crazy here. Kamala Khan has been around for a while, but in recent times hasn’t found many strong homes at the top of the metagame. A bit of extra Power will help compete with the robust complement of 4-Cost cards we’re seeing today. Perhaps even in some particularly sophisticated Namora decks?

Luna Snow released a little weaker than we’d aimed for, so we’re trying a bit of extra Power. A 3/6 with an ability that’s often an upside is unusual, but the performance of the 3/5 implies rather strongly that the effect is either a lot weaker than we thought, or less useful to existing strategies. So we’re going to see how this Power bump changes things because that will add more context to what’s going on and help us see through the snowstorm, so to speak.

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That’s all for this week. Until next time, happy snapping!

We’re back! Welcome to the first OTA of 2025. Since we know it’s been a minute, we have a solid set of changes today aimed at shaking up the metagame you’ve all been enjoying over the last month. We’ve got a few nerfs, a few buffs, and a rework for one of SNAP’s most dangerous divas. Check it out!

Let’s hit the bugfix first: our intent for the “steal” game action is that if Power isn’t taken, it also isn’t gained. That’s a clean line to draw, and brings Scream in line with cards like Rocket & Groot.The sonic symbiote here has quietly dominated our internal winrate metrics for a few months now. That might be surprising to hear as the deck isn’t perceived as being dominant, but that’s because Scream is kind of like Mister Negative–drawing Scream gives you a massive advantage, while games without Scream are a struggle. Given the deck’s position we decided to let Scream run wild for a little bit, but now we’d like to try and distribute a little of that strength more uniformly among the deck’s other cards to create a more balanced play experience. To that end…

This is a simple buff for the Scream decks to counterbalance some lost Power, but it also makes Spidey a stronger potential option for some other decks that could use the buff, like more traditional Move decks. As one of our most popular characters, we also want to keep Spidey positioned at an exciting rate for gameplay.

Luke is in an interesting spot, serving as a release valve against cards like Hazmat, a precaution for decks like Cerebro, and a combo piece for cards like Anti-Venom. That’s a lot of hats, and Luke’s frankly very good at wearing all of them. This has the added side-effect of making decks that want to play with afflict or Power-stealing abilities weaker, because Luke Cage just happens to be in some decks using the effect for their own reasons. We’re going to work toward finding a better division of labor for some of these roles in the future, but until then we’d like to weaken Luke Cage a little bit and see how the metagame shifts in the wake of that change.

With Luke Cage losing a point of Power, we perused some of the stronger cards doing Power reduction to see if any stood out as potentially needing a nerf in a world with less Lukes. U.S. Agent has been one of the strongest cards in that category, and it’s also contributed to a general reduction in the play rate of higher-Cost cards. Beyond that, we’ve had plenty of great decks that could easily play U.S. Agent without directly aiming to leverage the effect, just as a free card, and we’re expecting more to start showing up. Given all of the above, weakening the effect is appropriate.

Classic strategies like the “Zoo” deck that floods the board are strategies we always want to support. In addition to being fun, many of these decks give players aspirational goals to pursue for new gameplay, helping players grow their collections and transition towards higher-Series play. However, we’ve seen the winrates of these decks wane over the last few months. As a lynchpin of these decks that’s available early on, Ka-Zar’s a good option for a buff.

Speaking of 1-Cost cards, we’ve decided to try reverting Hydration Robert back to 1/4. This statline landed lukewarm on release, but we believe part of that may have been players taking some time to see how strong Bob could be, whether a deck was leveraging the snap effect or not. Bob hasn’t been as problematic as Silver Sable was, but still did also represent a “default strong” 1-Cost for a lot of decks, so this change will also create a little more diversity within the metagame among 1-Cost cards. Generally, we’re most happy when different decks want different cards at each Cost.

Speaking of Roberts, we’re also buffing Sentry. The days of Annihilus terrorizing your rightmost location have long passed, and Sentry has a few solid applications outside of that combo as well. We’re not particularly keen on increasing the options for Surtur, so trying Sentry at 4/9 will create a large card that’s immune to Shang-Chi while also having some different hooks for synergy thanks to the Void.

Nothing much to see here–Onslaught is just a fun, exciting card that’s fallen on some hard times. An extra point of Power is often welcome under such circumstances, and given Onslaught’s express use in the Living Tribunal deck it’s even more important.

Mister Fantastic is a classic card in early collections, one of the few that can threaten multiple locations. However, as players’ collections grew and the game’s diversity of effects widened, Reed has simply been outclassed. This is a small buff overall–just 1 Power net–but it has enough small gains that we didn’t want to push much more. That 3 Power is good at beating Nightcrawler in early Series play, gets doubled by Onslaught, and we’re still talking about a 3-Cost that has some synergy with Silver Surfer’s swarming strategy.

Last, but certainly not least, this might turn a few heads. While Hela had found an appropriate balance point with the previous design, as a team we weren’t thrilled with it. The -3 debuff wasn’t an elegant solution to the one-sided gameplay, and as we continue to create strong cards it would likely inevitably merit change again. We decided to approach the Hela from the angle of making an “interesting” reanimator deck, where the challenge wasn’t necessarily how to best discard the biggest cards but rather which cards you were trying to discard. This quest has proven fairly difficult in playtesting, so we’re starting from a generous position. We expect Hela’s own Power has likely become a meaningful dial with this effect, which is the ideal outcome.

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That’s all for this week. Until next time, happy snapping!