In this week’s balance update, we’ll be continuing to adjust metagame imbalances, particularly among cards in Surtur strategies that continue to be problematic over time.

Additionally, we have a swath of cards that we’ve been looking to buff and improve the pattern of, some of those are at the perfect time with the series drop, others are old starter deck favorites that we’re looking to give some love with Prehistoric Heroes, and finally we have a recent release that’s simply performing worse than we would like.

Let’s go ahead and discuss the Surtur deck and some of its supporting pieces!

Surtur:

Surtur has simply been too efficient for his cost as well as enabling a synergy with Skaar too powerful for most decks to compete with even after adjustments. Our last attempt at nerfing Surtur intended to keep his core play pattern with Skaar – allowing you to maintain explosive turn 6’s playing multiple 10 Power cards in a turn with your strongest draws but capping the raw point output that Surtur is capable of.

Unfortunately, this just wasn’t a substantial enough nerf to the deck and the card. Surtur has still been enjoying the highest win rate amongst strategies over the last few weeks, and his win and cube gain rate has topped the charts in a deck that doesn’t even play Skaar. We’ll get back to that shortly.

This change aims to still make him a potent piece for point generation in the 10-power strategy but make it substantially more difficult to have those explosive turn 6’s by not allowing Surtur itself to contribute to Skaar’s cost reduction without three triggers. His ceiling is potentially higher than his previous iteration, but it requires much more effort to achieve.

Skaar:

We know that this change might be disappointing with Skaar’s presence in the Series drop, but it is our responsibility to be committed to the health of the gameplay experience at large. The obvious question here given the paragraphs I just wrote about hurting Surtur’s synergy with Skaar is “why did you need to nerf both then?” The reality is that the numbers of various Surtur/Skaar decks have been too high for quite a while now and it has become apparent that incremental change isn’t doing enough to right the imbalance in a reasonable time frame to maximize the enjoyment for our players. Regardless of Surtur being drawn, it is still quite achievable to deploy 20 Power on turn 6 with Skaar in his current form. We’re hoping that ultimately this will release some pressure on the metagame and encourage more diversity. We’ll continue to consider other options for these packages of cards as the metagame becomes less “Surtur centric.”

Finally, Aero:

As I alluded to previously, one of the most successful decks by far of the last few weeks was a Scream/Surtur hybrid strategy eschewing Skaar altogether. While a fun component of Snap deckbuilding is hybridizing strategies to come up with solutions to problems, this was a pretty dramatic outlier, sporting absolutely no bad matchups and a low deckbuilding constraint.

This is another example of not wanting to take a risk on an incremental change leading to a massive metagame imbalance that makes our gameplay experience dramatically worse.

While naturally any card losing a power is a nerf, we felt that removing a power from Aero was relatively modest on a high power card in the context of traditional Scream. This will make it more difficult to include Surtur at such a low opportunity cost in the deck and mitigates the risk of a homogenous metagame.

Series Drop Buffs

Werewolf by Night used to be a mainstay alongside Bounce and Loki, and despite it being buffed the last time we talked about, it still hasn’t picked up much in popularity. We are hoping this will do some good work to give it a home again.

Annihilus is a unique card that has been largely overshadowed by Viper in recent times, and this is a nod towards bringing him further back up to playability. While we’re always careful about increasing the play rate of Clog strategies, we recognize that it’s a strategy people enjoy and we’re willing to make efforts to walk that tight-rope.

Some Old Favorites

With the upcoming release of Eson and Starbrand in Prehistoric Heroes, we thought this was a good opportunity to give some love to some old fan favorites White Queen has been weak for some time, but we always have an eye on how early series changes can impact the new player experience. Regardless, we think this is a good time to introduce a buff and hope that this will delight fans of hers as well as produce another exciting hook for Eson.

Similarly, Lizard’s downside and the deckbuilding cost that he asks of you to mitigate it is substantial given the opportunities for comparable power generation present in the game. There have also been a number of cards introduced into SNAP that generate more cards, naturally making Lizard weaker. We think this is a good time to give him a buff and hope that this will give players an exciting opportunity to build with Zero, Sauron, and comparable decks again.

While High Evolutionary does see plenty of play, he also tends to be the card in your deck that you want to draw the least when you include him!

That’s somewhat the reality of the design, but we felt the strategy would be more fun overall if you’re interested in playing him sometimes, not just purely out of total lack of other things to do. This is a push in that direction, but managing the Evo package is always tricky and we’ll keep continuing to look for adjustments.

This week’s OTA will focus directly on some tyrants of the metagame, shaking things up as we hit the midpoint of the Brave New World season. In addition to a few big nerfs, we’ve also got a few buff candidates from the strongest cards of SNAPs gone by. Let’s jump in!

Doom has been a top-performing card since release, often among our strongest cards on individual winrate. What has convinced us to make this change has been Doom’s strength as a single-card addition to a number of otherwise unrelated decks. For example, Doom 2099 was the best card in the best Scream deck last week! That’s a clear indicator the card is too impactful. Doom’s own Power wasn’t a strong dial for weakening the card, as 4/1 or 4/0 would both add ramp synergy with Ravonna, so we decided to centralize more of the Power and weaken the DoomBots instead.

Turns out Quicksilver’s not so bad! Wiccan has been the flagship card in unique ramp builds since release. While the card overperformed our expectations, it largely remained in-bounds of our performance metrics for quite a while. However, in addition to just remaining a strong top-tier deck the whole time, we’ve started to see the deck diversifying into multiple different builds, leading to an inflated play rate for Wiccan. We don’t want to do a lot of damage to those decks, but we do want to create more space and Wiccan seems to simply have more Power than required.

By far the strongest deck over the last week, Surtur-based decks have enjoyed the best winrate, best cuberate, and one of the highest play rates in the game, with the latter still growing. It’s only been a little out of line, but the continued growth is scarier when we dive deeper into the data and see that the deck actually has essentially no bad matchups. That meant we needed to make a change, so we’re starting with a firm one here. Removing base Power from Surtur would really damage the “flow” of the deck for enabling Skaar, as it’s difficult to get more than two triggers by turn 6. We instead decided to retain the ability to get 10 Power on turn 5, in exchange for a cap on Surtur’s gains.

One of the particular strengths of the Surtur deck has been how effectively it can integrate Armor and Cosmo into its playlines, shutting down all of the interaction players typically lean on to combat decks like this one. Given that was the case, and that Surtur decks seemed to wholly lack negative matchups, we felt it was appropriate to position a tech card to combat it more effectively. Scorpion made a lot of sense, as an option that can preemptively damage some of the stronger Skaar draws, in addition to being a solid card that has fallen out of competitive favor lately.

Another old favorite, Sunspot’s a classic design that’s fun to play with. Lately the function of 1-Cost cards has tended to exceed the benefits of their Power–Hydra Bob notwithstanding–so it’s a fine time to give Sunspot another chance to shine. At a minimum, we hope High Evolutionary and She-Hulk decks might be happy with the improvement.

Retro week continues! One of the scariest cards in SNAP during the early days, Sera now has a great deal of healthy competition for cards that discount Energy. On top of that, there are many more cards that take advantage of the tempo lost by spending turn 5 on Sera. Given these factors, it makes sense to return the Power we took away back in the day.

We’ve written about Adam Warlock in other forums, and we’re comfortable describing the card as a “learning experience.” At 2/0 with the current ability, Adam Warlock was among the worst cards in the game, on some weeks the actual worst. We thought that made it a good candidate to experiment with stat changes, and while we did see improvements in the card’s performance–small ones–that trade wasn’t worth the frustration it caused people who were enjoying the previous card. So we knew we wanted to do something different, but what?

We did consider reworking the card. Our caution around a full rework was a) we would rerun the risk of further alienating “original Adam” enjoyers, and b) it’s hard to make new cards–we prefer to focus on seasonal content, leading Adam to often get triaged in playtesting, or even pickpocketed! We decided to return to the well and look at how we could make something closer to the existing card, but improve the gameplay. We actually started with a version of the card that just always gained Power, rewarding a draw once per game, but as fate would have it we came back around to almost exactly where we started, just with a Power in the fail cases. As said above, lessons learned.

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

• Scream
  • [Old] 2/3 – When an enemy card moves, steal 2 Power from it. (once per turn)
  • [Change] 2/3 -> 2/2
  • [Bugfix] Scream will no longer gain Power if it can’t be taken, such as due to Luke Cage.