Balance Update: August 27, 2026

Hey folks, we know you’re busy enjoying Draft, but we’ve still got an OTA this week!

It’s a short list with some heavy hitters: one nerf, three buffs, and two bigger reworks. The metagame remains in a good spot and many of you are enjoying the Fractured Frontier cards, so we’re keeping changes light. Let’s jump in.

Sam Wilson Captain America

[Old] 2/3 – On Reveal: Add Cap’s Shield to another location. Ongoing: Cap’s Shield is Moveable.
[Change] 2/3 > 2/2

Our lone nerf today is to Sam Wilson Captain America, who has been an outlier among 2-Costs for quite some time in many decks. These days he is most often played in Batroc and Aurora (with Thanos) decks, which have both been excellent all season and in previous seasons as well.

We believe this change flattens 2-Cost strength and encourages more experimentation. Aurora has been the best-performing Thanos deck in Fractured Frontier. Thanos is popular in a healthy way: players keep exploring different shapes of strategies with him instead of settling into one list, which is where other build-around cards at similar play rates have gone wrong. This change should keep that experimentation going.

Mister Fantastic First Steps

[Old] 3/4 – End of Turn: Give a card in your hand -1 Cost or +2 Power.
[Change] 3/4 > 3/5

Strong Guy

[Old] 3/3 – Ongoing: +6 Power if your hand has 1 or fewer cards.
[Change] 3/3 > 3/4

Death Fractured Frontier

[Old] 5/8 – On Reveal: Resurrect all your destroyed characters to random locations.
[Change] 5/8 > 5/9

We’re handing out a couple of points to underperformers. Mister Fantastic First Steps was one of the strongest cards in MARVEL SNAP before his nerf to 3-Cost, but he hasn’t kept up with many other options at that Energy value,so we’re giving him a point to encourage more play.

Strong Guy might be an excellent fringe option with the upcoming Inversion Magneto, so this felt like a good opportunity to hand out a buff.

Death Fractured Frontier has been a tricky puzzle piece to figure out, as expected. We shipped her at a modest rate because her ability can swing games dramatically. In practice her win rate is low and the over-the-top outcomes aren’t happening often, so she can handle another point of Power.

Spider-Sense

[Old] 5 – On Reveal: Give your characters here +2 Power. Costs 1 less for each Moveable card you’ve played.
[New] 6 – On Reveal: Give your characters here +3 Costs 1 less for each Moveable card you’ve played.

Klaw

[Old] 5/4 – Ongoing: The location to the right has +7 Power.
[New] 4/2 – Ongoing: The location to the right has +6

Here are some larger adjustments. In practice, Spider-Sense has been harder to fully reduce than we expected, and it often plays as a reasonably statted card rather than a real payoff for building around Moveable. We’re raising its Cost, but as an effective 2- or 3-Cost 9-Power card it should be a meaningful strength increase for Moveable decks.

Klaw is an early Series card that we’re giving a sizable buff as an experiment. Hopefully the lower Cost widens his range of play beyond the new player crowd. Stay tuned, it may have more potential to be paired with new cards in the not so distant future!

That’s all for today. We hope you enjoy the debut of Draft and we’ll see you again soon for The Inversion!