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 2099
- [Old] 4/2 - After each turn, add a DoomBot 2099 to a random location if you played (exactly) 1 card.
- [Change] 4/2 -> 4/3
DoomBot 2099
- [Old] 4/2 - Ongoing: Your other DoomBots and Doom have +1 Power.
- [Change] 4/2 -> 4/1
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.
Wiccan
- [Old] 4/7 - On Reveal: If you’ve spent all your Energy on previous turns, +2 Max Energy.
- [Change] 4/7 -> 4/6
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.
Surtur
- [Old] 3/4 - After you play a card with 10 or more Power, this gains +3 Power.
- [New] 3/5 - After you play a card with 10 or more Power, this gains +3 Power. (twice per game)
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.
Scorpion
- [Old] 2/2 - On Reveal: Afflict cards in your opponent’s hand with -1 Power.
- [Change] 2/2 -> 2/3
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.
Sunspot
- [Old] 1/0 - After each turn, gain +1 Power for each unspent Energy.
- [Change] 1/0 -> 1/1
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.
Sera
- [Old] 5/4 - Ongoing: Cards in your hand cost 1 less. (minimum 1)
- [Change] 5/4 -> 5/5
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.
Adam Warlock
- [Old] 5/5 - After each turn, draw a card if you're winning here.
- [New] 2/0 - After each turn, draw a card if you're winning here. Otherwise, +1 Power.
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!