In this week’s balance update, we’ll be lowering the ceiling of Iron Patriot as well as adjusting Galacta to get them closer in relative strength to other cards at their Energy cost.
As far as buffs, we’ll be improving Pixie, Sauron, and Ghost Rider.
This is a relatively tame update compared to the last few, and for the most part the metagame is in a great place. Surtur and Hela strategies are back on planet Earth and folks have clearly been enjoying both the Loki buff and the release of Agamotto.
Agamotto and his Skills are showing up in a variety of strategies and paired with an uptick of Loki have created some exciting metagame churn. “Anti Big Deck” tech decks have even started to rise in popularity in response, with cards like Cassandra Nova and Darkhawk seeing large increases in win rate from week-to-week.
With that said, there’s one deck that is starting to become the exception among Agamotto strategies, largely eschewing any kind of theme for all what we would call rate cards, or cards that are individually strong without asking much of you to synergize with them. That isn’t necessarily a problem, but as in the case with Doom 2099 last OTA, we do want to seriously monitor when individually strong cards threaten to be consistently more powerful than synergistic interactions. Two of the cards in that deck have been prominent since their release with no signs of slowing down as they too often out-compete other cards at their Energy cost.
That can segue us into the individual card discussion:
Iron Patriot
- [Old] 2/3 - On Reveal: Add a random 4, 5, or 6-Cost card to your hand. If you’re winning here after next turn, give it -4 Cost.
- [New] 2/3 - On Reveal: Add a random 4, 5, or 6-Cost card to your hand. If you’re winning here after next turn, give it -3 Cost.
There’s a lot we really love about Iron Patriot. Encouraging players to care about the outcome of a location before the end of the game is a great incentive to make Marvel Snap feel more interactive, and he can often create exciting moments due to the game-to-game variety he provides and encourages. It’s the type of card we like being strong, but his play and win rate is very high, and there are times when his level of impact on the outcome of a game can be frustrating. We’ll be reducing the ceiling of his strength by lowering his cost reduction by one.
Our hope is that this helps to address one of his most frustrating and unpredictable outcomes - when he allows you to play a four Energy card for free. Naturally, this lowering of cost reduction is a nerf to every scenario, but rolling a four-cost specifically sticks out as a pain point for the card and a clear area where Iron Patriot has power level to give and still remain exciting to play with.
Galacta
- [Old] 4/6 - Each turn, the first card you play at another location reveals with +3 Power.
- [Change] 4/6 > 4/5
While Doom 2099 was more pressing last OTA, Galacta wasn’t too far behind when we made that decision. As alluded to previously and discussed last week, it is important to us that it isn’t so blatant for cards at a point on the Energy curve to be outcompeting each other.
To be clear, our desire isn’t to create a drawn out game of whack-a-mole, by nerfing every rate card that tops the chart, but the signs have been here for a while and Galacta was next in line after the dust settled and we got Doom 2099 to the right place.
We still expect Galacta to be a strong card and worthy consideration in a variety of strategies, but hopefully decks will feel more obligation to explore other options rather than simply defaulting to her.
Pixie
- [Old] 2/1 - On Reveal: Shuffle the base Costs of all cards in your deck that started there.
- [Change] 2/1 > 2/2
Pixie has remained relatively quiet since her release. With the increase in competition of strong two Energy cards you’d like to play on curve, we think it’s time to give her a buff, especially given her unique deck building incentives as well as her inherent high degree of variance. We're increasing her floor by giving her two Power and seeing how she fares.
Sauron
- [Old] 3/4 - On Reveal: Remove the abilities from all Ongoing cards in your hand and deck.
- [Change] 3/4 > 2/2
The release of Starbrand has done some good work to increase the popularity of Sauron/Zero strategies. That said, their win rate hasn’t improved dramatically. Further, while Starbrand is an exciting inclusion to the strategy, it does increase the awkwardness of the deck’s curve, and is often relegated to being played on turn 6 when you do draw Sauron.
Playing cards with inherent drawbacks and the hopes to mitigate them is an enjoyable fantasy and we think the deck has some room to try to get it to play more smoothly, so we’ll be trying this experiment with Sauron and continue to monitor it. Although 2/2 is a relatively low stat-line, our hope is that this will enable the deck to more frequently execute its game plan, and when it does we suspect that it won’t miss the Power on Sauron himself.
Ghost Rider
- [Old] 4/4 - On Reveal: Bring back one of your discarded cards to this location.
- [Change] 4/4 > 4/5
Despite our efforts to get Hela wrangled back in line, it is still important to us for Discard to be a part of the Snap metagame, being one of the game’s premier strategies. Ghost Rider has long underperformed and we’d like to try to give some opportunities to Discard and reanimation strategies that don’t feel quite so all-in. Hopefully this improvement to Ghost Rider can help to provide exactly that.
That’s all for today, happy Snapping!