Hello, friends. Shaun is back and ready to talk more Marvel Snap (Free). No, I’m not tired of it yet. And frankly, with how on the ball Second Dinner has been with staying on top of updates, I probably won’t be for a while. With a new development roadmap revealed and a new update, we have a couple things to talk about today. Go web, go!
Development Roadmap – March 2023
So, first up, we’ve got a new development roadmap. There are some interesting things on the horizon for the game. You can read all of the little bullet points there, but the biggest, mode immediate feature is a new competitive Conquest Mode that leverages the basic structure of Friendly Battles for a new way to go up against players around the world. You have to win a series of battles without losing to earn tickets that will grant you entry into higher leagues. The higher you go, the better the rewards. Wins will get you medals you will be able to use in a special Conquest Shop. The shop will change its contents every season, and you can look forward to cosmetics and special variants that you won’t find anywhere else.
The Token Shop is going to be getting a revamp so that players will be able to get the cards they want more easily. First up, when a new Series 5 card is released it will be featured in its own section for one week. If you buy it, that section will disappear until the next one comes up. The rotating Token Shop card selection will now only show Series 4 and Series 5 cards, as Series 3 cards have been moved to their own spot. Ultimate Variants are also getting moved out of the rotating selection into their own spot with its own rotation. Neat.
The rest of the immediate stuff was implemented in today’s update, so we’ll go over it that in a second. The mid-term and conceptual stuff hasn’t changed too much from the previous roadmap, and I imagine steady progress is being made on all of it. Conquest Mode is definitely the star of this roadmap, and I’m looking forward to trying it out even though I know I will get thrashed.
March 21 2023 Update
Alright, let’s talk about this update because it has a lot of interesting things going on in it. First, as mentioned in the roadmap, some changes have been made to help players fill out their card collections more easily. Players can expect to get more Tokens from Collector’s Caches and Collector’s Reserves, and this will be especially so for those who haven’t finished their Series 3 collections. More Tokens means more funds to grab cards from the shop, so that’s easy enough to grok.
There’s another perk for those who haven’t finished their Series 3 collections yet. There’s a new feature in the shop that allows said players to claim one free Series 3 card per season. Cards will rotate every eight hours, so feel free to wait until the one you really want comes up. This allows you to save Tokens for bigger purchases.
As usual, some cards have moved from one Series to another. Moving from Series 5 to Series 4 are Zabu, Sauron, Shanna, Dazzler, and the Shadow King. Sliding from Series 4 to Series 3 are M’Baku, Orka, and Attuma. Zabu in particular is a very useful card so it will be interesting to see what happens when he is more widely available.
There are some big balance updates, which is also fairly normal for these mid-season patches. Thanos, who got buffed last month, has gotten a debuff this time. His Power is back down to 10, which keeps him in Shang-Chi’s targeting sights but makes him a little less beefy. The Space Stone has also had its properties changed to cut back on Lockjaw shenanigans. The Mad Titan is still plenty strong, but hopefully he’ll dominate a little less now.
The Quinjet’s ability has also been slightly nerfed. It still reduces the Cost of cards that didn’t start in your deck by one, but it can only reduce the Cost to a minimum of 1. You can’t zero out Costs anymore with it. This is basically collateral damage of the Thanos debuff, as people were using the Quinjet to get the Infinity Stones into play for 0-Cost.
The next pair of debuffs targets Shuri abuse. Red Skull goes from being 5-Cost 15-Power that buffs enemy power by 2 to being 5-Cost 13-Power and buffing enemy power by 1. She-Hulk goes from 6-Cost 10-Power to 6-Cost 9-Power. Considering how often I’ve seen the Shuri/Red Skull/Taskmaster combo lately, the former makes a great deal of sense. And yeah, Shulkie was probably a bit too powerful given her versatility. Fair beans.
Speaking of Taskmaster, he and the other mimic cards are getting their ability slightly tweaked. Taskmaster, Absorbing Man, and Mystique now require the card they copied to be in play to copy its attributes. This keeps Taskmaster from copying a card that Shang-Chi has punched into the Sun and should help reduce the dominance of Shuri decks a little.
Aero is a popular card in some of the best decks, and it’s her turn at bat. She moves from 5-Cost 7-Power to 5-Cost 8-Power, but her ability has been changed so that she moves only the last enemy card played this turn to her location instead of all of them. This balance change on its own is probably going to have major ramifications for the meta.
Morbius and Knull are some of the most popular characters Marvel has created, and they’re both getting hit with a similar change. Morb’s Power now only updates if he’s in play, reverting a previous change that made it update no matter where he was. Knull will update in-hand but not in-deck now. Both of these cards will be seeing some tweaks in the future, so these are just kludges for the time being. No buffs this time for any cards because clearly we’ve all been naughty.
Hm, I accidentally wrote a novel here. Oh well, it’s all for the sake of being informative. I don’t know how much any of this means to people who don’t play Marvel Snap, but I doubt many of those folks would have read this far anyway. To those who did? Thanks for reading! The next deck guide should be pretty interesting after these changes.
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