If there’s one major complaint to be had about Marvel Snap (that isn’t about the glacial pace at which you accrue Collector’s Tokens and get new Series 4 and 5 cards), it’s that Second Dinner can be really slow in rolling out balance changes, causing the meta to feel incredibly stale. This was most noticeable last season, when the ladder was dominated by Thanos-Lockjaw and Shuri decks.
Having to wait a month between balance changes can make the game feel stale, but all that’s about to change, as Second Dinner has committed to rolling out small updates each week. These are changes that don’t require a downloadable patch, but they will be very small adjustments, such as number tweaks on various cards.
To start with, here are the changes players can expect this week:
Red Skull: 5/13 -> 5/12 Ongoing: Enemy cards at this location have +1 Power.
“As our previous patch notes discussed, we last adjusted Red Skull to weaken specifically his interactions with Shuri and Taskmaster. Our goal was to keep his strength otherwise flat or even slightly improved and see how things settled once we’d softened Thanos’s grip on the metagame. We know many players disagreed with that approach, and we’re weighing that feedback as we continue to debate internally how “aggressive” our balance updates should be. In this case, things settled into an improved metagame, but with decks based around Shuri and Taskmaster still too strong for our liking. We recognize Shuri is clearly the true offender here, and we have a balance change for Shuri ready.
However, that change to Shuri needs a patch to be implemented–we can’t make it via OTA. So this is an interim adjustment to weaken the Shuri deck just a bit more. We do expect Shuri to remain viable after this Red Skull tweak, but we don’t want to drastically nerf multiple “innocent” cards when we have an incoming nerf to Shuri herself. Once that change to Shuri is live, will we revert this or previous Red Skull changes? Maybe, but we’re going to give that some time because we’d rather ensure a larger shift in the metagame.”
Sunspot: 1/1 -> 1/0 At the end of each turn, gain +1 Power for each unspent Energy.
“Sunspot is one of the most heavily-played cards in the game. The why is obvious: he’s strong, he’s in Series 2, and he has powerful synergies with other cards like She-Hulk and Infinaut. The opportunity cost for having him in your deck is also very low, since you only have to have 1 spare Energy on any turn to unlock his strength floor, and the ceiling can be very high. All of this adds up to a solid criteria for a minor nerf, creating space for less-played cards to compete more often for slots in decks. We were curious if nerfing She-Hulk would have any impact on Sunspot, but truthfully we didn’t expect any change and assumed we’d be making this adjustment sooner rather than later.
We did evaluate some other changes to Sunspot, but for Series 2 cards we want to retain the elegance of the original design, just a touch weaker. As a default card in both Shuri and Thanos, this change does impact those decks a bit more than others, too.”
Shadow King: 4/3 -> 3/3 On Reveal: Set all cards here to their original base Power.
“Shadow King’s whole purpose is to fight back against exactly the kind of thing that Shuri’s doing, but this card simply released too weak to be a consideration for most decks. We recognize his status as a Series 4 card that’s used to answer powerful decks, rather than fuel them, might limit his potential to impact the metagame. However, we’re happy to just give him this boost and see where things land from there.”
Sentry: 4/8 – You can’t play this at the right location. On Reveal: Add a -8 Power Void to the right location. -> 4/10 – You can’t play this at the right location. On Reveal: Add a -10 Power Void to the right location.
“Sentry’s a card that just hasn’t found a great home yet. While these number changes aren’t an obviously impactful buff, it does increase the potential reward for running Sentry and the potential damage donating your Void with Viper can do. This is just a change we’ve been interested to try out, so we’re making it here.”
Second Dinner has also stated that these small tweaks will roll out every Thursday, and that they’re aiming to tweak two to four cards each week, which at least one buff in each change.
Marvel Snap is now available on PC and mobile devices.
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