January 30th – Balance Updates

No lengthy preamble this week! We’ve got a handful of buffs and nerfs to freshen up the metagame as the season comes to a close, so let’s dive in.

The “Move Bounce” deck has been a top contender at high Infinite for a while now, but that strength wasn’t really proliferating down into the wider metagame for the most part. Given that, we decided to “let them fight” and see if the top players could crack their own metagame. However, over the last few weeks we’ve seen the deck solidify its position and even start to surge across other audiences, so we’ve decided to take some balance action instead. This change will reduce the ceiling on Dagger, one of the deck’s strongest options for scaling Power.

In addition to the Dagger change, this softer nerf specifically aims to weaken Araña’s synergy with Human Torch. Tucking an extra point of Power into Araña won’t damage the card in other use cases very much, so it’s just a soft hedge on top of the Dagger change.

One of the things we love to do with OTAs is push up underperforming archetypes. The Ongoing deck had quite the heyday in 2024, but since then we’ve seen it slide back into the shadows. Moonstone was a unique and helpful boost this season, and we’ll see a few more additions release in February that we think an improved Spectrum could better support.

Similarly, the “Namora deck” is a fun and unique archetype in SNAP that we want to keep positioned as an option. Peni Parker aimed to give that deck slightly more support as another way to develop single-card Power as well as some mobility on the board, but we didn’t see quite as much lift as we’d hoped for. An extra point of Power should help.

Once a metagame terror, Leader has languished of late as one of our least popular 6-Cost cards. While Leader is among the best at countering an enemy 6-Cost, the metagame has been hostile enough to them that this capacity wasn’t very useful. An extra Power won’t suddenly shift Leader to the top of the metagame, but it will help account for the softer impact the card has been having.

Sandman’s new form hasn’t provided enough metagame pressure against decks flooding the board on turn 6, so we’re pouring on more sand. We don’t want to push Sandman so far that the card becomes the default disruptive option–cards like Legion, Aero, and Vision are a little more fun–but we do want to have the card performing the job of sheriff on some of these strategies a little better.

Nothing too crazy here. Kamala Khan has been around for a while, but in recent times hasn’t found many strong homes at the top of the metagame. A bit of extra Power will help compete with the robust complement of 4-Cost cards we’re seeing today. Perhaps even in some particularly sophisticated Namora decks?

Luna Snow released a little weaker than we’d aimed for, so we’re trying a bit of extra Power. A 3/6 with an ability that’s often an upside is unusual, but the performance of the 3/5 implies rather strongly that the effect is either a lot weaker than we thought, or less useful to existing strategies. So we’re going to see how this Power bump changes things because that will add more context to what’s going on and help us see through the snowstorm, so to speak.

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That’s all for this week. Until next time, happy snapping!