Marvel Snap Review: Balance and patch 13.13 News

A new balance has come to Marvel Snap, this time focused solely on nerfs to meta-dominant decks. In addition, the new patch brought significant changes regarding card acquisition and the token shop.

In this article, I'm going to elaborate on all the news, in addition to bringing my honest analysis of the nerfs, and addressing the forgotten ones, who went through another patch without receiving nerfs.

Thanos

Thanos lost 1 power and is now a 6/10. For what Thanos does and the amount of power he gets from the Power Stone (+10), he could easily go back to 8 power, but since the biggest strength of his deck is in the stones and other cards, that's ok Thanos has his base power reduced to 10.

The Space Stone

The change to this card was that instead of moving a card from where you play the Space Stone, you can now move a card from another location to where the Space Stone is played.

This is very relevant and a great change! Previously, Thanos players abused this interaction with Lockjaw, as they moved it to another location and thus continued the cycle of playing the stones cheapened by Quinjet and bringing powerful cards from your deck to the location. Now this is no longer possible and already weakens Thanos and Lockjaw's deck a bit

Quinjet

Now, here we had a change that made the deck lose a lot of its power. No more playing Quinjet on 1 and then playing Lockjaw with many free stones and doing crazy things that would tilt anyone!

Now Quinjet can't leave cards that didn't start in your deck costing 0. The minimum value is 1, so it's only possible to play the stones in Lockjaw's location from turn 4 onwards, which greatly slows down the deck's game plan.

While fair, this change to Quinjet affects other decks such as Double She-Hulk, which suffered A LOT after the nerf of this card.

What about Leech?

Yeah, Leech passed. Although at first, I was disgusted, it's important to stop and reflect, and we need to recognize that Leech was so strong because of Lockjaw and cheap stones, which meant that Leech's effect could be active on turn 4 and even on 3!

With the Quinjet nerf, Thanos' deck slows down and since he was the main deck that used Leech, it's likely that we won't see this card as often as before.

Red Skull, She-Hulk and the absence of Shuri in the nerfs

Red Skull lost 2 power points and became a 5/13 and She-Hulk lost power and is now a 6/9. Sincerely? This doesn't change anything at all in Shuri's deck, after all, the problem isn't in those cards. Shuri is the one who should have been nerfed!

It's Shuri who leaves Red Skull with 30 (now 26) power and She-Hulk with 20 (now 18) power! Decreasing a few points will not make the deck super weak, as it is very difficult for other decks to be able to beat this amount of power, mainly because there are several forms of protection such as Armor and Cosmo in a Shuri deck.

Increasing Shuri's cost to 5 would be enough to make this deck weak, but they decided to weaken cards that were important in other archetypes...

Taskmaster

Good news in the midst of chaos! Now if the target that Taskmaster was going to copy power is destroyed, he no longer copies it! This was a very strange interaction and made using Shang-Chi not as effective, as Taskmaster would copy the power of the destroyed card anyway.

So now (finally) the Shuri deck has a weakness! But it's like I said before: it's still going to be strong.

Aero's death

Aero's reign finally came to an end, and I have to confess: I was sad about this nerf. Now the card that was one of the best in the game becomes a fair/ok card, and it is very likely that its use will decrease considerably.

Aero's change, if you're out of the loop, was this: now it only moves to the spot where the last card played by the opponent is revealed. Before the nerf, it was all cards.

Aero will still be good in cases where the opponent only plays one card and still manages to counter Galactus. However, thinking about countering Galactus, there are other cards that do this and are cheaper than Aero (Polaris, Green Goblin, Debrii…), so the use of drop 5 is reduced, and it is likely that we will see other cards like Spider-Woman and Captain Marvel stealing Aero's place.

Thinking of players who haven't completed Pool 3 yet, Marvel Snap decided to give it a little push and from now on, every month, players will be able to choose a card for free in the new store section called Choose Your Card. In addition, players will also earn 4x more tokens than before.

However, as not everything is perfect, Pool 3 cards will no longer appear in the Token Shop and will only make room for Pool 4, 5 and Ultimate Variant cards.

To be honest, I didn't like the exclusion of Pool 3 cards from the Token Shop. Okay, players will gain more tokens to acquire strong cards from Pool 4 and 5, but many decks that use cards from these Pools have mostly Pool 3 cards.

Limiting the choice of players who didn't complete Pool 3 to just one card from that series per month makes the experience tedious, as you will have to rely on luck again when opening the Collector's Reserves and getting the cards that players need in the specific decks they want to play.

If Pool 3 cards were still available to purchase with tokens, this would have been the best patch, as I think it's important for the player to have the autonomy to choose their cards and build their decks in the best way they want. But let's wait and see if in the future the developers will go back on that decision.

Now I want to know your opinion about this patch! Were the nerfs fair? Did you also miss Leech and Shuri on the list? And what are your thoughts on the Token Shop upgrades?

Tell me in the comments!