October 24th - Balance Updates

As we come to the final week of We Are Venom season and turn our attention from High Voltage back to 6-turn games, we’re looking to dial back a few pieces of the metagame that can remove the opponent’s ability to play their cards and open up more room to experiment with a crop of new decks. 

• Storm
  • [Old]3/2 - On Reveal: Flood this location. Next turn is the last turn cards can be played here.
  • [Change]3/2 -> 4/5

Decks using Storm with War Machine and Legion to cut off all opposing plays on the final turn have remained strong, and while this sort of lockout combo can be novel it can get frustrating to play against repeatedly. We’re happy with lots of other stuff that War Machine is enabling, so just want to make this particular combo come up less frequently and require more setup. This change aims to do that while giving Storm some more Power to contest her own location. 

• Misery
  • [Old]4/7 - On Reveal: Repeat the On Reveal abilities of your other cards here, then destroy them.
  • [Change]4/7 -> 4/8

While Misery has enabled a lot of cool stuff, she’s fallen a little short of our hopes, in large part because she often removes so much Power from her location. With a little boost to her own Power, the other player should be forced to spend some effort to win Misery’s location, giving the Misery player more room to capitalize on the other advantages she’s generating. 

• Electro
  • [Old]3/2 - On Reveal: +1 Max Energy. Ongoing: You can only play 1 card a turn.
  • [Change]3/2 -> 3/3

Players have been trying out Electro in combination with War Machine and Misery, but overall the card’s had trouble standing up to other Energy generating options. While an Electro deck’s plan is often to weasel its way out of his restriction, that doesn’t always pan out and we’d like playing one card a turn to be a more feasible option. 

• Rockslide
  • [Old]3/3 - On Reveal: Shuffle 2 Rocks into your opponent’s deck.
  • [Change]3/3 -> 4/5

Darkhawk decks have consistently been among the highest win-rate decks for a long time, even when their play rates don’t catch up. However, drawing rocks can be a frustrating thing to play against, and that’s been happening a lot more recently with new versions of this deck built around Misery or Agent Venom. This change aims to make players actually draw the Rocks less frequently (with fewer turns to draw them), and to make the Darkhawk package require a little more building around rather than slotting seamlessly into tons of shells. 

• Shadow King
  • [Old]2/2 - On Reveal: Reset all cards here to their original Power.
  • [Change]2/2 -> 2/3

Speaking of Agent Venom, the card has spawned a lot of strong decks! While none of them look so powerful that they require a nerf at the moment, we’ve been concerned by the low degree of counterplay to this suite of strategies. Whenever possible, we want players to have some way to improve their matchups if they’re losing to the same strategy a lot. Since Shadow King is the most direct way to negate Agent Venom’s boost, we want to make him easier to include in a wide range of decks. 

• Klaw
  • [Old]5/4 - Ongoing: The location to the right has +8 Power.
  • [New]5/4 - Ongoing: The location to the right has +7 Power.

While Klaw hasn’t been dominating the top of the metagame, he has consistently been very strong since this buff, and is having an outsized impact at lower collection levels. As a Series 1 card, this has an outsized impact on newer players, so in the interest of diversifying their metagame, we’re taking Klaw down a notch since we still expect him to remain a reasonable option with wider collections. 

• Daredevil
  • [Old]2/2 - On turn 5, you get to see your opponent’s plays before you make your own.
  • [Change]2/2 -> 2/3

Daredevil is a beloved character and offers a unique way to play SNAP. We’ve been wary of making this card too strong, especially in lower collection score play, because it can slow games down a lot. But we think Daredevil has room to improve for his fans without being played so often that it makes a big difference to overall game length. 

• Miek
  • [Old]1/0 - When you discard a card, this gains +1 Power and can move next turn.
  • [Change]1/0 -> 1/1

We’ve been excited to see traditional discard strategies make a resurgence with Scorn’s release! They’ve generally been performing well and using a wide variety of the usual suspects, but Miek’s performance has been lagging. We’ve considered buffing this card for a while, but didn’t want to overshoot on the new discard packages. We feel confident now that Miek has room to get a little stronger and serve as another option in building these decks. 

• Typhoid Mary
  • [Old]4/10 - Ongoing: Your other cards have -1 Power.
  • [New]4/10 - Ongoing: Your other cards here have -1 Power.

Typhoid Mary has stayed the same for a long while now, but as Sauron decks have fallen out of favor, she hasn’t had many applications. She can look appealing for Skaar lists, but hasn’t really been an option because she brings your other high-Power cards below Skaar’s threshold. We’re making a change to help these cards combine the way many players want them to, and to make Typhoid Mary a more feasible option in decks that play more cards to the board too. — That's all for this week. Until next time, happy snapping!