Marvel Snap December 5, 2023 patch notes nerf Alioth & rework America Chavez

Published , by Donovan Erskine

As Second Dinner prepares to go on hiatus for the winter, the studio has dropped one of the biggest Marvel Snap updates we’ve seen in months. There are card buffs and nerfs galore, including some massive changes to Alioth, America Chavez, and Luke Cage. Let’s dive into the patch notes for Marvel Snap’s December 5, 2023 update.

Marvel Snap December 5, 2023 patch notes


Source: Second Dinner

The following patch notes for Marvel Snap were shared by Second Dinner on the company’s website.

General Updates

Features

Deck Builder

Albums

Featured Mystery Variants

Emotes: Players can now collect and equip new emotes.

Spotlight Avatar Frame

Audio

New Voice Over Dialogue for:

Art & Visual Effects

Swarm has new Visual Effects.
Improved and sped up the Visual Effects for Mjolnir.
No more waiting around forever when one Mjolnir affects multiple Thors!
Updated America Chavez Visual Effects.

Balance Updates

This is a "big patch" for design, as we're integrating work across a few months and trying to set everyone up for an exciting holiday SNAP season. Let's jump right in!

One of the "default" rules is that unrevealed cards are generally immune to being destroyed, bounced, or referenced for effects–they're not considered to have been played. That wasn't true for movement effects, however. Initially we decided to go that way on newer content because the two most prominent "mover" cards at the time, Aero and Juggernaut, both necessitated moving unrevealed cards for their effect. We've since seen this inconsistency causing more confusion than we feel it's worth. So, we're standardizing move to only affect revealed cards by default, with anything that moves unrevealed cards explicitly saying so.

Some cards have been functionally affected by this update, but their text won't change:

Developer Note: Stegron's been out for a while now, and he's had the occasional week of performance now and then. Overall however, he's remained fairly stagnant on both winrate and play rate. One of the things we believe we underestimated with Stegron was the frequency with which the effect could be negative, randomly tossing enemy cards into hard-to-reach locations or risking freeing up an extra slot at a location you're contesting late in the game. Given that, we're trying out a Power buff to this card to see how that changes his role in the metagame.

What about Juggernaut and Aero? Well, they're going to change a bit more.

Developer Note: For the most part, Juggernaut is exactly the same card. We've updated his text to clearly indicate that he can affect unrevealed cards, and rephrased it a little for fit. However, we've also made one small functional change, which is that Juggernaut only moves cards that are still under your opponent's control. That means something like a Green Goblin won't move if it's already revealed and changed sides. It's minor, but it's part of an effort on our end to make that also a default when affecting enemy cards.

Developer Note: Not so for Aero–she's been reworked more substantially. Aero is joining most other move cards and will no longer affect anything unrevealed. However, to accommodate that change we've lifted Aero's restriction to target the last card your opponent played regardless of what turn it was played on. This effect is fairly different, and it played out like a bit of a nerf for us, so we're compensating Aero with an additional point of Power that still keeps her under Shang-Chi's new radar. Keep in mind that the same way Taskmaster won't copy the Power of a missing card, Aero won't move one.

Non-Functional Text Updates

Alongside all of these balance changes, we've made a number of minor text updates to cards in the pursuit of further clarity, consistency, and brevity. These changes include:

None of these changes affected the functionality of any cards. The following cards have changed text:

Bug Fixes

Card Logic Fixes in 22.x

VFX & SFX Fixes in 22.x

Other Fixes in 22.x

PC Fixed Issues in 22.x

Known Issues List

New Feature Known Issues in 22.x

New Known Issues for Existing Features and Content in 22.x

Localization New Known Issues in 22.x

PC New Known Issues in 22.x

Existing Known Issues

PC Specific Known Issues


That's everything in the December 5, 2023 patch for Marvel Snap. For the latest news on the card battler, be sure to bookmark our dedicated topic page.