Patch Review
A major patch dropped yesterday in Marvel Snap with new content and a massive amount of new and updated cards in the datamines. We'll help you sort through it all and make sense of this mountain of information.
Character Mastery
The bananaing is upon us. This patch brought character mastery to the game and dozens of new flares and finishes along with it. We'll have an in-depth review and guide to Character Mastery coming tomorrow! Each character (except Eitri and Lasher!) has a reaction set as a reward at level 30. Some are great, others… less so. There have been some complaints about how generic some of the female characters like Valkyrie, White Widow, and especially Kitty Pryde look.
March - Ancient Avengers (Avengers 1,000,000 BC)
Our picture of the March season has started to come into focus. Several cards were changed from their initial datamines and others got new details filled in. We have extra cards that fit the season theme, but keep in mind, the team has been developing extra cards each season so only 5 will probably be released in March, with the others being extras for later game modes or simply unreleased extras.
Eson, Firehair, and Starbrand are all scheduled for spotlight caches and they've all received significant changes. Eson is a totally different card. Is he just a new toy for Arishem? Firehair looks like a great partner for Misery. With Starbrand we're finally getting a new Sauron card!
Khonshu looks like a new, interesting discard payoff. If you can discard him three times and then play him out on turn 6, he'll give you a massive boost by bringing one of your other discarded cards back with extra power!
The season pass card, Agamotto, is also a complicated one. At the start of the game, he'll shuffle 4 Ancient Arcana cards into your deck. These act as one-time use spells that are banished after use (presumably, removed from the game).
The remaining “seasonally appropriate” cards that don't have release dates are FanFei, and Ghost, the First Rider. Both got text updates in the patch, so it's hard to believe they are discarded designs. We'll probably see them sooner or later.
April - What if…?
That brings us to April. We knew April would likely be a What If…? season and that is now confirmed!
Unsurprisingly, we've got Captain Carter and Kahhori. But there are some new and interesting mechanics set to debut in April.
Captain Carter, the season pass card, and Dum Dum Duggan, who does not currently have a release date, both reference where your cards are positioned within a location, the first such cards to do so in Marvel Snap.
Goliath, Kahhori, Strange Supreme, and Hydra Stomper all have Spotlight dates attached. Strange Supreme seems like the most unusual of this bunch and will be interesting to build around with Thanos, Kate Bishop, and Arishem among others.
Seemingly every month comes with a cool card that generates a variety of spells or tokens and April has Infinity Ultron. We don't know how much the stones cost or some of the other associated values, but needless to say, Infinity Ultron looks like a powerful, potentially archetype creating new card.
May, June, and July
We've gotten our first hints about future seasons and it's safe to say May will be a magical season. A plethora of magical characters have been added to the data files, joining several that were already there. As always, one of our first indications of future season themes comes from titles added to the game files.
- 300 Years Your Senior
- Whole Covens On The Group Text
- Apathy All Along
- Cue Catchy Theme Song
- Hitching Witches Road
- Ouija Board Says Retreat
- Sale Firewood Supply Co.
- Right Minded Witch I'm
- I've Come to Bargain
- Sorcerer Supreme
This set of titles seems to indicate a witchy season, with characters and themes from the Agatha All Along Disney+ show. Perhaps the season name will have something to do with the Witches Road? However, we have a lot more magical characters than will fit into a single season and there's a particularly large group of Doctor Strange-related characters and a couple of Strange-adjacent titles too. Are we getting a single magical season or are we getting a Witches Road season and a Doctor Strange season?
Witches and Otherworld Related Cards
Dr. Strange Related Cards
There is also a set of spell-like cards that presumably belong to one or more of our magic wielders.
Another layer to the mystery is the several Fantastic Four themed titles. What month will we get the Fantastic Four related season? Fantastic Four: First Steps is scheduled to release in theaters on July 25th, so it feels more likely to be July than June. If we do get a Fantastic Four season, I'm guessing we'll get cards for H.E.R.B.I.E., Shalla-Bal, Mole Man, and Franklin Richards. Valeria Richards is a personal favorite character, so I'd love to see her too, but she seems less likely.
- Zen-La Tourism Board
- Fantasti-Car Insurance Broker
- Pretzeled My Elastic Arms. Help?
- Real Androids Wear Briefs
- Illuminatrix Juggler
High-value bundles
Final Thoughts
The patch brought a ton of new cards to pore over. It's always fun to track cards across the developmental process. Remember, they're all subject to change (see Eson, for example). There are a ton of new interesting mechanics in here and some cool potential seasonal themes. Hit the comments to let me know which cards you're most looking forward to and what you think Second Dinner has planned for this Summer's seasons!