Marvel Snap May 16 patch notes: Series Drop, card changes, Howard the Duck, and more

Another monthly mega-patch for Marvel Snap has arrived today, offering up substantial changes and improvements to the game.

Snap’s weekly over-the-air patches only affect numbers on cards, but these big mid-month patches always bring the heat when it comes to changes—and the patch for Guardians Greatest Hits is no different.

Alongside the new patch was the release of the new card Howard the Duck last night. The one-cost, two-power card has the Ongoing ability to read the top card of your deck, making him very useful to decide whether or not you’ll be top-decking the big card you need throughout a match.

Here is the full list of Marvel Snap patch notes for May 16, including Series Drop cards and more.

Marvel Snap May 16 patch notes

Patch highlights

Kitty Pryde returns

• “Kitty Pryde returns to MARVEL SNAP with a brand new ability. We will grant Kitty Pryde base card to ALL players. For new accounts created after today’s patch, Kitty Pryde will be available in Series Five.”

New feature: Deck cosmetics customization

• “Cosmetic customizations by deck (card back, title, avatar): Avatars and Titles can now be applied to each deck separately!”
• “Please Note: The first time you login this patch, your active deck will be changed to the first deck in your list. We apologize for this inconvenience!”

Seasonal Series Drop: Some cards have dropped down to a lower series

Cards dropping from Series Five to Series Four

• Master Mold
• Negasonic
• Nimrod

Series Four to Three

• Sentry
• Silver Surfer
• Dazzler
• Shadow King
• Sauron
• Ghost

Cards staying in Series Four

• Darkhawk
• Knull

General updates

Ranked Mode

• The number of Cubes required to Rank Up have decreased from 10 Cubes to seven Cubes.
• The number of Bonus Ranks gained when Tiering up has been reduced from five Ranks to three Ranks. (Example: When ranking up from rank 29, a player will go to Rank 33 instead of Rank 35.)

“Developer note: We’re continuing to make adjustments to Ranked Mode that will improve the overall experience for players. The changes coming with this patch feature some adjustments to the matchmaking algorithm and updates to the number of Cubes/Ranks while progressing through the season. There are more changes planned for future patches!”

“When purchasing an item from the shop, you must now Press and Hold the button to confirm your purchase. This should help reduce/remove any accidental purchases!”

Added Series One and Series Two labels to cards from those series

Audio

Voice over updates

• Indonesian VO mixed & mastered
• Thanos VO added for Spanish, French, Japanese, Chinese & Korean

General updates

• Fixed bug which would over trigger card flare SFX in collection screen and in-game

Balance updates

“This is a light week relative to the excitement of recent patches. The metagame as April ended featured a diverse metagame with healthy win rates and cube gain rates, and only a couple small popularity outliers. We’ll have more news for you soon on the future of our OTA balance patches, but today is mostly just a couple card reworks.”

Card updates

Kitty Pryde – Released with new design

• [Old] 1/0 – You can return this to your hand to gain +2 Power.
• [New] 1/0 – When this returns to your hand, +2 Power. Returns at the start of each turn.

“As we previously announced, Kitty Pryde will be returning to the game this week with her new ability. She’ll be Series 5 and awarded to all active accounts today.”

Crystal

• [Old] 4/4 – On Reveal: If this is at the middle location, shuffle your hand into your deck and draw 3 cards.
• [New] 4/4 – On Reveal: Each player draws a card.

“Crystal has been one of a handful of cards seeing incredibly low play and win rates for quite some time now, and an obvious buff candidate. We debated maintaining the direction of the current effect by removing the middle restriction, increasing the cards drawn, etc. But the tricky thing is that we don’t want an effect like Crystal’s to be strong. SNAP decks are only 12 cards and we don’t want those cards to play out the same every time, so we’re very careful about letting players draw cards. This rework aimed to make a simple, appropriate Crystal that could be fun alongside a variety of cards.”

Wave

• [Old] 3/3 – On Reveal: Next turn, cards in both players’ hands cost 4.
• [New] 3/3 – On Reveal: All cards cost 4 until the end of next turn.

“Wave’s cost reduction occurs after other effects that reduce card costs. In addition to a text update that clarifies when Wave’s effect begins, we’ve also made a rather large adjustment “under the hood.” Wave will now begin to apply after effects that reduce card costs, rather than before. That means She-Hulk, Death, etc. will always cost 4 while Wave is in effect. We don’t take lightly that this change kills a few decks, but Wave has been far too constraining on our ability to use cost reduction as a synergy reward in future designs. Leaning on Wave is just always better than dedicating your deck to the actual synergy–we’ve seen that with Death since both cards went live, and we’ll continue seeing it without this action.”

Death

• [Old] 9/12 – Costs 1 less for each card destroyed this game.
• [New] 8/12 – Costs 1 less for each card destroyed this game.

“As Death’s current performance is essentially dependent on Wave and Galactus, we wanted to improve her playability in other decks now that the interaction with Wave has changed. This may not be enough, and if we see Death take a huge dive we’ll come back and look at how these values can be adjusted further to ensure Death remains a meaningful card for dedicated Destroy decks.”

White Queen (Text-only change)

• [Old text] 4/6 – On Reveal: Draw a copy of the highest-Cost card in your opponent’s hand.
• [New text] 4/6 – On Reveal: Copy the highest-Cost card in your opponent’s hand into your hand.

“This is just a text revision to resolve some ongoing confusion about what White Queen exactly does and how it interacts with cards like Widow’s Bite. In the future, we may pursue establishing some kind of shorthand for copying a card into your hand, but for now we’re just going with the clearest expression of the card’s function.”