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Marvel Snap art featuring Galactus.
Image via Nuverse

2 of Marvel Snap’s best and most problematic cards just got hit with big nerfs

Several decks will be impacted by this update.

A new update just went live in Marvel Snap, bringing some anticipated nerfs to two of the game’s most powerful cards, Second Dinner first revealed on its official Discord server.

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Silver Surfer and Zabu have both just been hit with some substantial changes, and they’re already live in the game. These changes look to have a pretty large impact on some of the meta’s most popular and strongest decks.

For the future, Second Dinner said that balance updates will largely be relegated to patches. But today’s update is described as “over the air,” meaning there won’t be an update for players to download.

“For now, we still expect patches to be the primary way to deliver balance changes,” Second Dinner said. “Our internal processes aren’t designed to do these impromptu changes regularly yet, and we’ll often want to make more substantial changes than this tool allows. However, we may experiment with slightly more frequent balance on a small scale, to see if there’s an even better experience for players at our fingertips.”

Here are all the changes coming to the two cards that have been impacted in today’s Marvel Snap update.

Marvel Snap Zabu nerf

  • Previous: 3 Energy, 2 Power – Ongoing: Your 4-Cost cards cost 2 less. (minimum 1)
  • New: 2 Energy, 2 Power – Ongoing: Your 4-Cost cards cost 1 less. (minimum 1)

“Zabu’s individual card performance was strong, but not amazing,” Second Dinner said of the change. “It didn’t crack our Top 5 cards for most of January, which is usually where you find troublemakers. Zabu’s dominance only became apparent in evaluating its clusters, which is data that takes longer to surface. In mid-January we saw three distinct Zabu decks gaining steam near the top of our rankings on winrate, cube gain, and population. That was when we knew a change would be necessary, but the next patch was already locked, which brings us to today.”

Second Dinner went on to say that changing Zabu’s cost reduction will make it “harder to hide game-winning amounts of Power until turn 6 or empty your hand for Dracula,” and also break up the devastating Spider-Man/Absorbing Man combo. The dev said it expects Zabu decks “to look a bit different, but still have competitive builds.”

Marvel Snap Silver Surfer nerf

  • Previous: 3 Energy, 0 Power – On Reveal: Give your other 3-Cost cards +3 Power.
  • New: 3 Energy, 2 Power – On Reveal: Give your other 3-Cost cards +2 Power.

“Silver Surfer’s change is oddly linked to Zabu’s,” Second Dinner said. “It’s been a top five card in a top five deck since release, but steadied and gained cubes slower once players adapted…until Zabu. During Savage Lands, “Sera Surfer” was an unlikely hero and the best overall deck. However, it also had positive matchups against over 75 percent of the field, which meant it threatened to become too dominant once we adjusted Zabu.”

The dev said that this change aims to keep Surfer decks “viable, just weaker.” The addition of two power to a card that has always had zero “makes figuring out where he’ll be played more interesting for both players and lets us fine-tune his strength.” But it does give a hardcore nerf to using him in Mister Negative decks.


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Author
Image of Scott Duwe
Scott Duwe
Senior Staff Writer
Senior Staff Writer & Call of Duty lead. Professional writer for over 10 years. Lover of all things Marvel, Destiny 2, Metal Gear, Final Fantasy, Resident Evil, and more. Previous bylines include PC Gamer, Red Bull Esports, Fanbyte, and Esports Nation. DogDad to corgis Yogi and Mickey, sports fan (NY Yankees, NY Jets, NY Rangers, NY Knicks), Paramore fanatic, cardio enthusiast.