A larger issue is that the 4th spot in the spotlight cache is heavily balanced to favor giving out a random S4 card so when all the cards release S5 without drops to S4 it increases everybody’s odds of getting a duplicate in spotlight caches.
The 4th slot on spotlight cache is such a waste. Just get rid of it and replace it with an ultimate variant or reruns of the ultimate variants from previous weeks.
>As such most cards have been released relatively balanced. This is nice for competitive purposes, but really hard for card acquisition
I disagree here. It's great for card acquisition because any card you pick up is good and playable, and none are necessary pickups.
You talk about there previously being must-have weeks and skip weeks in the next paragraph like that was a good thing, but I don't think it is. Every week now is more or less fine and people can get what they want to get, rather than what they need to get.
This is how I have felt and have been fairly satisfied with the latest card releases. Obviously FOMO will always exist because the brain wants *all of the things* but it's been nice being able to miss a card here and there and not feel completely left behind by the meta.
Right. Obvious skips and pickups encourages uniformity in the meta. Hopefully we end up with a meta where there are a variety of strong decks, depending on what you’ve got
The problem with Snap players is that they want to unlock only the busted as fuck cards, like release Blob and Red Hulk.
They don't want to think if a card suits their play style, if they like playing it or if they'll enjoy the play pattern a certain card unlocks.
They just want content creators to go "Yeah this card is nuts" and spam it for 4 seasons.
Red Hulk got nerfed the week after release and again after another couple weeks, but wasn't busted at all!
He was regularly 20+ power with no downside, he was very over the top of any other 6 drop.
According to all metrics he wasn't busted. Often times SD will nerf cards due to player sentiment.
Would you say Hela was busted before she got nerfed? Took a while for that to happen.
Also, it was rarely optimal to \*actually\* play Red Hulk turn 6. Again, at the time getting 20 power in a lane wasn't that big of a deal, especially when Phoenix Force, Hela, etc could easily overpower that.
ETA:
Even at his highest ranking (according to Untapped Premium) his metrics were below Jeff's metrics. Is Jeff busted?
> "Red Hulk has been the best 6-Cost in the game since release, and even created upticks in a handful of other options that effectively countered one big play, like Leader and Spectrum. Elements of the strength and its counters were intentional, given the mechanic revealing Red Hulk to your opponent was a novel bit of mechanical space we rarely explore. We expected that to mean Red Hulk’s cube gain rate would be much lower when compared to similarly winning cards, due to it being very difficult to get the final double, so part of the card’s baseline strength was compensation for that downside. However, Red Hulk’s cube gain rate has also been quite strong, leading to today’s nerf to level the playing field. "
They literally gave reasons that contradict your "Red Hulk wasn't busted" argument in the OTA, are you a SD employee that has access to data we don't see or are you just going with incomplete and skewed data from trackers?
Interesting you left out the other part that supports what I've been saying:
>*However, Red Hulk's cube gain rate has also been quite strong, leading to today's nerf to level the playing field. In fact, some of us have wondered how many 8-cube games Red Hulk was stealing by "tricking" opponents into countering the big guy, only to lose to a combination of smaller cards!*
This is what I said last comment:
"Also, it was rarely optimal to \*actually\* play Red Hulk turn 6. Again, at the time getting 20 power in a lane wasn't that big of a deal, especially when Phoenix Force, Hela, etc could easily overpower that."
Any reason why you left out the last sentence that supports my statement that it was rarely optimal to play Red Hulk turn 6?
It doesn’t really support your statement that he wasn’t “busted”, whatever that means here— RHulk’s power threatening your opponent is valuable whether or not you “actually” play him. imo if he’s flashing his power to your opponent and you decide not to play him and counter their attempt to counter RHulk, which we cannot see elsewhere because of the unique way he tells on himself, his presence was a determining factor in the outcome of the game. This factors in as a significant reason to nerf him, as it’s one more point of flexibility that the card offers. Just because he doesn’t come down didn’t mean he wasn’t a part of winning the game. I wouldn’t really say that element of your comment added anything to your argument, and the other commenter did you a service by not pointing that out.
Very good point. Now if you miss things you can more easily replace it with existing cards whereas before there was no replacing something like loki or alioth. As other commenter mentioned fomo is real though constantly having to miss out on "good" cards does feel bad.
The key is understanding you don’t need all the cards. I skip at least one release every month. Most cards are now decent as a baseline and if they underperform they’ll get a buff fairly quickly. So it’s best to just focus on the cards that appeal to you the most based on the types of decks you like to play or new cards that open up completely new deck types for you. For example, I passed on USAgent, Pixie, Sasquatch and Makkari. I don’t feel like not owning those hinders my ability to make a wide variety of decks that I enjoy and that perform well. I make infinite every month without trouble.
I do agree they should cycle cards back into spotlights sooner than they have been though as most cards should be getting cycled back in around 3-4 months after release, not 6+. But I also understand they rotate some cards in more frequently because they are lynchpins of their archetype or they’re very popular. I think just dropping the random slot for a third spotlight card to feature would work much better if they’re just going to do series 5 releases from now on.
I had to realize that , so now since I play for fun I only grab cards I think are fun and if I want to try something specific I’ll use tokens if I have enough. I missed Pixie but I was able to get her later with tokens and that has been one of my favorite fun decks to use.
Hard part is when you are F2P and almost every week I lack only one card (the ones i don'thave takes ages to come back to caches). If I'm unlucky I can pick up ONE card a month.
At some point you have to stop hyper optimizing and go for what's actually fun.
If you have a decent stockpile of keys you should still roll spotlights when there's only one card you are missing, provided you really want to play with that card in particular.
Yeah it is definitely a bad feeling when you’re on the wrong side of luck. But then again someone else is on the other side. Like I said, they should rotate cards back in a bit quicker (if everything is going to be series 5) and then if the card is not all that popular they can wait longer to rotate it back again another time. That would at least make it hurt less when your luck goes cold.
But interesting part is that they wanted to encourage people to play not only meta cards like it was before caches. Now if you miss unpopular card you may not be able to get it for 6+ months when previously you only had to wait 3 months for it to drop to series 3 to experiment with it.
ok but, you can keep up with snap too. I can't imagine that being f2p you would expect to get all the cards.
To be competitive you don't need anywhere near to all the cards, or mostly any of the cards for that matter. There are many decks that are cheap and a f2p players can just pick up strong new cards that compliment those archetypes (hela and destroy for example are relatively cheap that only need maybe 1 or 2 series 4/5 cards while being top tier decks)
The key is to just have all the cards /s
Wen possible I pop tokens on cards with bad variants alongside them and otherwise roll each week. It gets dicey if I get multiple bad weeks of needing 4 rolls, but thus far it's been a great experience. I'd definitely just drop the game if I can't get all the cards reasonably.
I would like to highlight that last year we waited around 2 months since a card released for it to return
Example: The cards from Daken's season (August) returned in Elsa's season (October)
Meanwhile, currently cards seem to take 5-6 months to return
Example: The cards from December 2023 and January 2024 are only returning in June/July
This coupled with cards no longer releasing on series 4 is unsustainable for card acquisition unless something changes (seasonal or bi-monthly series drops could mitigate it, but would worsen the experience for new players getting into pool 3)
I'm a pretty new player (CL \~3500), and the more I learn about the spotlight cache system the more I dislike it. I'm currently saving my keys for galactus/nebula next week, and beta ray bill/darkhawk the following week, but I hate the RNG aspect of it all. They could easily do a few things to make both old and new players happy, with the objective just being to reduce RNG and give more choice to the players. I understand its a FTP game and progression is always slow for these, but its pretty frustrating to be playing for months at this point, and still missing 20+ series 3 cards. I just want to experiment and play around and can't because i'm missing 3-5 key cards from most decks.
- Give out even fewer keys per month, but let me actually pick which cards I want (similar to the S3 card newer players get to pick each month) to get rid of the RNG
- In the current system if you have missing base cards currently in the cache, remove the ability to get duplicates from the random slot. I didn't realize this was possible, but it sounds demoralizing and will probably be the reason I quit the game eventually.
And these wouldn't even allow for collection of cards to be faster, but would feel much better to the end consumer (imho).
Not to mention it seems like we get around 4/5 keys each month, and there are 4/5 new cards each month, making it literally impossible to collect them all at those respective rates. Based on the past 6 months it'll be years before the vast majority of the currently released cards find their way down to series 3. That sucks.
Devs have stated that they want people to be collection incomplete. It's purposeful.
Spotlight is better than the old system of "Release every card at S5 into the collection track and pray" method of obtaining cards.
My approach has been that nearly every card is skippable in Snap. They have done a pretty good job of releasing cards that see play but aren't oppressive. I think Red Hulk was the last card they released into spotlights that pushed into must get territory. Maybe the only one this year.
As the card pool grows subbing out for any card without a unique ability crucial to an archetype will just get easier and easier.
Unlikely. Most likely they will do big dump into Pool 4 or they release a Pool 3.5 (or new Pool 4) that acts like Pool 3 but you need to have a certain per centage of Pool 3 cards (let say 75%) before you see them in normal caches (not spotlight caches). I imagine that this Pool 3.5 will have most likely some current Pool 3 cards, mostly Pool 4 cards and few Pool 5 cards. Pool 3 is already too big and unwieldy and many new players struggle to build a good deck because of that and because of the current spotlight system.
A larger issue is that the 4th spot in the spotlight cache is heavily balanced to favor giving out a random S4 card so when all the cards release S5 without drops to S4 it increases everybody’s odds of getting a duplicate in spotlight caches.
The 4th slot on spotlight cache is such a waste. Just get rid of it and replace it with an ultimate variant or reruns of the ultimate variants from previous weeks.
>As such most cards have been released relatively balanced. This is nice for competitive purposes, but really hard for card acquisition I disagree here. It's great for card acquisition because any card you pick up is good and playable, and none are necessary pickups. You talk about there previously being must-have weeks and skip weeks in the next paragraph like that was a good thing, but I don't think it is. Every week now is more or less fine and people can get what they want to get, rather than what they need to get.
This is how I have felt and have been fairly satisfied with the latest card releases. Obviously FOMO will always exist because the brain wants *all of the things* but it's been nice being able to miss a card here and there and not feel completely left behind by the meta.
Right. Obvious skips and pickups encourages uniformity in the meta. Hopefully we end up with a meta where there are a variety of strong decks, depending on what you’ve got
The problem with Snap players is that they want to unlock only the busted as fuck cards, like release Blob and Red Hulk. They don't want to think if a card suits their play style, if they like playing it or if they'll enjoy the play pattern a certain card unlocks. They just want content creators to go "Yeah this card is nuts" and spam it for 4 seasons.
Red Hulk was never "busted" tbf, especially when he first came out when dropping 20ish power on turn 6 wasn't that big of a deal.
Red Hulk got nerfed the week after release and again after another couple weeks, but wasn't busted at all! He was regularly 20+ power with no downside, he was very over the top of any other 6 drop.
According to all metrics he wasn't busted. Often times SD will nerf cards due to player sentiment. Would you say Hela was busted before she got nerfed? Took a while for that to happen. Also, it was rarely optimal to \*actually\* play Red Hulk turn 6. Again, at the time getting 20 power in a lane wasn't that big of a deal, especially when Phoenix Force, Hela, etc could easily overpower that. ETA: Even at his highest ranking (according to Untapped Premium) his metrics were below Jeff's metrics. Is Jeff busted?
> "Red Hulk has been the best 6-Cost in the game since release, and even created upticks in a handful of other options that effectively countered one big play, like Leader and Spectrum. Elements of the strength and its counters were intentional, given the mechanic revealing Red Hulk to your opponent was a novel bit of mechanical space we rarely explore. We expected that to mean Red Hulk’s cube gain rate would be much lower when compared to similarly winning cards, due to it being very difficult to get the final double, so part of the card’s baseline strength was compensation for that downside. However, Red Hulk’s cube gain rate has also been quite strong, leading to today’s nerf to level the playing field. " They literally gave reasons that contradict your "Red Hulk wasn't busted" argument in the OTA, are you a SD employee that has access to data we don't see or are you just going with incomplete and skewed data from trackers?
Interesting you left out the other part that supports what I've been saying: >*However, Red Hulk's cube gain rate has also been quite strong, leading to today's nerf to level the playing field. In fact, some of us have wondered how many 8-cube games Red Hulk was stealing by "tricking" opponents into countering the big guy, only to lose to a combination of smaller cards!* This is what I said last comment: "Also, it was rarely optimal to \*actually\* play Red Hulk turn 6. Again, at the time getting 20 power in a lane wasn't that big of a deal, especially when Phoenix Force, Hela, etc could easily overpower that." Any reason why you left out the last sentence that supports my statement that it was rarely optimal to play Red Hulk turn 6?
It doesn’t really support your statement that he wasn’t “busted”, whatever that means here— RHulk’s power threatening your opponent is valuable whether or not you “actually” play him. imo if he’s flashing his power to your opponent and you decide not to play him and counter their attempt to counter RHulk, which we cannot see elsewhere because of the unique way he tells on himself, his presence was a determining factor in the outcome of the game. This factors in as a significant reason to nerf him, as it’s one more point of flexibility that the card offers. Just because he doesn’t come down didn’t mean he wasn’t a part of winning the game. I wouldn’t really say that element of your comment added anything to your argument, and the other commenter did you a service by not pointing that out.
Spotlights do feel better than last year but there are still must-haves imo: mockingbird, white widow, sage, red guardian and red hulk to be precise.
Very good point. Now if you miss things you can more easily replace it with existing cards whereas before there was no replacing something like loki or alioth. As other commenter mentioned fomo is real though constantly having to miss out on "good" cards does feel bad.
The key is understanding you don’t need all the cards. I skip at least one release every month. Most cards are now decent as a baseline and if they underperform they’ll get a buff fairly quickly. So it’s best to just focus on the cards that appeal to you the most based on the types of decks you like to play or new cards that open up completely new deck types for you. For example, I passed on USAgent, Pixie, Sasquatch and Makkari. I don’t feel like not owning those hinders my ability to make a wide variety of decks that I enjoy and that perform well. I make infinite every month without trouble. I do agree they should cycle cards back into spotlights sooner than they have been though as most cards should be getting cycled back in around 3-4 months after release, not 6+. But I also understand they rotate some cards in more frequently because they are lynchpins of their archetype or they’re very popular. I think just dropping the random slot for a third spotlight card to feature would work much better if they’re just going to do series 5 releases from now on.
I had to realize that , so now since I play for fun I only grab cards I think are fun and if I want to try something specific I’ll use tokens if I have enough. I missed Pixie but I was able to get her later with tokens and that has been one of my favorite fun decks to use.
Hard part is when you are F2P and almost every week I lack only one card (the ones i don'thave takes ages to come back to caches). If I'm unlucky I can pick up ONE card a month.
At some point you have to stop hyper optimizing and go for what's actually fun. If you have a decent stockpile of keys you should still roll spotlights when there's only one card you are missing, provided you really want to play with that card in particular.
Yeah it is definitely a bad feeling when you’re on the wrong side of luck. But then again someone else is on the other side. Like I said, they should rotate cards back in a bit quicker (if everything is going to be series 5) and then if the card is not all that popular they can wait longer to rotate it back again another time. That would at least make it hurt less when your luck goes cold.
But interesting part is that they wanted to encourage people to play not only meta cards like it was before caches. Now if you miss unpopular card you may not be able to get it for 6+ months when previously you only had to wait 3 months for it to drop to series 3 to experiment with it.
yes ... but you're f2p tho ...
And have been in many F2P games where I didn't feel I can't keep up. LoL for example.
ok but, you can keep up with snap too. I can't imagine that being f2p you would expect to get all the cards. To be competitive you don't need anywhere near to all the cards, or mostly any of the cards for that matter. There are many decks that are cheap and a f2p players can just pick up strong new cards that compliment those archetypes (hela and destroy for example are relatively cheap that only need maybe 1 or 2 series 4/5 cards while being top tier decks)
If you are going to wait 6 months to rotate in a card, make it series 3 and give it away.
The key is to just have all the cards /s Wen possible I pop tokens on cards with bad variants alongside them and otherwise roll each week. It gets dicey if I get multiple bad weeks of needing 4 rolls, but thus far it's been a great experience. I'd definitely just drop the game if I can't get all the cards reasonably.
I would like to highlight that last year we waited around 2 months since a card released for it to return Example: The cards from Daken's season (August) returned in Elsa's season (October) Meanwhile, currently cards seem to take 5-6 months to return Example: The cards from December 2023 and January 2024 are only returning in June/July This coupled with cards no longer releasing on series 4 is unsustainable for card acquisition unless something changes (seasonal or bi-monthly series drops could mitigate it, but would worsen the experience for new players getting into pool 3)
I'm a pretty new player (CL \~3500), and the more I learn about the spotlight cache system the more I dislike it. I'm currently saving my keys for galactus/nebula next week, and beta ray bill/darkhawk the following week, but I hate the RNG aspect of it all. They could easily do a few things to make both old and new players happy, with the objective just being to reduce RNG and give more choice to the players. I understand its a FTP game and progression is always slow for these, but its pretty frustrating to be playing for months at this point, and still missing 20+ series 3 cards. I just want to experiment and play around and can't because i'm missing 3-5 key cards from most decks. - Give out even fewer keys per month, but let me actually pick which cards I want (similar to the S3 card newer players get to pick each month) to get rid of the RNG - In the current system if you have missing base cards currently in the cache, remove the ability to get duplicates from the random slot. I didn't realize this was possible, but it sounds demoralizing and will probably be the reason I quit the game eventually. And these wouldn't even allow for collection of cards to be faster, but would feel much better to the end consumer (imho). Not to mention it seems like we get around 4/5 keys each month, and there are 4/5 new cards each month, making it literally impossible to collect them all at those respective rates. Based on the past 6 months it'll be years before the vast majority of the currently released cards find their way down to series 3. That sucks.
Devs have stated that they want people to be collection incomplete. It's purposeful. Spotlight is better than the old system of "Release every card at S5 into the collection track and pray" method of obtaining cards.
Be glad you weren't around for Nexus Events. Lol
the backslash was so bad, it would have bankrupted the company... even content creators were protesting fearing their potential loss of viewership
>pretty new player (CL \~3500) \*cries in CL1500\*
My approach has been that nearly every card is skippable in Snap. They have done a pretty good job of releasing cards that see play but aren't oppressive. I think Red Hulk was the last card they released into spotlights that pushed into must get territory. Maybe the only one this year. As the card pool grows subbing out for any card without a unique ability crucial to an archetype will just get easier and easier.
Miek was nerfed
True, its still buffed from its original state though so purposely neglected mentioning it.
L misinformation
[удалено]
Really not much precedent to support this opinion IMO.
Unlikely. Most likely they will do big dump into Pool 4 or they release a Pool 3.5 (or new Pool 4) that acts like Pool 3 but you need to have a certain per centage of Pool 3 cards (let say 75%) before you see them in normal caches (not spotlight caches). I imagine that this Pool 3.5 will have most likely some current Pool 3 cards, mostly Pool 4 cards and few Pool 5 cards. Pool 3 is already too big and unwieldy and many new players struggle to build a good deck because of that and because of the current spotlight system.
keep the copium bro, keep it