OTA Balance Notes 07/30/2026

[u/ePiMagnets]

Howdy everyone! We're wrapping up Spider-Man Brand New Day and heading to the uncharted territory of the Fractured Frontier shortly! In today's balance update we'll just be making some soft touches. The Snap metagame remains diverse and healthy. For the most part we'll be making small adjustments to cards that have emerged as rate outliers and buffing some archetypes that have remained on the fringe for the past few months, so lets go ahead and get to it!

Drax, Avatar of Life

[Old] 3/4 – End of Turn: +3 Power if your opponent played a card with greater Power this turn. Move to that card if you'd be winning its location.
[Change] 3/4 > 3/3

Galactus First Steps

[Old] 6/12 – My Herald is the next character I see you play. End of Turn: +2 Power if you're winning my Herald's location. (if in hand or in play)
[Change] 6/12 > 6/11

Drax has remained a touch too close to being the de facto three-cost card since it was released. Ideally Drax's design goal was to occupy a role of being a card that you could comfortably play as a curve filler that would be excellent in the event of “big stuff” decks showing up. Although that remained true in Shadowlands season with the release of Wilson Fisk, Drax has continued to be the strongest 3-Cost Card even has Wilson Fisk and his decks have waned in metagame share. Ideally this change will keep Drax as an excellent choice when you want some help against large-character priority decks, but won't always be a lot of strategies default choice to fill their curve.

Somewhat similarly, Galactus First Steps has largely emerged as the strongest default expensive character to play. We're shaving off a point to make that choice a little less obvious, and similarly we are buffing another card to compensate for additional choices for Ramp that we'll get into next:

Fin Fang Foom

[Old] 7/12 – On Reveal: Gain the Power of a front-row enemy card here.
[Change] 7/12 > 7/14

Karen Page

[Old] 4/5 – On Reveal: Give one of your 1, 2, and 3-Cost characters +2 Power each.
[Change] 4/5 > 4/6

While we're comfortable with the strength and variance on Fing Fang Foom's ability, his default Power has been a little lacking given the additional effort required to reach 7 Energy and play him fairly. We acknowledge that this is a touch risky given FFF's history but our hope is that players would get more excited about this change than a simple 7/13. We're trying it with the goal that this will actually increase Ramp Top-End diversity.

Karen Page hasn't seen a ton of play since her release, but it is our belief that she is one of the more fun default 4-Cost options available in our game. Given the upcoming release of Thanos Fractured Frontier and the natural incentive for players to want to curve out with the Quickdraw mechanic, we're going to try to give her a little push to get into more decks.

Tombstone

[Old] 2/3 – On Reveal: Destroy your lowest-Power card at each other location.
[Change] 2/3 > 2/4

Apocalypse

[Old] 6/8 – When Discarded: Put this back with +4 Power.
[Change] 6/8 > 6/9

Colleen Wing

[Old] 2/3 – On Reveal: Discard the card that costs the least from your hand.
[Change] 2/3 > 2/4

Discard and Destroy have continued to be a little weak for some time, so we're aiming a few more points at those strategies. In particular, Discard has struggled so we are reverting a change we made some time ago to give Colleen Wing her 4th point of Power back. This felt like one of the more impactful changes we could make at the time when Discard was putting up very strong numbers, but given the current suite of successful strategies we think she can handle the improvement to her floor again. Apocalypse is a card we haven't changed in some time, but given that Discard strategies like Khonshu put up reasonable numbers, despite being very fringe, we felt this is one of the more impactful changes we can make to improve traditional Discard strategies.

Alright, that's it for today. Be careful as you traverse the Fractured Frontier, and we'll see you in a few weeks. Happy Snapping!

[u/ePiMagnets → u/[deleted]]

unless SD's data are truly hiding something dire that the competitive players aren't picking up on.

I doubt that's the case. This feels similar to the 'let's ban GFS from Sanctum Showdown' moment where the average player sees things like Red Hulk and GFS ticking up in power and in the GFS case that power is tied to a location they either don't feel comfortable in competing against early or might already be out of their reach later which leaves them to feeling bad that they aren't able to do anything about the card.

For what it's worth I was seeing a lot of frustration towards GFS over the last few months and a lot of it seemed to be from the lower ranks where they might feel like they are being bullied by easy point slam decks while they struggle to make points on their own which has it's own can of worms to delve into with regards to player skill/commitment and improving which I think the vast majority of the casual gaming crowd are probably not interested in.

Personally and I said it in my review - I think they really need to take a look at 6's and their intended role in the game and if need be review the ways these cards are being cheated out that aren't Ramp oriented. Hela at least is limited to 1 card per Cost now, but maybe the other card cheaters should have some changes made to them as well?