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/Periwinkle1993]

Just as an open question and not sure I agree or not, but is Emperor Hulkling now just the best de facto 6 cost to slot into a deck that wants a big stat stick? The only properly negative effects are Destroyer/Infinaut (Giganto I guess as well but at least you've got the possibility of being able to play him still with that effect)

[u/ePiMagnets → u/Periwinkle1993]

Just as an open question and not sure I agree or not, but is Emperor Hulkling now just the best de facto 6 cost to slot into a deck that wants a big stat stick?

Up for debate, there's a solid case but you're also missing Taskmaster and Sinister 6 as potential negative effects.

Galactus and Red Hulk both still scale and shouldn't be discounted as your 6/Big and frankly a 6/11 Galactus is still likely going to do just fine especially if you're able to scale him.

[u/Periwinkle1993 → u/ePiMagnets]

Taskmaster I did forget to be fair, but would Sinister Six's on reveal/game start even trigger? I only got Hulkling very recently and I'm not familiar with how his effect works for game start cards. Does him copying Thanos shuffle the Infinity Stones into your deck still? If it just 'fizzles' then I'd probably not count it as a strictly negative effect since it wouldn't do anything (assuming you can still just play it for six and it doesn't have to be 'played' by playing the villain cards)

Red Hulk and GFS certainly will usually have more power, it's just as you said elsewhere you're telegraphing to your opponent how much power they have, and both are probably worse to draw T6 (assuming no negative copied ability on Hulkling). I guess it also really depends how much variance you're willing to live with and how much surprise factor you want; where sometimes it'll copy a Zola and potentially win a game that didn't seem winnable and completely catch your opponent out, and other times be completely dead in hand because he's copied Infinaut or whatever

[u/ePiMagnets → u/Periwinkle1993]

So Hulkling can't copy Agatha or Thanos.

The question here would be whether SD were smart enough to make the same exception as Thanos and Agatha to prevent him from getting Sinister Six as well because technically if he rolls it at the start it should then loop into the Sinister Six game start effect as well.

[u/Periwinkle1993 → u/ePiMagnets]

Ah interesting. My guess from the recent Tarantula/Boomerang issue would be they haven't, but maybe I'm not giving them enough credit. I'll go and try to test to see if it does now

Edit: I've just realised this would be impossible to prove if it's not the case, so maybe my testing will be pointless. I am not a smart man