Marvel Snap’s new OTA update takes aim at Thanos and discard decks by nerfing some enabler cards

Another over-the-air update for Marvel Snap has arrived today, changing card values in the never-ending war to balance the game’s overall meta.

Thanos and Discard decks have been especially strong of late, so both have been hit with some ancillary nerfs. But some buffs have come for everyone’s favorite group of “a-holes” in the Guardians of the Galaxy, too.

Here’s everything changing in March 21’s Marvel Snap OTA update.

Marvel Snap March 21 patch notes

Marvel Snap emote artwork 2024 — A lot of buffs this week. Image via Second Dinner

This week’s OTA update has Thanos in its sights by nerfing two cards guilty of making him as strong as he is, including Mind Stone and Psylocke, along with a long-standing Discard mainstay in Apocalypse.

“Thanos has become a bit of a problem for the metagame,” Second Dinner said. “When we adjusted Time Stone, we briefly mentioned that the design of Thanos can be constraining. Specifically, the versatility of the Stones give the deck a lot of room to maneuver and adapt to whatever the metagame becomes. In all cases however, the strongest Stone in the deck has consistently been the Mind Stone. We considered removing its second draw, but ultimately that’s a very appealing part of the card. So for now, we’re taking the unusual approach of making it a two-cost card. We don’t think this is likely to fully solve the ‘Thanos problem,’ but hopefully it meaningfully addresses the archetype while we investigate a wider range of solutions.”

Psylocke, meanwhile, has had her power dropped to one, while Apocalypse is dropping from six/eight to six/six while maintaining his plus-four power each time he gets discarded.

“Discard decks have moved from the middle to the top of the metagame over the last month, fueled by some strong and exciting new releases,” Second Dinner said. “We want Discard to be a great deck, but it’s been just a hair too strong. Apocalypse is the single best-performing card in the dedicated Discard archetype, so we’re taking away a little bit of its base Power. We considered reducing the triggered buff ability instead, but when possible we prefer to push strength into the ‘dreams’ of our cards, and Apocalypse has an exciting one to grow.”

The update contains a lot more buffs than nerfs, however, including many of the Guardians of the Galaxy, plus Adam Warlock, who is now a five/five, up from his recent change to a five/four.

“As previously discussed, we made the last change to Adam Warlock with an abundance of caution,” Second Dinner said. “Since then, we’ve seen it was a very minor improvement for a small number of decks, so we’re going to push on a little bit more. We believe the design could go to five/six fairly easily, but one of the archetypes we’re interested in here is Cerebro-5, which can be a difficult deck to serve. So we’re trying the smaller buff to see how that goes. None of this is to say that we won’t pursue other costs or a more dramatic rework later, but for now we’re going to try nudging things more softly.”

Here’s the full list of changes today.