Marvel Snap‘s Most Popular Cards Are Now Less Powerful

The Marvel Snap meta is shaking up a lot right now. First, the addition of M.O.D.O.K. likely means you’re seeing a ton more discard decks that take advantage of the card’s ability to destroy your entire hand. Before that, Marvel Snap’s intensely-hated Leader card, which copies your opponent’s entire play, became less useful. And now, a small hotfix to Marvel Snap has brought down two of the most common cards down a peg.

Zabu, the star of the card battler’s previous season, will now reduce the cost of 4-energy cards by one rather than by two. And Silver Surfer will now beef up 3-energy cards by two instead of upping them by three, as he used to. According to Marvel Snap Zone, the two most popular decks in the meta right now are Zabu-focused, with Silver Surfer making a couple of appearances in the top ten. And sure enough, Second Dinner confirmed in its patch notes that three different Zabu decks were prominent in rankings when it came to win rate, cube gain, and population.

“Weakening these two Season Pass cards wasn’t a light decision,” a blog post announcing the changes reads.

“These changes aren’t meant to ‘delete’ Zabu or Silver Surfer–just give other cards more room,” it continues.

Why did Marvel Snap nerf Silver Surfer And Zabu?

Here’s Second Dinner on the Zabu changes:

Moving Zabu’s cost reduction from 2 to 1 reduces the potential Energy reduction of the cat, making it harder to hide game-winning amounts of Power until turn 6 or empty your hand for Dracula. It also breaks up the Spider-Man/Absorbing Man combo, which was stronger than we’d like. Sliding him down to 2-Cost hopefully refunds enough tempo to retain the fun of building around various 4-Cost cards. We expect Zabu decks to look a bit different, but still have competitive builds.

Read More: Everything You Should Know About Marvel Snap’s Game-Changing New Season

Silver Surfer, Second Dinner notes, has been a top five card since its inception. More than that, “Sera Surfer,” which Marvel Snap Zone gives over a 55% win rate, was literally the best overall deck! The developers feared that the card might become “too dominant.”

The blog post says:

This change aims to keep mostly the same Surfer decks viable, just weaker. We’re specifically happy to carry Power on Surfer himself, because it makes figuring out where he’ll be played more interesting for both players and lets us fine-tune his strength. Those gains unfortunately come at the expense of some cool Mister Negative decks we enjoyed seeing.

I doubt this will kill either card; they’re still useful. But my gut says that Sera Surfer decks are about to be replaced with Hela Discard decks, which can bring back the hand that M.O.D.O.K. destroys.