OTA: "Repeat" Maths

The OTA released today has major card adjustments that will completely shift the meta, but even more impactful to the long-term state of the game will be the changes to "doubling". If you know anything about Onslaught scaling in this game, you'll know it's weird! Today's OTA simplifies the maths in the game a lot – you won't be able to hit the same numbers, but the numbers should make more sense. (Until you add in Super Skrull or Moonstone, that is!)

The Basics

Instead of any doubling happening (which often was confusingly more of a +2 than a x2 anyway), you now get a flat +1 bonus effect from cards like Wong and Invisible Woman First Steps.

Example 1: Invisible Woman First Steps

Let's say we're copying IWFS with Prodigy or Chameleon:

• 1 IWFS: 2x, no change
• 2 IWFS: 3x, was 4x
• 3 IWFS: 4x, was 6x
• 4 IWFS: 5x, was 8x
• If we go crazy and have IWFS with 3 Jocastas: 17x, was 32x

In general, what used to be 2n procs (with n IWFS in play) is now n+1 procs.

Example 2: Wong

Let's say we're playing a toxic surfer list.

• Wong + Surfer: 2x Surfer, no change
• Wong + Mystique + Surfer: 3x Surfer, was 4x
• Wong + Mystique + Surfer + Odin: 9x Surfer, was 16x

That’s a +32 buff going down to +18!

Example 3: Onslaught

What does this mean for Onslaught? Onslaught scales more slowly now. Let's look at the power we get from Mr Fantastic with a load of Onslaughts in his lane:

• 1 Onslaught: 2x (+6 Power), no change
• 2 Onslaughts: 4x (+12), was 6x (+18)
• 3 Onslaughts: 8x (+24), was 18x (+54)
• 3 Onslaughts on Onslaught's Citadel: 16x (+48), was 54x (+162)

In general, n Onslaughts now scale by 2ⁿ rather than the more confusing 2 x 3⁽ⁿ ⁻ ¹⁾.

Competitive Examples

In December, I took an Ongoing deck into KMBest's Holiday Block Party tournament that played on Moonstone's ability to copy Onslaught's effect from Mystique and Chameleon. This scaled Mr Fantastic's output far past what any normal deck could reach on points alone.

The high-roll on this deck buffed each side lane by a massive 204 Power. With the new maths, that high-roll goes down to 54 Power. Still a lot!– but also much easier to beat now (e.g., with Man-Spider).

The Living Tribunal

Let’s look at a classic Tribunal setup, with a lane of Iron Man, Onslaught, Mystique (copying Onslaught), and Tribunal. We have 18 base Power in the lane.

Old maths: 18 x 6 = 108, adding 36 Power to each lane

New maths: 18 x 4 = 72, adding 24 Power to each lane

That’s a big difference competitively! It’s now much more achievable for our opponent to beat us on points in two locations – and we’re still playing a deck that is famously vulnerable to tech.

Conclusion:

The ability to build massive sandcastles has always been a part of the appeal of this game for me, so it's a sad moment to see these numbers get nerfed. Having said that, thank goodness! I had to put in a lot of work to understand the old numbers and making the game more intuitive is always a step in the right direction.

Lauren's note:

Big thanks to 0Drag0n0 for putting this together. He's one of the Snap mathematicians I look up to! I had back-solved my own solution to complicated Skrull-Onslaught math which worked 99% of the time. 0Drag0n0 was able to rework it to solve the 100%.

Anyway! Please go check out and follow 0Drag0n0's stuff at Twitter and Twitch.