Marvel Snap Patch Notes May 19, 2026: New Player Onboarding Overhaul, Character Mastery XP Boost, and Two New Keywords

Marvel Snap's May 19 update delivers a major new-player experience refresh, sweeping Character Mastery improvements including doubled match boosters, and formalizes two brand-new keywords — Empowered and Moveable — across more than a dozen cards. Performance fixes, memory optimizations, and a long list of bug fixes round out one of the meatier non-balance patches of the year.

Second Dinner has dropped one of the most player-friendly Marvel Snap updates of 2026, and it's not a balance patch — it's a quality-of-life overhaul. The May 19 release rebuilds the early-game experience for new players, doubles the boosters you earn from every match, and bakes two new keywords — Empowered and Moveable — into the rules text of more than a dozen existing cards.

A Smarter, Friendlier New User Experience

Second Dinner has spent months talking about lowering the barrier to entry for fresh recruits, and this patch is where the talk meets the table. New players who finish the tutorial now earn a complete Ultron "Zoo" deck simply by playing additional Ranked matches — a huge leg up over the old grind toward a viable archetype.

The tutorial itself has been re-shot. A new instructional match featuring Hawkeye and Star-Lord teaches the basics of card synergy and turn-order strategy, replacing the older flow that left many newcomers fuzzy on how Snap actually works. After matches, an Upgrade Prompt now spells out what most veterans take for granted: that upgrading cards with boosters is what unlocks new cards from the Collection Track.

Two more pressure-relievers round it out: the turn timer is removed entirely until new players clear the snapping tutorials, and the daily login calendar has been overhauled with clearer visuals — and a chunky reward upgrade. Thanos lands on day 14, instantly slotting into one of the deepest archetypes in the game.

The visual side of the early collection isn't being neglected either. Iron Man, Hawkeye, Spectrum, Medusa, Blue Marvel, and more have all received refreshed VFX so the cards you spend your first 50 matches with look as good as the ones you eventually chase.

Character Mastery Gets a Big XP Boost — and Double Boosters

Character Mastery has been one of the most-debated systems in Snap since its debut, and Second Dinner is clearly listening. The May 19 patch is the first of what the team is calling "rolling improvements" — meaning more changes are coming in future releases — but this round packs a punch.

XP from splits and variants has been substantially increased, while the XP required per Mastery level stays the same. The result: cards level up noticeably faster. Here's the new XP table:

• Splits: 15 → 50
• Rare variants: 25 → 75
• Super Rare variants: 75 → 150
• Season Pass, Bundle, LTM, Album, and Conquest variants: 125 → 200
• Spotlight variants: 125 → 400
• Ultimate variants: 250 → 600

The bigger story, though, is what's happening at the end of every single match. Booster rewards are now doubled across the board — including in modes like Limbo, Fogwell's Gym, and any match that runs past turn 7. That's a permanent, game-wide acceleration to your collection economy.

Second Dinner is also trimming the split pool. Rays (all variants), Frosted Glass, and the Rainbow Confetti flare have been pulled from each card's pool — though you'll still receive them as Mastery track rewards if you don't already own them, and any previous splits with those finishes are kept intact. Bigger swings — like Wild Boosters and the ability to re-roll finishes and flares — are confirmed to be in active development for future patches.

Performance, Memory, and a Modernized Rules Engine

Earlier this year Second Dinner promised a sustained investment in performance and tech debt. This patch lands several of those punches at once. The team has reworked how the client handles VFX, which should reduce visual-effect-related crashes — historically one of the most frustrating sources of mid-match disconnects.

Startup load time has been improved, memory efficiency is up, and — most quietly important — the order of operations for card mechanics has been updated to make interactions more intuitive. That last change is doing double duty: it makes existing cards behave more predictably, and it opens design space for more complex mechanics in future card releases. The internal bug-reporting pipeline has also been streamlined, meaning more fixes can ship without forcing a client update.

Two New Keywords: Empowered and Moveable

The biggest mechanical change in the patch is how Snap formalizes language that's long lived in card-specific rules text. Two new keywords now do the heavy lifting:

Empowered — "When a card's Power is permanently increased. Ongoing Power changes don't count." Importantly, setting Power to a higher value (think Valkyrie) now counts as Empowered. The keyword has been retroactively added to Clea and Sebastian Shaw.

Moveable — "You may move this while playing cards." This one is doing a lot of work, getting attached to fifteen cards and one location in a single sweep:

Functionally, most of these cards already could move while you played other cards — the change is about clarity. With a shared keyword, deckbuilders can spot Move synergies at a glance, and the design team has a clean handle to hang future Move-tribal mechanics on.

Card and Location Tweaks

One small but meaningful rules-text adjustment: Red Shift and Celestial Burial Ground now check for base Cost rather than current Cost. That closes a small loophole where cost-modifying effects could either enable or invalidate their interactions in ways that didn't match the cards' fantasy. Beyond that, VFX and audio polish has been applied to Blue Marvel, Spectrum, Star-Lord, Medusa, and Hawkeye.

Bug Fix Roundup

The patch closes out one of the longest bug-fix lists in recent memory. Highlights worth knowing:

• Hydra Bob's VFX will no longer collide with cards like Jocasta in a way that crashed the client.
• Fin Fang Foom's VFX is no longer at war with High Voltage: Overdrive.
• Gambit Horseman of Death now handles created cards that were returned to hand and replayed properly.
• Spider-Ham's VFX triggers cleanly to show the targeted card without the pig actually entering play.
• Archangel Horseman of Death's VFX timings have been tightened so they no longer overlap with the resurrected card's effects.
• Legion no longer causes location art to fail to load on certain boards.
• Symbiote Spider-Man's visible "box" artifact has been cleaned up.
• A Korean translation error on the location Pyramid of Rama-Tut has been corrected.
• The Daily Offers shop UI will no longer scroll itself on purchase, and overlapping bundle prefabs have been fixed.
• Android users will no longer see a long delay opening Settings after a fresh install.

PC players get their own targeted love: a redundant ESC button has been removed from the Album UI, an off-screen ESC button issue in Limited Time Game Modes has been fixed, and several accidental navigation traps caused by misjudged UI hit-boxes have been closed.

What This Means for Marvel Snap Players

For new players, this is the single best week of the year to start Marvel Snap — a free competitive deck, a friendlier tutorial, Thanos on day 14, no turn timer pressure during the learning curve, and visually upgraded starter cards all in one drop.

For veterans, the doubled booster economy is the headline. Every match you play from today forward earns twice the upgrade currency it used to, which translates directly into faster Collection Level progression, faster Mastery progression, and a tangibly bigger reward at the end of every Ranked queue. Combined with the formalized Move keyword — which all but telegraphs that more Move-tribal cards are on the horizon — the May 19 patch is less a maintenance update and more a setup move. The next few months of Marvel Snap just got more interesting.