It’s spooky season in Marvel Snap, and developer Second Dinner is celebrating the haunting month of October with We Are Venom, the alien-horror-goo response to the previous Amazing Spider-Season. Just as last season focused on Spider-Man and his Amazing friends, this month’s theme is based on Venom and his ever-increasing family of symbiotic weirdos.
There are no new fancy game mechanics to come with the season’s opener, but there are a bevy of new cards to discuss, as well as a new game mode to prepare for.
In this installment of Snap Sense, I’ll be giving my thoughts on the card releases and their Spotlight Caches, looking to offer my best insight into which weeks hold only the best new card, but the best overall Spotlights to feel good about spending your Keys on. I’ll also go over the new High Voltage mode to help explain what it is and what you can get out of it.
Season Pass Release: Agent Venom
Agent Venom takes on the mission to be this month’s Season Pass offering, but can he take down his targets, the titans of the metagame?
Agent Venom is a 2-Energy, 4-Power card with an On Reveal ability that reads: “Set the Power of all cards in your deck to 4.” Right off the bat, Agent Venom sounds like he’s prep
ped and ready to join the Cerebro 4 deck list, which utilizes Cerebro’s Ongoing buff to your highest power card(s) by leaning deeply into that parenthetical plural. Cerebro itself normally has 0 power, so hitting it with Agent Venom already raises it up to join with the other 4-Power cards now buffed to 6 or even 8 with Mystique doubling Cerebro (and potentially gaining 4 power of her own from Agent Venom in the process.)
Cerebro decks rarely see upper tier competitive play, however, so does the Symbiotic Operator have any other edge cases that might see him infiltrating Infinite rank? The answer, at least right now, is “doubtful.” Agent V could help to buff bounce-style and Angela/Thena lists by giving their bouncing/scaling cards more base power, but it remains to be seen if that is worth the potential hits to high-end final plays like Sasquatch or momentum drivers like Wiccan. He might also find a home in Mister Negative deck lists, but he would have to work more like an escape hatch for those games in which you don’t draw the Mister Negative card. Neither option sounds like a given.
This isn’t to say that Agent Venom is just going to be another mediocre offering of a Season Pass release. He has some notable synergies, with cards like The Hood. AV’s ability converting Hood to a 1/4 confers a massive swing of 7 points of power on Hood alone. You get 10 points of power to play across two locations for only 2 energy. 4 power being added to cards like Iron Man makes him effectively 8 power at minimum in a lane. When Agent Venom strikes, he will strike hard, but I think it will take some time for the deck brewers to get to that perfect concoction.
Spotlights Week 1: Scream
Releasing alongside the Patriotic Parasite this week is Scream, the Venom symbiote’s daughter and expert headbanger. She is a 2-Energy, 2-Power card with text that reads: “When an enemy card moves, steal 2 Power from it. (once per turn)”
Any time your opponent moves a card, Scream lets out a cry and whips her hair into the offending card, drawing 2 power from it and adding it to herself. The first thing I think of when I see this card is the potential to add some real relevance to what I call the “pinball” deck archetypes. These decks utilize cards like Polaris, Stregron, and Magneto to knock their opponents’ cards into inopportune locations, but often lack the numbers of their own to compete for multiple locations. Scream being able to reach an ideal height of 2/10 is admirable, but unlikely.
Even if it can consistently do so, it remains to be seen if one card is enough to bring back what has almost always been seen as a meme deck. There’s not much chance Scream ends up being just a generically good 2-drop, either. In fact, Scream becoming a generically good 2-drop might actually be a bad thing for the metagame as it stands.
If Scream is good, then Move is bad. The most powerful clog decks right now are split between decks that fully seek to clog their opponent’s board, or decks that look to strategically clog a lane and use a movement-based package of cards to win another on power. If the move-based clog decks become bad, then more people will play full clog decks to try and combat Hela. Unless there’s a deck that also consistently beats Hela and runs Scream to balance them both, there’s a chance that Scream’s presence actually flattens the metagame even further for a week.
Scream could be good, or she could be bad. She could be good and then that’s bad. There’s a lot still up in the air for Scream, but right now I’m not holding my breath. On top of that, the cards she is being spotlighted with are similarly in odd positions. Man-Thing is good when Luke Cage isn’t heavily featured in the metagame, and Mobius M. Mobius is good when there’s lots of energy cheat out and about. Neither of these are true right now – however, Mobius might be a clutch fun-killer for High Voltage mode later on this month, if you don’t already have him. None of these cards feel like immediate gets to survive in this meta, however.
Spotlights Week 2: Misery
Hot on the heels of Agent Venom and Scream comes another two symbiotes at once: This time in the form of Misery, a 4-Energy, 7-Power On Reveal card that came from an experiment mixing the Anti-Venom and Carnage symbiotes into one being.
Misery’s On Reveal text brings with it an interesting deck-building puzzle: “Repeat the On Reveal abilities of your other cards here, then destroy them.” Unlike a great deal many of the other cards releasing this week that have at least one obvious home, Misery almost appears to be a card that begs for a deck of her own. She is recommended as a followup to Electro to remove his limiting Ongoing effect from play while also juicing his Max Energy bonus to 2, but what does this accomplish that Wiccan, a card with the exact same statline, doesn’t also accomplish with the same consistency?
Right now, I’m just not seeing it with this card. There are some interesting synergies with stuff like Jubilee or White Tiger, but the 4 energy cost makes it an awkward follow up. That said, though, even if there are not too many useful On Reveal targets for a card like this now, there could always be in the future. Weird combo cards like this and Grandmaster often appear useless and inefficient to begin with, only to sneak their way into irreplaceable status over time.
The decision is made ever more difficult by the sheer quality of cards that Misery is debuting with in her Spotlight cache. War Machine recently buffed to have an Ongoing effect, launching lockout-style deck lists into competitive play once again. Namora is a constant sleeper hit, often being the last piece of a Wong-style combo deck that really brings the whole list together. Either of these two cards would be a welcome addition to your collection if you currently lack them.
My hottest take here is that Misery could well be the sleeper hit of the season. My most lukewarm one, though, is that this is going to be a generally good cache to open if you have the Keys to spare.
Spotlights Week 3: Scorn
The third week rolls out the release of Scorn, a 1-Energy, 2-Power cybernetic symbiote that reads: “When you discard this, return it to your hand and give +2 Power to itself and one of your cards in play.”
It doesn’t take a Marvel Snap genius to know what kind of decks Scorn is going to go into. If you’re familiar with this game at all, as soon as you saw the word “discard” in the text, you knew that Scorn would be featured in discard-style decks. That’s just kind of how this game works, particularly for this specific archetype.
Discard lists often see play right around the edges of higher-tier competitive rankings. They are capable of putting up large amounts of power in the right conditions, but often lack the sort of numbers needed to match up against current metagame giants like Hela. Scorn’s ability to add +4 to the board every time it is discarded (provided it is also played) could prove to be the scaler that discard needs to fully step up into the big leagues.
That being said, Scorn is going to be a complete dud outside of discard-based decks. If you don’t like playing discard, you’re not going to like playing Scorn, making him an easy skip.
If you are a player who is still new to the game, however, the calculus might change on your decision. Discard is an archetype that is given to the player relatively early into the game, and adding this key piece could help boost your consistency while you’re still rustling up the other cards, like Proxima Midnight. Even if you’re not into Discard, the other two cards in the Spotlight are Jean Grey, a card who really helps round out the Ongoing deck list that’s also really popular at lower collection levels, and Sebastian Shaw, an absolute staple card for Silver Surfer decks. Surfer decks are known budget winners within the community – apart from Shaw, many of the most beloved 3-cost cards are in Series 3 and therefore relatively easy to acquire.
Spotlights Week 4: Toxin
Week 4 brings with it Toxin, the spawn of Carnage and a 2-Energy, 1 Power card with an On Reveal ability that states: “Return your other cards here to your hand. +2 Power for each returned.”
Toxin, like Scorn, is a card that will enter the game knowing exactly where to find its host. Upon its release, Bounce archetypes will finally have another lane-based card returner like Beast. Where Beast makes your cards cheaper and easier to play, Toxin, much like his father, instead grows larger for every card returned in this way.
When bouncing a full lane, Toxin goes up to a 7-Power card, which is nothing to sneeze at on its own. He can also be bounced with Beast himself, potentially raising that power ceiling to somewhere more like 11 or 13 power. That’s a huge stat stick that shores up one of the dicier aspects of playing bounce – sometimes you have to remove power in one location to increase it elsewhere. Not so much anymore.
Considering that Bounce-style decks have recently been rising up in the metagame to combat the Hela superiority, Toxin seems to be in the running for most immediately beneficial card of the month. It could even be the overall best card this month, if nothing else ends up being a surprise contender.
How Toxin’s overall Spotlight Cache stacks up, though, is harder to judge. Zabu is hardly a card anymore after his Ongoing ability was nerfed into being just an On Reveal, and Elsa Bloodstone, a former staple in certain bounce-style lists, has not been finding much favor lately. Toxin might be the card that helps elevate her back into the graces of the community, however, and Zabu has all but been begging for a buff or rework lately, so we’ll have to see what the October 10th OTA brings us before we can say for sure.
Spotlights Week 5: Anti-Venom
Rounding out the season is Anti-Venom, the the black-on-white symbiote infused with Mister Negative’s negative energy. Anti-Venom is a 4-Energy, 6-Power card with an On Reveal that reads: “Set the Cost and Power of your deck’s top card to 0.”
This rewards you with a free card play of some sort, and with a cleverly-designed deck, pulling something like a Knull, Iron Man or even a White Tiger could be what you need for a surprise victory. That being said, the similarities this card to Iron Lad are hard to ignore. Both cards have the same stat line, and both interact with the top card of your deck in a way that allows you to gain the effects of that card without any further energy cost. Iron Lad is often considered a decent card in combo-based decks, but is far from a format staple. It seems like Anti-Venom is set to follow the same path.
Anti-Venom’s Spotlight Cache is also one of the most skippable of the month. Ghost Spider is an irreplaceable card for move-based decks and an occasional generically good 1-drop, but is also a Series 4 card and thus easily purchased with 3,000 Collector’s Tokens. Supergiant is a decently strong card but an incredibly niche one, and rarely sees top-tier play outside of some very specifically-crafted deck lists.
New Game Mode: High Voltage
But that’s not all! Running through Week 3 and into the beginning of Week 4, players will be able to queue into a brand-new game mode known as High Voltage. This mode appears to be an extremely fast-paced version of the Marvel Snap we already know and love.
Players start with 2 cards, drawing 2 new cards every round for only 3 rounds, obtaining a total of 8 cards from their deck over the course of the game. Every turn, the energy available is randomly decided (believed to be from 2 to 5) and doled out to both players to make the best plays available.
There’s no snapping and there’s no cubes, but there will be rewards available for winning! The featured prize of the event is Agony, another Venom spawn and the last brand new card featured in the We Are Venom season. Agony is a 1-Energy, 2-Power card with text that reads: “After you play a card here, merge this with it.”
Agony seems like a simpler Forge, and could possibly end up being a generically good 1-drop to fill out certain deck lists. She will be available in the shop as a Series 4 card upon October 31st if you are not able to obtain her in the event.
High Voltage is shaping up to be a very chaotic new way to play the game. Without seeing it in action, it is hard to gauge what strategies will be the best. My initial impression, however, is to pack some energy cheaters like Hope Summers or Sera. Getting 5 energy on turn 1 and playing Sera will allow you much more leeway in the next two turns to play out as good of cards as possible, and Hope Summers could cause the energy disparity that you need to overcome your opponent.
My best piece of advice is just to get in there and have fun with it! It is an extremely short event, only taking place over the course of one week. More than likely, it will be just random enough that any deck will be able to win a reasonable amount of times, so all that remains to be seen is just how difficult it will be to actually obtain Agony.
Final Thoughts and Observations
Once again, we appear to be heading into a season that is absolutely stacked with good new cards. This time, at least, we are getting the opportunity to obtain one of them for free, and the difference between the good cards and the less-good ones appears with more contrast. If you like Bounce and Discard, pick up Toxin and Scorn, respectively. If you like weird cards, Agent Venom and Misery may have what you’re looking for. If you don’t really know what you’re after, open the caches that get you the most number of new cards to your collection.
Also be on the lookout for another League to occur this season! I’ve heard rumors of one but have seen no set dates. Remember that Leagues only sort you into one upon playing your first Ranked Ladder or non-Proving Grounds Conquest match, so the sooner you jump into the action, the more likely you are to get matched against equally eager players. Stick to Proving Grounds or wait a bit and you might get sorted into a more lackadaisical bracket.
Otherwise, I hope to see some good things from this season. The Amazing Spider-Season ended up something of a bummer, but with any luck, We Are Venom will give the game the shot in the arm that it could use right now.
