It is September, and that means a new season of Marvel Snap to get our card-grabbing mitts around!
This time around, the theme is fan-favorite Marvel hero Spider-Man, with each weekly new card bringing more of his amazing friends to bear. Not only does this season boast a whole new game mechanic, but possibly one of the most stacked new seasons we’ve seen in months as far as new card releases go!
Today, I’ll go over each of the new cards dropping this month and give my opinions on which ones you’ll want to skip, and which ones you’ll want to Snap up. (Spoiler Alert: You’re gonna want a lot of resources this month!)
Season Pass Card: Symbiote Spider-Man
First up, let’s talk about the card you can receive by purchasing this month’s Season Pass Premium. Symbiote Spider-Man swings into action as the game’s first-ever Activate card, which allows you to play the card on one turn and then press and hold over it on any subsequent turn to trigger its ability. This card’s Activate text reads: “Merge your lowest-Cost card here with this. Copy its text like it just revealed.”
This card is a bit hard to judge right out of the gate, as Activate cards have no precedent in the game to draw from, but with that being said, I think it stands to be a real killer for combo deck enthusiasts.
Right off the cuff, I can envision playing this card on turn 4, and then playing Black Panther before activating the Symbiote Spider-Man’s ability. This will make Black Panther reveal, double his power to reach 8 power, gain 6 more power from SSM to hit 14, and then double again for a hefty 28 power. A turn 6 Arnim Zola can copy this pumped up Panther into the other two lanes after destroying it here, doubling it once again for 56 power in two lanes, a feat not easily matched without the appropriate tech options. And that’s without thinking about it much!
Suffice it to say, the Season Pass offering seems quite promising this month. As always, however, I would still recommend waiting if you’re on the fence. You’ll have the entire month to purchase the pass and receive the card, giving all the deck chefs out there plenty of time to cook up something unique that might catch your attention.
Spotlight on the Spotlights, Week 1: Silver Sable
This week’s Spotlight Cache release is the monochromatic mercenary herself, Silver Sable. This particularly nasty one-drop has an On Reveal ability that reads “Steal 2 power from the top card of your opponent’s deck.”
That means, upon playing her, she immediately becomes a 1/3, right in line with something like Blade, who comes with the potential downside of having to discard a card in order to play him. If the opponent needs to play the card Sable has stolen her power from, however, that essentially adds 2 more effective power points to the card, putting Sable in the company of some of the highest power 1-energy cards in the game, without any of the drawbacks that all of those cards possess.
Where Silver Sable will really shine, though, is in the “bounce” deck archetypes, using cards such as Beast and Falcon to bring cards back into the player’s hand to play again. Re-triggering her On Reveal effect even once brings Sable up to that 1/5 level of power without requiring the opponent to play the afflicted card. All told, Silver Sable looks to be a generically good 1-cost card that will be extra effective for all you bounce enjoyers out there.
Week 2: Madame Web
Next up is Madame Web, divining her way through the Great Web to reach us as a 2/1 Ongoing card that says “You can move one of your other cards away from here each turn.” This card could potentially portend a meaningful shift in power for the “move” deck archetype that utilizes moving cards from lane to lane, both to power them up and to create a more unpredictable final score.
For a long while, move decks have been considerably under-represented in lists of top performers, often due to a lack of cards that were meaningfully capable of making those moves happen. Madame Web essentially doubles the move output of any “move-enabler” type cards, such as Iron Fist or Ghost Spider, allowing a player to use such a card to bring their Vulture or Human Torch into Madame Web’s lane before moving it out again next turn. Before Madame Web, a Vulture could be moved once by Iron Fist played before him and Ghost-Spider played after to get buffed from a 3/3 to a 3/15.
After Madame Web, that same three card combo now allows Vulture to get up to 27 power. Not only that, but Madame Web will also allow you to dodge tech cards like Cosmo by simply playing the cards you want to play in her lane first and then moving them into the lanes you’d prefer them to be in for your final scoring. This card stands a good chance of absolutely shaking up the Marvel Snap metagame when it releases.
Week 3: Araña
The week of September 17th sees the spunky Spider-Girl also known as Araña wall-crawling her way into Marvel Snap. Araña provides us with the second of three new cards sporting the Activate ability, with hers reading: “Give the next card you play +2 Power and move it to the right.”
This, alongside Madame Web, makes two powerful new tools to add to the move archetype’s toolbox, working in particularly strong conjunction with the Human Torch, whose ability to double his power after moving means that he will get an even greater boost to double up from than before, essentially jump-starting his doubling by one whole step right off the bat.
Araña is also notable for being one of only two cards that can move one of your cards to the right without also first playing a card of your own in that rightward location, the other being Nico Minoru. This is a boon without equal when locations like Sanctum Sanctorum show up as the 3rd location, rendering it nearly unplayable to those who’ve brought non-move decks to the battle. Despite feeling more like a companion card than a singular game-changer, Araña still seems like a worthy pickup in the weekly deluge of good cards that is this season of Snap.
Week 4: Scarlet Spider
Rounding out the season’s new releases is the crimson crime-fighter that never lets us 90’s-era comic book fans forget the Clone Saga, Scarlet Spider. Scarlet Spider gives us the final new Activate card of the season, this one stating: “Add an exact clone of this to another location.”
At first glance, this one feels like its a little bit underwhelming compared to the move-based prior releases. That being said, simply playing and activating Scarlet Spidey results in a player having 10 power on the board, spread across two different locations. The strongest 4-cost cards in the game right now all top out at 10 power on their own, and most of them possess either downside to playing them, like Typhoid Mary, or a condition that must be met to even play them in the first place, like Crossbones or Cull Obsidian.
All my man Ben Reilly requires of you is to play him down and then press him to Activate on the next turn. This is also going to be a card that, like Brood or Mister Sinister, benefits greatly from increasing its power prior to activation. A +2 buff from Forge or Araña becomes +4 once Scarlet Spider is cloned. If you really want to get crazy, combine him with Symbiote Spider-Man for two 11-power Spider-Monsters and really spread those points around!
Final Thoughts and Observations
It’s tough to properly rate the cards coming out this season in Marvel Snap, partially because of the lack of precedence in the Activate mechanic, but more so because every new card honestly looks like it could be a major player in the metagame. This is a huge contrast from the past season, and even the one before it, where a few cards came out each month that felt either very skippable or, at the very least, easily replaceable.
For what it’s worth, the season pass offering of Symbiote Spider-Man almost seems like a no-brainer in my opinion. If you are someone who is comfortable spending the money on a mobile game, there are a lot worse places to drop ten bucks. It also doesn’t hurt that purchasing and completing the season pass is, without question, the easiest way to get the most new resources for the least amount of money. Otherwise, Spotlight Keys are a precious resource, so judge the weekly releases according to what they are being bundled with in their Spotlight Cache.
If you were to put my feet to the fire, I would probably rate Madame Web as the most desirable release to pick up this month. It’s going to be a huge upgrade for move decks and could also see play generically as a utility card to help move your cards around strategically. Hot on her heels would be Scarlet Spider, followed by Araña, and finally Silver Sable. That being said, though, taking the entire Spotlight Cache available each week into account changes the calculus considerably.
In that case, I would rank this week’s Cache with Silver Sable higher than the others. Sable is far from a bad card, and the other cards you can obtain this week, USAgent and Mockingbird, are, respectively, a card that many people slept on and was since buffed to be quite strong, and a format stable that is a must-have for multiple top decks in the current metagame. Behind that, it would have to be Scarlet Spider week, with Araña week tailing just behind. Scarlet Spider’s Cache contains White Widow, another format staple and generically good two-cost card, and Skaar, a card that has been seeing more play again after recent updates. Araña’s Cache, meanwhile, contains Ms. Marvel, a card that has fallen fairly out of favor in recent months, but also Sage, a very powerful card that may be replaceable in many decks, but always outperforms its replacements in meaningful ways. Ironically (or perhaps even intentionally), the Madame Web week boasts the weakest overall Spotlight Cache, featuring Silk, the only Series 4 card in the entire month to be showcased, and Alioth. Silk is barely played in today’s metagame, and even though it is a move-based card, it does not fit the same sort of decks that something like Madame Web helps build. Meanwhile, Alioth is still a fairly powerful and useful card, but nowhere near the metagame it used to be upon its release.
All in all, if you’ve been saving your Spotlight Keys and Tokens from the last few seasons, unsatisfied with some of the recent cards, this month may well be the time to use them. As always though, don’t try to gamble. If you have fewer than 4 Keys on any given week, there is at least a 25% chance you’re gonna miss out on one of the cards you want that week. The more cards in any given Cache that you want, though, the less likely you are to walk away with nothing that you wanted in the first place. Think hard, and spend wisely, and you too will develop the kind of Snap Sense that lets you go far in Marvel Snap!
