With less than a day left in the first week of the Amazing Spider-Season of Marvel Snap, how have the new cards fared once the weeks of theory-crafting met a solid week of play-testing? Is Symbiote Spider-Man and the Activate mechanic shaking up the meta? Did Silver Sable solidify her spot in the one-cost category? Here at The Snap Back, we intend to find out!
Symbiote Spider-Man: A Swing and a Miss?
Symbiote Spider-Man brought along with him a brand-new way to interact with the game of Snap thanks to the Activate mechanic, and as predicted, he does indeed shine inside of combo-based decks. Combo decks look to play a series of cards in a specific order to achieve an outcome greater than the sum of their parts, and Symbiote Spider-Man excels at either smoothing out the cards required or providing a more consistent series of cards to play. In fact, SSM has perhaps found its “forever home” inside of one of my personal favorite deck lists: Phoenix Force.
The Symbiote provides an additional back-up plan to the deck’s usual back-up plan of using Shuri, who doubles the power of the next card played at her location, to increase the power of Nimrod before spreading copies of it around each location using cards with the “destroy” keyword, allowing you to play SSM on turn 4, then play Nimrod on turn 5 before activating SSM, adding their power points together to double the Nimrod’s power additively instead of multiplicatively. This even opens up some cleaner play lines for the final turn of the game by only having one card in this lane instead of two, providing Arnim Zola’s card cloning effect only one target to choose from and guaranteeing two 12-power Symbiote Coated Nimrods on each of the other locations.
That being said, the card is far from an unstoppable powerhouse. I found this to be an issue inside of the Phoenix Force list, much to my dismay. If a card is resurrected with Phoenix Force and then merged into Symbiote Spidey, it keeps the power added by both cards but loses its ability to move every turn, because that was a feature granted to the specific move card by Phoenix Force, which no longer exists, as it is now a Symbiote Spider-Man with the text of the old card. As such, the card may be a boon to this list’s backup plan, but actually hinders its main play-line!
Additionally, there are a number of other factors that cause the card to be more cumbersome than it was perhaps first expected. Its energy cost means that it can not come into play until the last half of the game in most cases, and cannot be activated until the last third. As such, an opponent has numerous ways to negatively interact with the card, like denying the On-Reveal effect you wish to copy with a Cosmo, moving the card to a different lane before the activate can happen, or even sending across a lower-cost card than what you intend to merge with, forcing the SSM to merge with that card instead and throw off the whole combo!
Lastly, the amount of decks this fits into cleanly are somewhat limited. You can make SSM work in a number of different places with a lot of interesting cards still, but for the most part, the card really only sits most efficiently in Phoenix Force and more gimmicky Wong-based combo decks that seek to absolutely maximize On-Reveal effects to their greatest potential. These kinds of deck prey on players that are unprepared for them, and so will be much less useful to you as you continue to move up the ranked ladder.
So should you pick this one up? Many people have been hyping up this card, and I was certainly one of them. Despite all of its new angles of play, however, it is still a combo card at its core, and so suffers from almost all of the same downsides that combo-based cards often do. The Premium Battle Pass costs $10 USD, though, so after some time with it, I would have to say that I would prioritize picking this up only if you are comfortable with the monetary expense, or a particular fan of combo type decks like Phoenix Force. Plus, you have the whole season to decide how you feel about this card, anyway.
Snap Back Verdict: Strong Recommendation for Phoenix Force, for Everyone Else it can wait!
Silver Sable Hits Her Mark
On the other hand, Silver Sable has been almost just as predicted. Not only has she immediately become an instant favorite for bounce-style decks that can easily scale up to 1/5 or 1/7 before taking into account reduced power on opponent’s cards, she has also proven to be a very playable one-cost card in any deck that needs one. A 1/3 with no downside turns out to be a perfectly reasonable stat line for a card, if you can believe it. I have had great success throwing her into decks that normally call for something like Hydra Bob, a monster 1/5 who scurries to a new location if either player snaps, and only rarely has the 2-power difference resulted in a loss where a bigger body would have won.
Of course, she’s not a perfect card, by any means. The 1/3 basic stat line is reasonable, but there are still many other one-drops that have or can reach powers much higher. Nebula, for instance, is a much more affordable card at Series 4, and her ability only needs to trigger twice to be a more powerful card on its face than Sable. The aforementioned Hydra Bob’s downside of moving to new locations is often easily mitigated, and it boasts much more power just by playing it. The power stolen from an opponent’s card is nice, but one can only play so many cards in any given hand of Snap, so it is rare that a single card being less powerful can’t simply be played around by a skilled opponent.
All things considered, Silver Sable is a very capable card and a strong addition to your Marvel Snap card collection. She is not an absolute must-have (in most cases) but if you have the resources to spare, there are way worse options to pick up.
Snap Back Verdict: Strong Recommendation for Bounce Enjoyers, Mild Recommendation for everyone else!
Looking Ahead
As a final word of caution, we are heading into a potentially big shift in the metagame in the following week. Many top-tier players have been singing the possible praises of Madame Web, and while the future is still uncertain (to those of us who aren’t Madame Web, at least), she stands to shake up the way the game is played at the higher ranks of play. Even if she doesn’t, on Thursday an “over the air” update patch is coming as well. These so-called “OTA”s are specifically based around balance updates and managing the immediate metagame, as opposed to the more standard patches that largely bring behind-the-scenes and effect updates. In other words, by Thursday, Madame Web and the OTA could see a whole new style of play being brought to bear.
So, spend wisely and spend cautiously, fellow Snappers. Spotlight Keys don’t come easy, and Collector’s Tokens even less so. Pick up the cards that you want to use and think will be fun before taking anyone else’s opinion online. This is a game and games are meant to be fun, after all!
