The second week of Marvel SNAP’s Marvel Rivals crossover season is soon to be over and done with, and with it came a big OTA update that really ruffled some feathers and shook up the way the game is played! But what happens now in the wake of the OTA? And how did the new release, Peni Parker, stand up to the meta? Find out all this and more in this week’s edition of the Snap Back!
Peni Parker Merges Smoothly Into Marvel SNAP
Peni Parker is a card that has hit the Marvel SNAP collection with a lot of mixed opinions. Many have struggled to decide how worthwhile she is, and where exactly she wants to be played. Some claim she is one of the best cards to release this month, and others think she is easily replaceable and not a bad option to skip on.
One place where Peni has proven invaluable, however, is in decks featuring Wiccan. Wiccan’s main deck-building puzzle requires his player to have spent all of their energy by the turn they play this 4-Cost accelerator, so that he will grant them an additional +2 max energy for every turn thereafter. Peni is a natural fit for Wiccan decks, as a 2-Cost card that creates a 3-Cost SP//dr. With Peni in hand, a player only needs a single additional 1-Cost card to be perfectly prepared for that turn 4 Wiccan play. Furthermore, any card that merges with Peni grants the player +1 Energy on the next turn. So a card like Agony, for instance, who merges with the next card played in its lane, further assists Wiccan play when merging into Peni on turn 2 and giving the player 4 energy on turn 3, just enough to get that Wiccan out a turn early and maximize the amount of extra energy they have for the rest of the game.
Peni has also proven fairly useful in more generic Move-based decks, since the SP//dr card allows anything it merges with to move once. Adding 3 power to a Human Torch and giving it a free move is already a strong play that results in a 10-Power Torch. Since merging into another card essentially re-writes that card as being the last one played, though, you can follow it up with something like a Ghost-Spider to move it again for a 20-Power card in just 3 card plays. Peni has also found some success in revitalizing my personal favorite, the Phoenix Force deck, as a backup/bolster to its usual play patterns.
All that said, Peni feels like a card that’s yet to truly shine. She excels in Wiccan lists and can be added to Move and Phoenix Force, but is far from required in either. She is unique and multi-faceted in her applications, though, and I honestly expect this is one that’s going to be surprising us all in a few weeks when people figure out the real tech for her. That’s why I’m going against the grain a bit here and saying…
Snap Back Verdict: Strong Recommendation!
An OTA Update Brings Judgment Upon The Judge
The biggest news this week was easily Thursday’s OTA update and the changes it brought to a number of cards, most notably the Celestial Arishem. In the comics, Arishem acts as a judge of civilizations’ worthiness to exist in the cosmos, and last week, Second Dinner made their own judgment on Arishem, and found him to be wanting.
Arishem is an extremely unique card, in that he adds a large number of random cards to your deck and forces you to come up with your strategies on the fly between those random additions and what you’ve put in the deck yourself. In order to help alleviate the randomness, however, Arishem also provides his player with additional max Energy to play as many or as powerful cards as possible each turn.
The card’s arrival was extremely anticipated, and Arishem was, to my knowledge, one of the most picked up cards on its release in Marvel SNAP history to date. It also quickly became one of the most infuriating, as players opposing an Arishem deck found themselves unable to properly strategize against a deck that could, quite literally, be capable of playing any card. This was compounded by the early inclusion of cards like Quinjet in the deck, which, if played, lowered the costs of all cards that didn’t start in your deck. All cards added by Arishem were considered to have not started in your deck, so now not only did the Arishem player have additional energy every turn, but also cheaper cards to play too. Another concerning interaction was Loki, who would remove all of the extra cards in an Arishem deck and replace them with their opponent’s cards, but at -1 cost, which offered a similarly frustrating experience.
Arishem has been managed a bit in the months since his release, with Second Dinner primarily fiddling around with the number of extra cards he adds on game start. Now, however, they’ve come up with a more drastic change: Arishem no longer grants +1 Max Energy from the start of the game, and instead only kicks in on turn 3. Second Dinner also provided a back-end change that doesn’t appear on the card text, but that’s no less important. Arishem can no longer add cards to your deck that you have already put in your own 12-card selection. One of the biggest frustrations is when an Arishem player has not one, but two copies of the perfect card it needs in a given situation, so this was probably one of the best calls they could have made.
This OTA also featured a number of other changes, mostly small power buffs to cards like Frigga, Elsa Bloodstone, Enchantress, and Lockjaw. Arishem was not the only card under scrutiny this week, however, as Typhoid Mary was also changed to give -2 to other cards in her location instead of the prior -1. The most interesting and unexpected change this week, however, was to Cerebro. Cerebro’s Ongoing ability adds +2 to the “card(s)” on your side with the highest power, and so centers around a strategy involving most, if not all, of your other cards all sitting at the same power level so Cerebro boosts them all. This has always been a very niche strategy that has only been truly meta-relevant in rare occasions, but Cerebro enjoyers will be happy to hear that it is now only a 2-Cost card, giving it a lot more flexibility in when and how it is played.
Looking Ahead
Since Second Dinner is giving its employees the rest of the holiday season to do with as they please (and they’re right to do so), we will not be seeing any major changes coming after this last patch. The next OTA update is reportedly not until January 9, which means we’ll have nearly three and a half weeks for the metagame to be shaped only by new card releases. That being said, Doom 2099’s release tomorrow could very well be one of those metagame-defining releases, so stay tuned for our updates on that as it happens!
In other news, I’m very interested and not a little bit concerned with where the game will be as these next weeks press on. While I thought this OTA was a pretty good one, all things considered, it was met with a lot of outward hostility from the community. The Arishem situation is a sticky one, where many players love it and treat any change to it as a personal attack, and many other players vehemently despise seeing the card and playing against it, welcoming any nerfs as needed. I’m beginning to worry that Marvel SNAP is entering a phase of player malcontent that’s becoming too heated to manage. No game company has ever managed to please 100% of its fans at one time, to be sure, but the level of agitation that I’ve seen from the vocal player-base lately is truly starting to reach a fever pitch.
The next patch could very well be a make-or-break for Marvel SNAP. Players need an answer to their card acquisition woes, and Second Dinner needs to make sure that answer is one that can both appease their players but also maintain their ability to monetize the game going forward. I know that people are having doubts as to just how easily that can be managed, but the people behind the company have managed to maintain an impressively solid schedule of updates and content for over two years now, so I have faith that they’re capable of it, at the very least.
What do you think? Will Second Dinner win back the fans who have dwindled in their anger? Will Doom 2099 sweep the metagame? Will the return of High Voltage, just a few weeks away, be enough to drive up player interest in the meantime? Come back next to find out all this and more in next week’s edition of the Snap Back!
