I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday week full of warmth, cheer, and good games of Marvel SNAP! The past week saw a brand new card enter the game, as well as the return of an old favorite game mode in High Voltage! But how does the card stack up against some of the previous releases this month? Is High Voltage proving to be as fun now as it was when it debuted? All this and more in this week’s edition of the Snap Back!
Bruce Banner – Boring and Bad?
This week’s new card release, the iconic Bruce Banner, alter-ego of The Hulk, has really hit the collection waters with barely so much as a ripple. As it turns out, his percentage-based chance to become a better card means that, most of the time, you should just be playing a better card in the first place.
Let’s do a quick bit of math – when played on turn 2 or 3 and with a single point of energy skipped every turn to give him his 25% chance to HULK OUT every turn thereafter, Bruce Banner ultimately has a 68.36% chance of HULKING OUT over the course of a normal, 6-turn game. That’s not too bad! But every turn afterwards only lowers that chance, making him less and less valuable if he’s not able to be played on curve.
And even if he is, he still essentially “requires” at least one point of energy left unspent each turn to HULK OUT, which means it’s worth factoring into your math when considering his value. At a cost of 2 energy to play, plus sparing 1 energy per turn for 4 turns, he comes out to an effective cost of 6. A 6-Cost card. For a potential 12 Power. Compared to The Hulk card, that you get immediately upon turning the game on for the first time, which is a 6-Cost card with 12 Power. He’s just The Hulk, except unlike the Hulk, his power isn’t guaranteed.
And sure, there’s a lot of functional difference in skipping an energy and playing other things each turn than just playing The Hulk on turn 6. But even then, playing Havok on turn 4 costs 2 to play, and then locks your Max Energy at 4 for the last two turns, resulting in a total loss of 3 additional energy points, to become a guaranteed 12 power. For only 5 energy effectively spent. Bruce Banner’s also just a worse Havok, a card that hardly anyone plays as is!
The in-game data has borne this out as well. High Evolutionary decks, who are already looking to float energy, have not seen a major increase in winrate with the inclusion of Bruce, and still are among the least powerful decks in the metagame right now. Bruce could not move the needle on this at all. This leads to a pretty conclusive verdict for the Gamma Genius himself.
Snap Back Verdict: Easy Skip! Maybe the Easiest Skip you’ll ever Skip!
High Voltage Makes For a Sizzling Holiday Season
On the 28th, Marvel SNAP reintroduced High Voltage into the game for the week. High Voltage, if you weren’t around for its debut, is a rapid-fire game mode that takes everything you love about Marvel SNAP and condenses it into a lightning-fast three-turn experience.
Energy is granted randomly (but uniformly) from 2-5 additional points every turn, and each player starts with two cards and draws two more on each of the three turns. Thus, players end up with anywhere from 12-30 total energy across three turns to make as big or as crazy of plays that they possibly can.
This week, the usual suspects from last time are banned again this time: Magik, Galactus, and Black Widow. New to the lineup of prohibited cards this time around, is the Purple Fun-Ruining Cloud Alioth. While this is probably a wise move by Second Dinner, it seems to have broken the floodgates for other alternatives. As it turns out, gamers like to ruin other people’s fun. Who knew?
In this go-round of High Voltage, I can personally attest to seeing an almost offensive amount of tech cards being played that I hardly ever saw last time around. In a mode like this where you can build your proverbial sand castles higher than ever, it seems that players are more willing than ever to find ways to kick those castles over. Red Guardian, Rogue, Enchantress and Shang-Chi have been used in great numbers, and I even ran into a deck that, as far as I could tell, actually ran nothing but hate cards designed to destroy or discard every single game piece in their opponent’s deck. When Alioth was around, it was easily one of the best tech card options in High Voltage, but without it, players have simply resorted to playing every single other tech card instead.
The worst part is that the mode places almost zero value in actively winning games. Players receive 20 “Volts” per win, and none for a loss. However, after the first credit reward at 200 Volts, the progression points required leaps up to 2,000 Volts for the second prize, to 5,000 for the fourth, and then jumps again at the sixth prize to a whopping 10,000 Volts! It doesn’t take a mathemagician to see that those 20 Volts per win lose their overall value faster than it takes to play through a single game of High Voltage.
Instead, players are encouraged to play for the High Voltage Missions, which grant 125, 250, and 500 Volts respectively. These missions are refreshed every eight hours along the usual mission refresh periods, meaning that a player can gain up to 2,625 Volts every day by simply completing these missions. In order to unlock the card Lasher at 12,000 Volts, it will take a little over four and a half days of doing nothing but completing the missions. As you’re reading this, there are just about 5 days left in the event exactly, so if you haven’t started, it’s not too late!
My advice is just to play something crazy and have fun with it. I’ve seen (and had) a lot of successful games playing variations of Wong/Black Panther/Arnim Zola, as well as the more toxic variety of Wong/Mystique/Gambit/Absorbing Man to annihilate the opponent’s entire board, but I’ve also seen Surtur decks, Patriot Ultron decks, as well as a bunch of Discard decks that basically are running the same lists you’d see on the ladder. Like I said, the wins don’t matter, outside of a few rare missions, and the games are fast enough that if you keep playing, you will get those missions completed eventually. Most notable among them is probably the “Win all 3 Locations in a match” task, but you’ll find a number of people, myself included, who will just throw matches after completing that mission. At a certain point, I’m always just trying to maximize my energy spent for mission completion rather than trying to win, or doing stupid things like playing Legion on Central Park to drown myself in Squirrels just because it makes me laugh. So make yourself laugh, and enjoy it while it lasts!
Looking Ahead
We’re still in the dry spell of the Holiday season as far as game updates goes, with an Over-the-Air update not coming until January 9th and the Patch on the following Tuesday, the 14th. Bruce Banner was not able to move the needle of the metagame in any significant fashion, so expect the games to stay largely the same unless someone figures out some crazy new tech in the meantime.
Be wary of the ranked ladder in this time of High Voltage, however! The biggest and baddest players are liable to finish the limited mode early, spending gold to refresh their missions early and getting it out of the way so they can get back to the ladder. The sorts of players who take the game more casually will be drawn to the more obviously casual mode, so if you’re on the ladder this week, know what you’re getting into and prepare for the sweats to come.
In the meantime, enjoy the New Year and we’ll be back to share our thoughts on Rocket Raccoon & Groot and probably Lasher, too, as well as any new surprising updates that come along in next week’s edition of the Snap Back!
