Another week of the Marvel SNAP We Are Venom season is almost complete, and with it came a strange new card and an OTA update that looked to really shake up the meta. How does the landscape of Marvel SNAP look now? Does Misery have the sauce? What will things look like moving forward? Read on and find out in this installment of The Snap Back!
Misery Lives Up To Her Name
This week’s new card release, Misery, brought alongside it a new deck-building puzzle, similar to Wiccan’s release a few weeks back. At 4-Cost and 7-Power card, she’s no slouch in the stats department (again like Wiccan), and one of the primary combo cards played with her is Electro, as her On-Reveal ability to re-trigger the On-Reveals of the other cards in her lane before destroying them allows you to double up on Electro’s max energy gain while disabling his “play only one card per turn” Ongoing drawback. Once again, though, +2 max energy is exactly what Wiccan gives you when you play him properly.
Even so, Misery finds herself in much different deck situations than Wiccan. She can be paired with cards like The Hood for an extra 1/6 Demon that also destroys his negative power output, or Hazmat to double up on her board-wide affliction before dropping a powerful Ajax. The most interesting deck I’ve found so far, however, pairs her with the classic Darkhawk package.
With cards like Misery and Grandmaster, you can double or even triple the output of your rock-slinging cards Korg or Rockslide, vastly expanding the number of cards in the opponent’s deck and thus increasing the power of Darkhawk when he is played. Black Widow and her ability to stop your opponent from drawing for a turn can be just as, if not more, disruptive to their strategy as well. Black Widow on turn 3 into Grandmaster on turn 4 into Misery on turn 5 forces your opponent to play entirely out of their early-game hand, denying them draws for the entire last half of the match. Each blanked draw also results in a larger deck size by the end of the game, further increasing the strength of your Darkhawk. There’s even a surprise Phoenix Force to be found in the list for one last resurrected On-Reveal effect!
As great as all this sounds, however, it’s hard to say that this, or any, deck list requires Misery to thrive or even survive. Darkhawk decks always tend to fare at least middling well throughout most of Marvel SNAP’s history, and I found myself often playing either Misery OR Grandmaster, rarely both. Additionally, my win rate on the deck, though positive, wasn’t really anything special. It’s playable, but maybe only just.
Ultimately, Misery does not feel like a card that is extremely necessary in the current metagame. On top of having a rather unique ability, Cosmo is so prevalent in games lately that anything trying to maximize On-Reveals is already going to be at a disadvantage. However, there are two things that keep this from being an Easy Skip.
First, Misery’s Spotlight Cache is packed with some of the best cards available this entire season. War Machine’s recent buff to an Ongoing ability has catapulted him into popularity as a force to be reckoned with, and Namora has constantly been a dark horse card since her release, quietly over-performing in a series of strange and fun gimmick decks that somehow just work. If you’re lacking War Machine, you already should be using keys to get him this week, so you may as well go all-in for Misery too.
Second, Misery, like Grandmaster, is a weirdly-positioned card that is only ever one tiny buff or new On-Reveal card release away from being incredibly overpowered. The true potential of this card has yet to be seen, whether it’s from lack of creativity or overabundance of Cosmo blocking On-Reveals in the metagame. I can’t say for sure, but there’s a not-small part of me that thinks this is the one people might regret not picking up in a month or two. Even so, I can’t give a recommendation on a hunch alone, so…
Snap Back Verdict: Mild Recommendation if you don’t have War Machine, leaning Easy Skip otherwise!
Thursday’s OTA Sent Hela Back Home
A bevy of updates hit the game of Marvel SNAP on Thursday, October 10th, including aninteresting change to Zabu that made him a 1-cost that permanently reduces the cost of 4-Cost cards in your deck by 1. This allows him to be bounced or even combined with Misery to further reduce these costs if need be.
The most impactful change of the OTA was, perhaps, the adjustment to Hell Cow. She was granted another point of power at the cost of her activated ability only discarding one card instead of the previous two. This, combined with the previous Hela nerf that causes the discarded cards to come back with -3 power, seems to have put an end to Hela’s reign of terror. Though she hasn’t been rendered fully worthless, a Hela deck now requires more intention to play the proper cards played ahead of time and relies more on luck of the cards falling properly on the last turn. Simply put, she is no longer the “I Win” button she had been for a few weeks.
White Widow was also changed, or more specifically, her Widow’s Kiss token was. Where previously the Kiss was a 0/0 Ongoing card that has -3 Power until that side of the board is filled, it is now always -4 Power, but is destroyed when its side of the board is filled instead. This nerf dealt a major blow to the Clog-type decks, resulting in the titans of the metagame no longer standing as tall as they once had.
Looking Ahead
Even before their rebalancing, Hela and Clog decks were already being challenged by a handful of competitive counters, including an insidious combo that had only just sprung up a bit before the Hell Cow buff that changed everything: Storm, War Machine, and Legion.
Storm, on turn 3, will eventually disable the lane she’s in from being playable under normal circumstances. War Machine on turn 4 removes those circumstances and allows you to play your own cards wherever you’d like. Legion on turn 5, played into the Storm lane, results in all three locations reading “Flooded: Cards cannot be played here.” On turn 6, the opponent simply cannot play a card, so they leave and you win. Decks featuring this package differ mostly in the way they decide to arrange the other nine cards in the deck to gain points when this combo fails to appear properly.
Even more popular and powerful than this, however, were the Agent Venom decks. As it turns out, there are a great deal of cards in Marvel SNAP that have strong abilities balanced around a very low individual power output. Agent Venom waves that little downside away, giving you an 8-power Iron Man or a Bishop that starts the game with the equivalent of three card plays of power already added. Agent Venom is an undeniable powerhouse that raises the question of whether or not a card that’s only available via real money right now should be this big a factor in the competitive scene of SNAP.
There’s no doubt that the game needs to make money to continue to exist, and the fact does remain that, regardless of the card’s performance, the Marvel SNAP season pass is one of the best values you can get in the digital TCG genre. Even so, one has to wonder what kind of pressure now exists on the balance team over what to do with Agent Venom moving forward, especially once the season is over and it’s released into the general card pool for free-to-play gamers.
Either way, we press forward boldly into the season. Next week’s release, Scorn, could be a huge upgrade to the classic Discard-style decks, but only time well tell if it can stand up to Agent Venom or War Machine. Time, of course, and also myself, next Monday, when I go over him and more on next week’s The Snap Back!
