The We Are Venom season just keeps squirming forward in Marvel SNAP! We are now over halfway through the season, and also just over halfway through the lifespan of Marvel SNAP’s new limited-time mode, High Voltage. How has this new mode been received by the community at large? Is it fun? Is it difficult? Those with a laser-focus on the ranked ladder may also wish to know how this week’s release in Scorn is faring against the competition. We’ll be covering all this and more in this week’s edition of The Snap Back!
Scorn: Solid Symbiote, or Messy Machine?
Scorn is a card that was never going to make a huge splash into the Marvel SNAP community upon its release. Cards with discard abilities are almost entirely relegated to the singular “discard”-type deck list. This list packs Morbius to get the most out of every card discarded, and Dracula to take on the power of an oft-discarded and powerfully-buffed Apocalypse. Scorn is no exception, but slots into this deck very cleanly and provides an obvious boost to the deck’s overall power level.
Scorn’s ability to buff a random card with +2 Power every time it is discarded means that it can continually provide extra strength to lanes throughout the game, even if it is ultimately not played. A properly buffed Scorn can even make for a tantalizing Dracula target! This gives the player new options for mind games on the final turn: Do they play the powered-up Apocalypse and let Drac discard the Scorn, or do they play out the 1-Cost Scorn and any other discarding cards for one last Apocalypse pump to take the Dracula lane sky-high? For a long time, the only smart choice was to give Apocalypse to Drac, but now the discard gamer has opportunities to fake out their opponents.
Even so, Scorn is, as stated, a discard card, through and through. Even discard-adjacent decks like Agatha/Moon Knight or Black Bolt/Stature feel lackluster when using this card, placing it squarely in the classic discard deck archetype. If you like to play discard, you’ll want to have Scorn. Otherwise, you probably won’t.
If you are a newer player or just one with a lower collection level, and are missing the other cards in this week’s Spotlight Cache, then this might be a particularly good week to use Spotlight Keys too. Jean Grey is not all that great, but has a solid home in Ongoing-based deck lists. Sebastien Shaw, meanwhile, is an absolute must-have for Silver Surfer lists. Surfer lists also often end up being some of the most budget-friendly competitive lists in the game, too, making Shaw potentially the last piece a player may need to fully outfit a powerful Silver Surfer deck.
Snap Back Verdict: Strong Recommendation for Discard and Silver Surfer Enjoyers, for Shaw Owners and anyone else, Easy Skip!
High Voltage: How is the Mode? How is the Card?
This past week also brought along with it Marvel SNAP’s brand-new, second-ever, limited-time game mode, High Voltage. This mode allows players to throw down some seriously high-octane card plays by constantly increasing the maximum energy each player has available to them over the course of a lightning-fast three-round match. Winning games and completing missions in this mode progresses players down a reward track that can earn them a bonus new card this week: Agony.
This mode has been extremely well-received by the players of Marvel SNAP, from the lower-ranked newbies to the hard-sweating elites at the top of the Infinite Leaderboards. People love slamming down big power cards and outrageous card combos, and High Voltage does not disappoint. The extremely-increased Max Energy caps mean that players get to indulge themselves with over-the-top Wong/Gambit combos to wipe their opponent’s cards off the board, or simply play powerful card after powerful card until there’s no way an opponent can match them in all three lanes. Most importantly, though, is the lack of progression reversal. Volts can only be earned, they are never lost, and playing the game is all it takes to complete missions and ultimately earn Agony and the Iron Man variant.
Speaking of Agony, I haven’t gotten the chance to play-test her fully, but she seems like a perfectly reasonable card so far. Her ability to apply a targeted +2 buff to the next card played in her location is an easy fit for Destroy-based decks. It replaces Araña in providing that extra buff to cards like Deadpool or Wolverine, and what it loses in helping cards get into weird locations, it gains in removing itself from the game board upon its merge to free up space for other destructible cards.
There may be some other places where Agony will shine in the future, too, like Namora-based decks that want only one card in a lane when Namora is played. At this point, however, she seems to fit in exactly as she appears to have been intended to: as a nice “bonus card” players can obtain for free this week. If you did not manage to get the time in to play High Voltage this week, you aren’t missing out on anything critical. Even if you are, Agony is a Series 4 card. She only costs 3,000 Collector’s Tokens and thus can rather easily be added to your collection.
Looking Ahead
The last two weeks of the Marvel SNAP We Are Venom season promise to be interesting. Next week’s release, Toxin, stands to be a breakout success when paired with the Agent Venom bounce-type list that was popular early in the season. The prevalence of Cosmo in the game right now, though, may be enough to trip up the newest bounce card before it can even get off the ground. The final release, Anti-Venom, almost seems like a joke for how oddly without a place it feels, but could surprise us all once he finally arrives.
The release and subsequent enjoyment of High Voltage seems to me like an important moment in the life of Marvel SNAP. The ability to relax and play a version of the game with absolutely no stakes turns out to be a deeply-sought one, and this is a lesson that I hope Second Dinner takes to heart moving forward. Marvel SNAP’s last limited-time mode, Deadpool’s Diner, was an interesting foray into alternate game types, but often proved to be more frustrating than it was fun. With High Voltage, I think that Second Dinner has the formula right, and with any luck, we’ll see them iterate on it to provide even more entertaining, low-stakes ways to play Marvel SNAP.
As always, keep on Snapping, and don’t forget to be here next week to find out how the meta reacts to Toxin’s arrival, as well as anything else that erupts suddenly. If it happens in Marvel SNAP, you can read about it here on The Snap Back!
