There’s only one more month left in the year, and you know what that means – there’s only one more Marvel SNAP season this year, too! To cap off the year, Marvel SNAP is teaming up with the brand-new Marvel-themed hero shooter Marvel Rivals to debut nearly a whole team’s worth of Marvel Rivals-inspired cards for the season.
In addition, Marvel SNAP is continuing its new tradition of offering a free Series 4 card as a reward for playing in a limited-time game mode. This time around, the fan-favorite High Voltage mode returns, and with it, the promise of a new symbiote card named Lasher. Read on to find out more, including my thoughts on every new release this month!
Season Pass Release: Galacta
The first release to cover is, as always, the new card that is given to purchasers of the season pass. This month, that card is Galacta, the Daughter of Galactus! Galacta is a 4-Cost, 6-Power card with an ability that reads “Each turn, the first card you play at another location reveals with +3 power.”
Right off the bat, one can see the immediate synergy with her father, Galactus. Making Galactus a 6/9 before checking to destroy all other locations will make him a much more significant threat in shutting down otherwise unwinnable games. Other obvious interactions include things like Mister Sinister or Brood, who double or triple themselves to turn that +3 into a +6 or a +9, respectively. Galacta is also just generically fairly strong, as guaranteeing two triggers of her ability on the turns 5 and 6 means that she ends up being a 4/12, which is in no way anything to sneeze at.
Even so, something about this card screams “clunky” to me. When I consider the decks she could be in, I’m really not sure how it would play out practically. Galactus decks usually want to cheat him out early when they can. If you play Wave, then you play Galactus on 4 and there’s no chance to play Galacta. If you play Psylocke, you have to play her on turn 4 to get the 6 energy on turn 5, so once again, no chance for Galacta. Even Surfer decks may find it difficult to get Galacta to work. Playing Brood on 5 feels very behind the curve, especially when you’ve had to keep a lane open the whole game for it to work.
Overall, I’m sort of middling on Galacta. Normally I’d give the same spiel here about how the $10 USD is a good deal for anyone who’s willing to spend money on the game, but in this specific instance, it’s a bit tougher for me to recommend for reasons I’ll be going into later.
Spotlights Week 1: Luna Snow
The first Spotlight Cache card this season is the K-Pop icon Seol Hee, better known by her superhero codename, Luna Snow! Luna Snow is an interesting character in that she debuted originally in yet another video game, the 2018 mobile title Marvel Future Fight. Her comic book debut, interestingly enough, was in a tie-in book for the 2019 crossover event that last month’s Marvel SNAP season was covering: War of the Realms.
Luna Snow is a 3-Cost, 5-Power card with an On-Reveal ability that reads: “Add an Ice Cube to each side of this location.” And no, that doesn’t mean she’s going to have a couple of rappers doing her backup vocals. The Ice Cube is a 1-Cost, 0-Power card with the following ability: “At the start of each turn, get +1 energy. Then destroy this if your side is full here.”
Luna Snow appears to be a new variation of a ramp-style card, which seeks to improve your personal playing curve to outmatch your opponent. Ideally, you play Luna at a location that is either almost full or already full on your opponent’s side, granting them a maximum of one turn with extra energy, while you keep your Luna lane free of additional cards to maximize the amount of free energy you are granted. This lets you play a 5-Cost on turn 4, and then two 6-Costs on 5 and 6, or perhaps a spread of additional cards.
I think that Luna Snow is going to be a pretty interesting card, and probably a pretty strong one! It will not only be fairly easy to play her in such a way that you minimize the amount of extra energy you grant to your opponent, it should also be interesting to build decks around her that can properly utilize this extra energy to go over the top of whatever strategy they want to employ. In this way, the card is more like Wiccan than its more obvious counterpart, the 3/5 ramp requirement known as Wave.
Spotlights Week 2: Peni Parker
Zooming into battle in the next week is the Spider-Man variant and brainchild of My Chemical Romance’s Gerard Way, Peni Parker! This Evangelion-inspired Spider-Gal is a 2-Cost, 3-Power card whose On Reveal ability reads: “Add SP//dr to your hand. When this merges, you get +1 energy next turn.” The SP//dr card is a 3-Cost, 3-Power addition with its own On Reveal ability: “Merge with one of your cards here. You can move that card next turn.”
Peni obviously has synergy with her own SP//dr mech, but will also be able to get a lot of value from other cards with the “merge” property. With Peni’s release, we may finally be seeing the beginnings of deck archetypes based around merging cards. Could this mean we’ll be seeing more people using oft-forgotten recent releases, Agony and Symbiote Spider-Man? It’s certainly possible!
Another, less obvious synergy that Peni has is with the Young Avenger Wiccan. Wiccan needs cards to be played on every turn of the game leading up to him in order to get his energy working, which is why he is often played with cards like Quicksilver and Domino to ensure a player can play a card on turns 1 and 2. In the most basic of cases, Peni is a 2-Cost that creates a 3-Cost, giving you a clear path to Wiccan in a single card. Her own ability to grant extra energy also could be utilized with Agony to ramp Wiccan out on turn 3 for an even quicker path to even more energy.
I’m extremely high on Peni Parker right now, and I think she’s going to be one of the better cards to release this month. She seems extremely versatile, capable of being both built around and also being slotted into multiple deck types. Overall, she just seems like the kind of card that’s fun for deck-builders, and those always rate highly with me!
Spotlights Week 3: Doom 2099
Week 3 brings us one of Marvel Rivals’ major antagonists in the form of Doom 2099! This futuristic despot is a 4-Cost, 2-Power card with a textbox that says “After each turn, add a Doombot 2099 to a random location if you played (exactly) 1 card.” This card keeps with the running theme of cards that create other cards, with the Doombot 2099 also being 4-Cost, 2-Power cards. Their textbox, however, is an Ongoing ability that reads: “Your other Doombots and Doom have +1 power.”
The Developer Update video above confirmed what the community was hoping to be true: The Doombots ongoing ability absolutely includes the OG Doctor Doom card and his own Doombots. In other words, every single Doombot 2099 on the board means that playing Dr. Doom will be worth an additional 3 points of power. Playing Doom 2099 on turn 4 should produce a Doombot (at time of writing I’m unsure exactly how this interaction works), then a single card played on turn 5 will create another, and finally, Doctor Doom played on 6 will add an additional Doombot 2099 on top of the other two OG Doombots. 3 Doombot 2099’s means +3 power to every single Doctor Doom, Doom 2099, and Doombot on the board. By my count, that’s a total of 21 additional power across all three locations!
For me, it’s currently a toss-up between Doom 2099 and Peni Parker for the best new release this season. Not only is Doom 2099 going to be a plainly powerful card in the proper decks (that 4/2 body screams Mr. Negative to me), I personally love it when Second Dinner releases cards that interact in interesting ways with older, perhaps less-played cards, giving them indirect buffs in ways that will increase their play-rate without actually adjusting the card itself.
Spotlights Week 4: Bruce Banner
Hulking into the next week’s card release is the Gamma Genius himself, Bruce Banner! Bruce Banner is a 2-Cost, 1-Power card with an ability that reads: “When you end a turn with unspent energy, 25% chance to HULK OUT!”
This is an interesting card, with obvious compatibility with High Evolutionary and his affliction-style decks. Getting a 6/12 Hulk as early as turn 3 would be a great boon to such a deck that typically only has one major points play in the Evolved Hulk on turn 6 and must otherwise rely on reducing the opponent’s point value in another location to win. While it didn’t appear from the video that the newly-created Hulk would also have the Power-boosting ability that High Evolutionary normally gives him, just having another big threat could be what it takes to bring High Evo back into the mainstream.
That being said, this is the first card that wears its randomness directly on its sleeve. People are going to be saying things like “If you play Banner on 2 then you’re guaranteed to have another Hulk by turn 6 if you float energy” because people are, by and large, very bad at understanding probability. There will be games where puny Bruce Banner never gets his chance to “HULK OUT!” even if all the proper plays are made to ensure leftover energy, and that is going to feel really bad for the player playing him. The Hulk card is also quite susceptible to the classic Hulk-killing card Shang-Chi, and the earlier Banner converts into Hulk, the more susceptible it will be.
I really don’t know if this card is going to shake the game up too much. I think that its randomness is going to be more of a pain point for people than it will be a powerful addition to a deck, and when it comes down to it, the game has progressed to a point where a 6/12 Hulk isn’t exactly all that threatening. Only time will tell, however!
Spotlights Week 5: Rocket Raccoon and Groot
The final week of the Marvel Rivals season gives us the first card in Marvel SNAP history to feature two characters in one game piece: Guardians fan favorites Rocket Raccoon and Groot! The Rocket Raccoon and Groot card is a 3-Cost, 3-Power card that reads “You can move this once. After your opponent plays a card here, steal 1 power from it.”
First off, I kind of think it’s just weird to have a card that is comprised of two characters that already exist in the game as cards of their own. It’s kind of like the Agent Venom/Anti-Venom situation from two seasons ago, it just feels like it’s designed to be confusing for new players. Furthermore, while this card definitely fits within the general style of the Guardians of the Galaxy cards and their “play this in a location your opponent will play” mini-game, it doesn’t quite feel like a mixture of the two original cards, especially not in the same way that Nocturne debuted as a perfect mix of her parents, Nightcrawler and Scarlet Witch, in both power, cost, and abilities.
All that aside though, this does look like it stands to be a reasonably good card. Stealing power from the other player’s card means that it’s actually a two-point swing every time, which is significant, especially when you can trigger it more than once. Its ability to move is also going to ensure that it remains unpredictable, leaving the opponent guessing which lane it’s safe to play in, and if that lane isn’t the one that currently contains Rocket & Groot. If you combine it with other move-enablers (or maybe even SP//dr) to give it more movement, you can further increase its potential threat. It could be a good fit in the burgeoning Scream-centered move decks we’ve been seeing around the edges of the metagame.
I think that Rocket Raccoon and Groot is probably going to be fairly good. At this point in time, it doesn’t strike me as a particularly necessary card to own, but seeing as this one isn’t releasing until the very end of the season, it’s honestly anyone’s guess as to what the game looks like by then after some new patches and OTA updates.
High Voltage Returns
One bit of news that really made waves with the release of the Dev Update video was the confirmation that High Voltage would be back again this month, featuring new rewards and, presumably, the same fast-paced gameplay that players loved last time around. For those unaware, High Voltage is a game mode that only lasts 3 rounds and increasingly ramps up the max energy available for both players, with the last turn providing anywhere from 6 to 15 points to spend on playing as many powerful cards as possible.
This time, players can look forward to the new Series 4 card that tops the mode as its final reward: The tendril-covered symbiote known as Lasher! Lasher is a 2-Cost, 2-Power card with an Activate ability that reads: “Afflict an enemy card here with negative power equal to this card’s power.” Activate cards have really been finding their place in the 1- to 2-Cost range, and the wording on this one means that the more you can potentially buff this card, the better its ability works as well. He could go really well with Gwenpool or Galacta, or even something as obvious as Forge or Agony.
I’m super excited about High Voltage. I played more of this mode and more Marvel SNAP that month than I have in any other surrounding seasons. My only complaint was that progress in the mode is almost entirely dependent on completing the missions, with the actual rewards for winning a game a pretty measly amount of points in comparison to the huge payoffs for missions. This helped improve the casual nature in that you didn’t need to grind too hard to get your points, but it did mean that after I was done with my missions for the time period, there was little incentive to keep playing until they refreshed. Hopefully Second Dinner takes this into account and adjusts the per-game rewards somewhat, but considering the complete lack of changes to Deadpool’s Diner in its second time in the game, I’m not holding my breath.
Final Thoughts and Observations
As I stated in my last edition of the Snap Back, the meta is in a particularly healthy place right in Marvel SNAP. There are lots of decks to play, and none of them are so overwhelmingly powerful that they’re warping the rest of the game around them. The game itself is about as fun as it’s ever been, if not more so.
That being said, there is an elephant in the room that needs to be addressed. Simply going into the comments section of that Dev Update video tells quite the story. Nearly 100% of the comments are snarky at best, and outright hostile at worst, and they’re all upset about the same thing: card acquisition.
I’ve hinted towards this animosity a bit previously, but have held off on fully weighing in until I could properly gather my thoughts. I could probably write an entire article fully explaining my own position, but the gist of it is this: Second Dinner had some good ideas in converting to the Spotlight Cache/Key system, but by this point it is clearly an aspect of the game that the players feel has become untenable. Whether those feelings are based on any factual evidence or not is, by now, completely beside the point.
There are a number of extremely intelligent mathematicians in the community, and once the Spotlight system was announced, there were posts and videos circling that explained, in great detail, how the new card acquisition was, despite what many players thought, actually significantly improving the number of cards a player could obtain by putting in a minimum of ten bucks towards the season pass every month. Not long after that, though, Marvel SNAP adjusted the system in a few key ways that really upended those calculations.
Firstly, they added an additional card every month. For the first couple months of the new system, the first week of Spotlight Cache offerings were all older cards, giving players who are closer to being collection complete a free week to save their keys for later weeks. It wasn’t long before that ‘free’ week was filled by another new card, though, so now every player has to consider whether or not to use their resources every week. Additionally, they originally planned to launch new cards as Series 4 on occasion, but that was also quickly and quietly discontinued, most likely due to the community’s general decision that Series 4 new releases were the perfect time to spend tokens instead of Spotlight Keys, leading to far fewer caches opened on these weeks.
Now, every card released (barring the ones they give for free in events) are Series 5 cards, worth a whopping 6000 tokens if not gambled for in the Spotlight Cache. The total number of Series 5 cards has ballooned out of control, while the Series 4 cards have languished in comparison. This is an issue that has only been compounded by the lack of Series Drops, which used to be regular and now only seem to happen once or twice over the course of an entire year.
In fact, a major pain point of the community in recent weeks is the announcement of the latest Series Drops. Only three cards are getting lowered into the free-to-earn Series 3 collection, and of those moving from Series 5 to 4, only a small number of them are particularly well-loved or even playable in the current metagame.
This brings us to the problem of the Spotlight Caches this month. Another notable aspect of the cards that are lowering in Series is that a great deal of them are also cards featured in this season’s Spotlight Caches. As a result, there are only two cards this entire season that are being offered in the Caches that are Series 5, not including the obvious new releases.
This is why you may have noticed I didn’t bring up the Spotlight Caches in my card previews earlier. I really don’t think there’s a single good Cache this season in terms of optimizing your collection efficiently. It’s always a good idea to consider skipping Caches that only contain Series 4 cards, since you can get two Series 4 cards in tokens for the price of one Series 5. This month, the first three weeks are all Series 4, back to back to back. Even the Series 5 cards that are being offered are in a relatively low point in their play-rate and viability right now. Week 4’s bundling of High Evolutionary with the synergistic Bruce Banner makes it the most desirable Cache of any of them, while Week 5’s offering of Blob feels almost insulting for as little as Blob is played these days.
Ultimately, it feels like Second Dinner had a real chance to gain some good will from their players with these Series Drops, either by vastly increasing the number of cards into Series 3, or the quality of cards into Series 4, and they chose to do neither. That, combined with the continued issue of too many Series 5 cards existing and being the best cards in slot for so many decks, is quickly becoming an insurmountable issue within the Marvel SNAP community. As someone who loves this game, I truly hope that Second Dinner is listening to the complaints of the community and manages to deliver a satisfying solution, and that that solution comes sooner rather than later before the game bleeds players.
What are your thoughts on card acquisition? Do you think there’s a way Second Dinner can salvage the situation? Which cards this month do you think will be worth the Keys, despite their Cache-mates? Come back next week for this season’s first edition of the Snap Back where we’ll see how Galacta and Luna Snow panned out, as well as any updates to these concerns if we get them!
