The first week of Marvel Snap‘s We Are Venom season is soon to conclude. In this tumultuous, Hela-filled metagame, how are the new cards shaping up? Were Agent Venom and Scream enough to shift the game away from the Big Villain meta and break things up into something more diverse and interesting? Find out all this and more on this week’s The Snap Back!
Agent Venom is One Smooth Operator
Peter Parker’s former bully Flash Thompson ended up being one of my favorite iterations on Venom in the comics, and so I am happy to report that, after an initial week of play testing, the Agent Venom card has, indeed, landed into the Marvel Snap collection pool with one heck of a splash. Last week, I expressed some doubts in Agent Venom’s ability to find a real home, and it is safe to say those doubts were wholly unfounded.
Within hours of his existence in the game, an Agent Venom-based bounce deck was quickly put together that proved to be a metagame menace. Not only is The Hood a fantastic card when it provides 4 power instead of -3 to a board state, cards like Silver Sable and Mysterio have great synergy with the Symbiotic Soldier as well. Mysterio in particular has a similar synergy to Bast, where instead of playing two false 0-power Mysterios and one true 4-power Mysterio across each lane, an AV-prepped Mysterio simply spreads 4 points of power to every single lane. This makes Mysterio competitive in points with cards like the 6-cost Doctor Doom despite costing only 2 energy to play.
This bounce deck has largely been bounced from the meta by a second Agent Venom deck, however; this one leverages Bast AND Agent Venom to ensure the low-power cards in your deck start off with a boost in the early game, while finishing up with cards like Iron Man (now with 3 or 4 power instead of 0) and Klaw that can bolster your lanes in more indirect ways. Add in a Cosmo to interact with Hela and Bounce decks and a Mystique to double up any of the three aforementioned Ongoings and what you end up with is a powerhouse of a deck list.
I’m always pretty high on the Marvel Snap season pass cards. Even when the card itself is not the greatest card in the game, the season pass rewards more than make up the price tag most of the time. If you’re enough of a Marvel Snap fan that you’re actively reading an article about it, then you’d probably benefit from purchasing the pass regardless. This month though, it sure seems like we’ve got a real keeper in Agent Venom. My only real caution at this point is that he’s performed so strongly so quickly that there’s a non-zero chance he could get nerfed before the month is up!
Snap Back Early Verdict: Strong Recommendation!
Scream: Sonic Boom or Bust?
A card that exists as an “anti-move” tech card is a truly interesting design. One like Scream that can casually take power from moving cards and add them to herself seems like a shoe-in for being a top card in Marvel Snap. Unfortunately, after a week of playing with and against this card, I’m not so sure the Shouty Symbiote has the lung capacity to really make a dent in the metagame.
Scream isn’t a bad card – in fact, she seems like she should be a rather good one. She has few restrictions on when she can get power from moving cards, and it only takes two or three moves to get her well above rate for a 2-cost card. Her problems are twofold: Her deck list and this overall metagame.
The “pinball” or “anti-move” style decks that displace opponents’ cards has never been a particularly strong archetype in Marvel Snap. Scream adds some power to it, but it doesn’t change the fact that you’re essentially playing one good card with a list full of mostly-mediocre cards. It just doesn’t manage to consistently reach the heights of power that a Hela or well-played bounce deck can achieve regularly. Plus, half of Scream’s entire game plan gets rendered moot by Luke Cage, a card most Hela gamers are bound to come the table with already.
Overall, Scream seems like a good card trapped in a bad archetype, and even after a week, it remains to be seen if she’ll see much competitive play. If you want to try it out or think it has potential, don’t let me stop you, but otherwise…
Snap Back Verdict: Easy skip!
Looking Ahead
A lot of times on The Snap Back, I like to toss in a full deck list that I think might help people in their climb at that point in time. Right now, however, the metagame is in such a volatile state that I fear anything I think is good now will be useless by Thursday! In the span of seven days, I’ve seen decks rise and fall, like the Agent Venom bounce list or a weird Sera and Onslaught deck that has you playing an entire Silver Surfer game-plan on turn 7 alone.
Hela is still a big deal, even as her meta-share has reduced significantly. Decks simply have to put up huge numbers right now to be able to compete in the metagame, and big numbers are usually susceptible to tech like Shang-Chi and Shadow King, so expect many more tech cards in your games in the weeks to come!
This week, we have two major points of interest in Misery’s release tomorrow on Tuesday the 8th, and the first balancing of the season in the Over The Air update on Thursday the 10th. I am still unsure that Misery will make any major ripples in the game, but as we all know, an update can change everything in Marvel Snap!
Either way, I’ll be here next Monday to give you the lowdown on the updates in the newest installment of The Snap Back!
