The days go by and Halloween has come and gone, and even though Venom: The Last Dance is still in theaters, Marvel SNAP’s We Are Venom season will soon be officially coming to a close. The last 5 weeks have been an interesting time for the game, but it was not without its low points. Did Anti-Venom arrive to heal a broken metagame, or is Agent Venom’s iron grip on the format refusing to yield? Was it a wise decision to release a card name “Agent Venom” and a card named “Anti-Venom” together in the same month? Read on and find out this and more in this week’s edition of The Snap Back!
Anti-Venom Might Be the Cure For What Ails You
As I’ve written before, Anti-Venom may be one the most argued over cards this season in terms of his effectiveness. Even a one-point power increase to 7 (not shown here) wasn’t enough to sway opinions one way or another. Some swear by its effectiveness, while others point to its below-average stats on sites that track that sort of thing to indicate its poor performance.
What Anti-Venom does have going for it is a natural synergy with the card Luke Cage. Luke’s Ongoing ability that disallows any of your cards from having their Power reduced means that every 0/0 card you get from Anti-Venom becomes fully powered once it hits the game board, turning a calculated risk into essentially just a free card. This is absolutely a boon, but mostly with decks that already seek to have Luke Cage around for their overall strategies, like decks running Hazmat or the recently-buffed Typhoid Mary.
Anti-Venom also benefits from the card Mobius M Mobius, which hasn’t seen as much play recently but has been returning to combat the Agent Venom/Sera decks that are full of counter cards and explosive turn 6 plays. A solid Anti-Venom deck often can really shut down many of the prevailing Agent Venom decks that have been plaguing the metagame for some time.
That being said, it’s otherwise hard to say how much more use you’ll get from Anti-Venom that you couldn’t also get out of an Iron Lad instead. If you feel like you need a leg up on all the Agent Venom decks, he’s probably worth a look, but it may not even be that necessary. From my experience, the metagame starts at the top, modeled by the best players and flowing down the rest of the ranks as they try to emulate those decks that beat them or what they’ve seen on their favorite content platforms. The existence of Anti-Venom as a balancing force has already lowered the amount of Agent Venom decks being played at the upper echelons of the Infinite leaderboard, so its likely that the rest of the ranked ladder will be seeing fewer of them as a result. Long story short, just this card being around is enough to shape the way the metagame changes, and it’s not necessarily important that every player has it if they aren’t terribly interested.
Snap Back Verdict: Mild Recommendation for hardcore climbers and High Infinite players looking to shape things up, but Easy Skip otherwise!
A Final Verdict on Agent Venom
There’s really almost not much left to say about Agent Venom. Throughout the entire month,his presence has been a permanent fixture in a huge swath of the top performing deck lists. He has proven time and again that 4 points of power is an incredibly strong starting point for almost every card costing 3 energy or less, especially those that can continue to grow in power after being placed. He has given us a frighteningly powerful trio of cards in himself, Iron Man, and Mystique, allowing multiple lanes to scale their power dramatically while also juicing those power totals themselves. After a couple of key nerfs, he was able to more or less completely wash the once-overpowering Hela deck lists completely out of the competitive scene.
Agent Venom is just really good, y’all. He’s so good that it actually makes this final verdict a lot more difficult than one might expect. At this point, after basically 5 solid weeks of putting up powerful performance numbers, he’s good enough that it almost feels unavoidable at this point for him to be adjusted in an upcoming OTA update. If you haven’t picked this card up by now, there’s a nonzero chance you’re running out of time to experience him at the height of his strength.
It’s hard to say exactly how one would go about changing this card without completely shifting its functionality. A change to his stat-line is almost a sure thing, I would not be surprised if he went down to a 2/3 or even a 2/2, but even removing 1 point off of his ability might be enough to completely tip the needle in the other direction. Not only does it shave something like a potential 8-10 entire points off of your deck, depending on how you built it, but it also lowers the composition of cards you’ll want to run with it, since now anything with 4 power is going to be losing power instead of gaining it.
Ultimately, I’m really not much of a balance expert, but I would be quite surprised if his name wasn’t on the list of changes in the next OTA. With that being said, for $10 USD it’s probably still going to be worth it to get a powerful card that supercharges a broad variety of deck types for a couple more weeks, at least.
Snap Back Verdict: Strong Recommendation!
Looking Back (And Ever Ahead)
As is often the case, we’re heading into two weeks with no balance updates, so the game of Marvel SNAP will be a matter of what you see being what you get for a while. That said, what you see lately is actually a fairly wide variety of decks. Agent Venom still reigns as the overall champion of the metagame, but his ability to go into a number of different decks means that each of those decks have a number of strategies that can reliably counter them, which means that we’ve come out of the other end of a Hela-dominated stranglehold to blossom into a varied and fairly interesting metagame overall, where no one deck stands so far above all the others that it shapes the entire way the game is played.
Many, if not all, of the card releases this week managed to provide a fairly significant upgrade to the types of decks they belong within, without making any of them overwhelming. Discard decks have been seeing a popular resurgence with Scorn, and Bounce decks, ever popular, have become a bit more consistent with the addition of Toxin. Even Scream, maligned somewhat at first, has become part of many solid, mid-range, “fair” types of decks that just look to play a mostly gimmick-free game of Marvel SNAP. Even cards like Misery increased the value of offbeat decks using cards like Sersi or the Thor/Beta Ray Bill/Jane Foster card package, and Anti-Venom added a stronger prevalence of cards like Luke Cage and Alioth back into the mix to spice things up again.
All things told, I think Marvel SNAP is pushing in a positive direction. Only time will tell, however, if the next season, War of the Nine Realms, can keep this momentum heading. How do you think the metagame feels now? How do you think the new cards will turn out? Come back for the next Snap Sense to hear my predictions and, as always, come back for next week’s Snap Back to find out where we’re at by then!
