In a rather unexpected turn of events, the Marvel Snap update last Tuesday made a single simple change that completely upended the way the game has been played this whole week. But did Araña’s release help move the needle at all? Or are we all stuck in another firmly-set metagame that many may be opposed to? Find out this week on The Snap Back!
Araña Adds to an Assortment of Deck Lists
This week’s new card release did her level best to not be overshadowed by the patch that she released alongside, as monumental a task as that proved to be. Araña’s text is another Activate ability that reads “Give the next card you play +2 power and move it to the right.” She immediately proved her worth in the bevy of movement-based decks that have sprung up in the wake of Madame Web’s release last week, adding an immediate power-up to cards before Madame Web moves and buffs them again.
In many ways, Araña works as almost a pure upgrade to Iron Fist – she is played before the card you wish to buff, which synergizes with Ghost-Spider moving the card played just after she is, but is a delayed effect that lets you play her early and decide when to activate the ability at a later turn. Furthermore, she increases the power on the card no matter what, letting you give non-move-based cards a little boost or really ramping up the cards that already get buffed via movement. Even moving a card rightward is arguably a benefit, as cards like Heimdall already move cards to the left, and there are only so many times a card can be moved in the same direction when there are only three locations to move between.
Araña has also made a splash inside of destroy-based deck lists, too. Her ability to pre-buff Deadpool, who returns to your hand with doubled power every time it is destroyed, is a great way to kick off his scaling power. Every point of power given to Deadpool before he’s destroyed results in two more added after. This has, in fact, led to a resurgence of Deadpool-based destroy decks that go all-in on buffing and destroying the Merc With a Mouth until he reaches astronomical levels of power and playing him on the last turn with Knull, who will have gained the combined power of every destroyed Deadpool to be even larger still.
All that said, Araña is not without flaws. Primarily, her activated ability makes her a clunky draw in the last half of the game. Something like Forge, a standard On-Reveal card that adds the same amount of power to the next card played, can often be played on the last turn with a strong 4-cost card to good results. Araña, drawn on turn 6, is a completely dead draw. Her 1/1 stat line is almost never going to help anything that far into the game, and without another turn to activate, she essentially has no text at all. Also, particularly in the destroy decks that feature her, Araña’s move component can make for awkward moments when the locations are not favorable. I’ve had times where she could only reasonably move a card into a location I could not play in after the fact, making it difficult to follow up the buffed card with additional strategies. It’s not entirely a deal-breaker but it came up enough times in my play testing that I had to note it.
Snap Back Verdict: Strong Recommendation for Move Masters, Mild Recommendation for Destroy Enjoyers!
Another Week, Another Patch, Another Meta Shift
Sometimes it’s just a simple card update that brings back an old ghost from the past to return as a metagame menace. This week, the patch brought with it a series of what seemed like benign balance changes. These changes, intended to further seed the Activate mechanic into the game, took the cards Black Swan, Sword Master, and Hell Cow, shuffled some of their power and energy a bit, and most importantly, changed their abilities from On-Reveal to Activate. For Black Swan and Sword Master, this resulted in little shift in their play rate or success. Sword Master now discards odd-costed cards, which is an interesting but so far unremarkable change, and Black Swan’s ability to lower the cost of 1-energy cards to 0 for a turn on demand grants her a bit of increased utility in decks that seek to drop a deluge of cards on the last turn. The real winner here, though, was Hell Cow.
Hell Cow’s ability allows her to discard two cards at random from your hand upon play. Prior to this week, this was often too risky of a play without enough obvious benefit for her to be included in a deck over cards like Corvus Glaive, who also discards two random cards but grants the player an extra point of energy every turn thereafter as a result. As an activated ability, however, Hell Cow’s hand dispersal fits perfectly in the list of the infamous Hela deck.
Hela’s ability allows her to reach into the underworld that she presides over, reviving all cards that the player discarded into their graveyard over the course of the game and placing them on the board in random locations. The way this ability is often utilized is by stuffing the list with high-cost, higher-power behemoths that are discarded via targeted discard drivers like Lady Sif or Blade. This would often not be enough discarded cards to make a meaningful difference, however, leading Hela players to include things like Corvus Glaive to send a few more heavy hitters into the graveyard. Both Corvus and Lady Sif, however, run the risk of discarding Hela herself, sending the entire strategy into a grinding halt.
Now, a player can activate Hell Cow on the final turn before staging the Hela play. This will remove two more (presumably powerful) cards, and Hela will in turn bring them back along with everything else the player has managed to discard along the way. With two or three big discards brought back, there is always a chance they stack up in the same location and leave the other two lanes too low to secure a victory. When a player can easily and consistently bring back four or five, however, those odds change dramatically.
The end result is a deck that requires very few significant choices to be made throughout the course of the game, and a deck that is also quite difficult to interact with in a significant fashion. The Hela deck will hardly play cards before turn 3, and as such, likely get to flip cards over last in the final turn. Unless their opponent can control or guess where Hela is being played and deny her On-Reveal ability with a card like Cosmo, they can only hope that somehow the revived cards stack up in a way that denies the Hela player a victory.
All this makes Hela a very popular deck, as it is very easy to put up huge numbers with, and the entire point of Marvel Snap is to have bigger numbers than your opponent. What this also does, however, is force the rest of the meta to keep up, finding ways to increase their output as well so that their point totals can go over Hela. Things like the Deadpool-Araña deck, for example, try to have the biggest Deadpool and Knull possible that can match up against any amount of power a Hela can pull out on the last turn.
Decks that cannot compete with Hela in points, then, try instead to attack her from different angles. Most notably, if the Hela player does not have space for their cards to return, then they cannot meaningfully add power to their lanes. This has ensured that clog-based strategies that prioritize cards such as White Widow, Debrii, and the Green Goblin are also very popular. These kinds of strategies are often met with some disdain from the player-base at large, however, since denying a player the space to actively play the game is often just as frustrating, if not more so, than seeing a turn 6 Hela win the game in what feels like a single play.
Looking Ahead
Ultimately, what we are in right now is a metagame that, put simply, feels bad. Playing on the ranked ladder from the 70’s all the way to post-Infinite means you’ll be inundated with Hela decks and Clog decks, and often it feels like the only way to beat them is to join them, which just contributes to the saturation of these decks and the minimization of the overall deck diversity in Marvel Snap. That being said, my advice is still, as always, to just play what you want to.
If you want to jump on the Hela train or if you want to stuff up your opponent’s board with junk, do what makes you happy. If I’ve said it before, I’ll say it a hundred times more: Marvel Snap is a game and games are meant to be fun. If those things don’t tickle your fancy, there’s other decks that are reasonably competitive, like Gilgamesh Zoo decks or even my old standby, Phoenix Force. If the decks you like aren’t competitive right now, and that’s something that’s important to you, then it’s okay to step away for a while and find something else to play, too.
Last week, I thought we were settling in to a diverse and interesting metagame, but all it took was a single patch to send everything spiraling into a very rigid and defined one instead. Just as things can change for the worse in a single instant, though, so, too, can they change for the better. Keep an eye out for upcoming patches and, as always, keep coming back here for Marvel Snap updates, news, and advice on the weeks to come!
