I recently put together this deck that I am calling AnnihiLoki and went undefeated with it from Proving Grounds to Infinity Ticket + another small handful of games. While it’s still a small sample size, the combination of two of the game’s current most powerful cards seems promising!
AnnihiLoki
On the surface, Annihilus and Loki have no synergy, but the two strategies actually can complement each other! Loki is a great fallback plan. If you draw Annihilus OR Sentry but not the other, Loki can refresh your hand with potentially more synergistic cards. I think this can be a powerful application for Loki going forward in many types of decks that lean on drawing other specific combo pairs as well!
In the video that inspired this article, you can see that this deck aims to function as an Annihilus deck, but can pivot to Loki in bad matchups or when the combos don’t come together. This is most obvious in matches 3 and 4 against Destroy decks.
My favorite games with the deck though come in match 5 against an Annihilus Bounce deck. If you only watch one match, skip ahead to those! On that note too, Loki can also be used to try and draw Annihilus since the card is seeing a lot of play right now!
Defining Overlapping Synergy
One thing that I like to do when I look at Marvel Snap cards is think about overlapping synergy. While it is true that Loki and Anni have little overlap between themselves, there’s a few cards in this deck that can be powerful in Loki decks and Annihilus decks individually. These might not be the strongest options in either deck, but their flexibility in supporting both cards allows you to have flexible gameplans that make the deck more consistent.
A great example of this is Armor, Cosmo, and Professor X in Destroyer Spectrum lists, (like the one that got me Infinite this season). While Destroyer and Spectrum have no direct synergy and even compete at the same energy cost, these cards provide overlapping synergy because they are Ongoing for Spectrum and stop Destroyer’s Destroying, which makes all 5 of these cards worth considering together.
It’s important to talk Werewolf up top because this deck is also basically a Werewolf deck, with all other 11 cards being On Reveal, including Loki and Anni. Werewolf can have some trouble moving around all the Rocks, but the card is just obviously too high a rate to not play currently.
The Hood is the most direct overlapping synergy card in the deck, providing Junk for Anni and an extra card for Loki. Falcon is a way to clean up The Hood + Rocks from Debrii, and can act as a backup plan for Anni-less games. Also it returns the deck’s many 1-cost cards to your hand to Loki them away. This one might feel like a stretch as far as supporting Anni, because it itself is more in the category of having overlapping synergies with Anni, being a direct support for The Hood. These two cards are really interesting to consider though because Loki decks don’t tend to run The Hood and Anni doesn’t tend to run Falcon, but together these become the core of the deck!
Nico Minoru is just an all-star. The destroy and draw ability works directly with both gameplans, fueling Loki and drawing you to your Anni combos. Duplicating cards also helps Loki and making The Hood a Demon that gives you a Demon is quite efficient!
Other Support
The rest of the deck’s support can be run through pretty quickly.
Sentry and Debrii round out the Annihilus core. Debrii is even optional but Sentry is the main reason to run Annihilus.
Viper and Carnage provide alternate ways to clean them up. This is especially important with all of the other snappers currently playing Anni themselves. Having a few extra ways to clean up right now is a good thing!
Maria Hill and Snowguard provide cheap card generation for Loki that can be recalled with Falcon. Maria has been a blast and won me several games in wacky ways that I’ll likely show off on YouTube soon! I’ve won games with Quake, Dagger, and even Baron Mordo can trigger Werewolf by Night! All of these cheap On Reveals allow Falcon to further aid Werewolf, though these two and Nico can often be multiple triggers just by themselves.
A note on Snowguard; It may still be underrated. Similar to Legion, it is a card that allows one player to control some of the game’s variance. The option to turn locations off with Hawk can win games out of nowhere. In this deck, don’t forget Bear can occasionally be a Junk card too, adding Squirrels, Rocks, Ninjas, or even Monsters to clog the field.
Alternative Options
The best cards this deck isn’t playing are the Collector, Shang-Chi, Shadow King, America Chavez. If you’re missing anything these 4 are all probably fine replacements and arguably could even be in if you have everything.
If you’re missing some Loki support cards, consider Sentinel, Mirage, or Agent Coulson. I could see another version of this deck too that decides to lean heavier into Loki and potentially includes Quinjet with only Anni + Sentry thrown in for random wins and because Annihilus is just so good against opposing Annihilus users.
For card replacements specific to your collection, the quickest way to get me to respond is a comment on the accompanying YT video, but feel free to also sound off in the comments down below and let me know what you think. Half of the reason I made content around this deck is I felt that the idea had legs and I wanted to see how it could evolve, so let me know what works and doesn’t for you!