Hey everyone, Torikun is back to continue with Battle Breakdowns!
The Tournament held last weekend, Season 13 Battle Arena #1, was quite special. We finally saw Galactus achieve a Tournament victory! Braude successfully utilized the Big Bad and became the first player to achieve two tournament victories in a Battle Arena event, defeating Wiilson001 in the finals...who also happened to be playing Galactus themselves. How did Galactus achieve such a level of success even while often being considered extremely risky in an open decklist tournament? Let’s break it down.
Galactus Finally Dominates
Braude - The Final G
To understand how Galactus dominated the tournament, we have to understand the deck and how it interacted with the tournament meta. Braude’s tournament-winning Galactus deck appears to be a fairly standard Galactus deck at first glance - which is actually the key point. Essentially, this deck focuses almost entirely on maximizing the potency of its Plan A - maximizing the chance for Galactus to trigger on board by including America Chavez, and then shutting out the opponent with Shang-Chi, Spider-Man, and Knull.
Wilson001 - Galactus
Wiilson001’s Galactus deck also functions similarly to Braude’s. However, it sacrifices a slight amount of output for some tech - Wasp was aimed towards dealing with Aero; while Killmonger is a generically good tech card. The loss of Daredevil and Destroyer did have an effect in the Galactus mirror in the final and was a likely reason why Wiilson001 was defeated. However, Wiilson001 admitted that the tech cards were helpful during some of the Swiss rounds earlier on.
Compared to Galactus decks which contain more viable Plan-B's such as including Shuri+Taskmaster or Nimrod, the successful Galactus decks in the tournament were more all-in with their Plan A's. While the success of Galactus could be attributed to the skill of these two finalists, metagame shifts also played a major role in creating a favorable environment for Galactus to thrive. Essentially, the fewer Galactus counters exist in the meta, Galactus can build their decks in a greedier fashion and thus ditch their Plan Bs, because their Plan As are not being disrupted.
High Evolutionary’s Popularity Continues
High Evolutionary’s popularity has continued, despite the recent Spider-Man nerf that targeted the most popular HE deck on ladder - HE Lockdown. However, the HE Lockdown didn’t have the output comparable to the strongest HE deck out there - HE Lockjaw. This high-roller deck continued its streak of dominating the meta-share in Tournaments, and was the most popular pick for this tournament by a mile with a 27.34% appearance rate and the highest amount of top cut representation.
JoinTheResistance - Big Evo
The above deck was piloted by JoinTheResistance and Potara towards a top 8 finish (with JoinTheResistance going undefeated in the Swiss rounds). This deck is what I would describe as the standard version of the HE Lockjaw deck. It utilizes the synergy behind Wasp, Lockjaw, Thor, and Jane Foster in order to pull from Lockjaw as many times as possible and hopefully hit one of the deck’s many high rolls. High Evolutionary super charges the usual Lockjaw pattern due to Evolved Wasp’s On Reveal and Evolved Hulk’s massive body. The Iceman serves as the 12th card in this list, and is best used as a tech card slot to improve matchups against other decks - in this case Iceman helps in the mirror. On the other hand, Juanca00 slotted Shang-Chi into this slot instead and reached the Top 8 with the same deck otherwise.
KJB - Normie HE
The other HE archetype that saw success was a midrange HE Tempo build piloted by the Snap.fan May Open champion KJB, who finished in the Top 8. This deck plays like a classic Doomwave deck - get ahead then use Wave on Turn 5 to shut out the opponent. In general, the midrange tempo decks saw more success in tournaments than HE Lockdown builds, because they output more power on average and have less linear gameplans.
Other Top Cut decks
Ororong - Ororong Thanos
Ororong finished in the Top 4 of this tournament, bringing with them the most unusual Thanos build that stumped viewers, commentators, and competitors alike. This unpredictability gave the deck a ton of leverage in games due to its many hidden combinations, oftentimes set up by the Invisible Woman. By playing Magik on Turn 5 behind Invisible Woman and then moving away Invisible Woman on Turn 6 using either Ghost-Spider or Heimdall, this deck was able to surprise opponents and suddenly flip games on its head. Beyond that, the deck operates like a standard Thanos Destroy deck, using Carnage and Venom to generate procs for the Death.
MaxTaipei - Darkhawk
Maxtaipei brought a midrange Darkhawk deck, finishing in the Top 4. It similarly packages the previously successful Darkhawk decks - running Korg/Zabu/Darkhawk /Rock Slidefor early game tempo, then Wave into either Doctor Doom or Leader to close out games. However, because High Evolutionary decks tend to output more power, this deck features more slot dedicated to tech cards - Killmongerdeals with the common 1-drops played in HE decks such as Misty Knight, Sunspot, and Nebula, while Shang-Chi can improve the matchup against HE Lockjaw. While Maxtaipei lost to Braude’s Galactus in the semifinals, the inclusion of Cosmo in the deck gave them the closest matchup against Galactus by far amongst the Top 8.
Other Meta Trends
Lack of Galactus Counters
As you could see from the non-Galactus decks in the Top 8, all of them had a poor matchup against Galactus, due to packing almost no counters for Galactus’s On Reveal. Over time, the addition of powerful cards such as Iron Lad and High Evolutionary raised the power level of the meta, creating real costs to running tech cards like Cosmo, or Aero, and pushing out Patriot decks, which are largely poor into High Evolutionary decks. Essentially, most of the top decks in the meta used their free slots teching against each other, leaving Galactus an easy opportunity to dominate.
Kitty Bounce MIA
In general, OTA nerfs discourage players from bringing decks which feature cards that were nerfed and this weekend was no exception, with the Beast nerf causing players to stay away from picking the deck which had won the most recent edition of Battle Arena. Kitty Pryde herself only had 7 appearances amongst the 128 decks, and mostly featured in Sera decks, which did not do well in the Swiss rounds. Because only a small amount of Kitty Bounce games were actually played, it’s not yet time to say that the Kitty Bounce deck is dead, as it’s likely the deck is still quite strong anyway.
Closing
Once again, I would like to congratulate Braude for winning Battle Arena a second time, as well as Wiilson001 for qualifying for the Snap.fan World Championship due to reaching the Finals with Braude already previously qualified. This tournament is likely the swansong for Galactus in his current state, as he is likely to be changed in the upcoming patch, so it might honestly be fitting that Galactus finally found his success during the final open decklist tournament right before the June patch. With Conquest Mode also on the way, I predict the Marvel Snap competitive scene to continue heating up, as the road towards the SFWC continues on.
The next tournament on the SFWC circuit is Snap Clash’s June Open, to be held next Saturday on June 17, with the same Swiss into Top Cut format but a closed decklist format instead, similar to the Conquest Mode format. Stay tuned for more content on the site that will be breaking down the best decks to use in the closed decklist format. But for now, this is Torikun signing off.
Sign Up Link:
https://battlefy.com/snap-clash/snap-clash-open-june/64831aab36c5020c5878568d/info?infoTab=details