Hello and welcome back to Burning Questions, your weekly romp through Marvel Snap's hottest topics. This week we got five brand new cards, The Golden Gauntlet World Championship qualification kicks off, and we are getting something else to spend Tokens on! Let's go!
1) What's the best new card?
We get a lot of new cards at the beginning of every season and the Season Pass card is usually the best of the bunch. But the most powerful new card isn't Galactus, the controversial Super Premium Season Pass Silver Surfer card, or even the much-feared new Series 5 tech card, Stardust. Terrax has been really solid, but even that's not who I have in mind. No, the card you're most likely to regret passing on in a few months is Red Shift. His targeted discard has already led to increased play rates for Hela and Agatha (or often Hela AND Agatha!). Here are some of the best builds to take advantage of this relatively obscure Herald of Galactus that are outside of the popular and established builds that you may have already seen elsewhere.
Red and Black
Murder She Wrote
Morgan the Red
And I know Grand Arena is in the rearview mirror, but this was a ridiculously fun deck for the last day of the mode!
GREND
Check out our content on all the new cards here!
Snappy Review Heralds of Galactus
Heralds of Galactus Series 4 Card Previews
Silver Surfer First Steps Preview
Stardust Preview
Galactus First Steps Preview
2) What's going to win the first leg of the Golden Gauntlet Open?
Marvel Snap official tournaments are here! The first tournament in the qualification process for the World Championships is taking place on August 9th, starting at 8:00 PM Eastern Time / 1:00 AM London / 10 AM Sydney. You can watch along on the official Marvel Snap channels on Twitch or YouTube, and I know quite a few creators are planning to rebroadcast the steam on their own channels. The pairings and standings will be live here once the tournament is live!
Holding a tournament right as we got all these new cards is the perfect timing. There are some established top decks, but these new cards mean there is a chance for the game's best deck builders to surprise. One of the established top decks, Invisible Woman End of Turn or Victoria Hand, will probably come out the eventual winner, though there is space for a really good player to find something that beats both.
My bet would be some kind of deck that counters those with Supergiant or by racing for priority and using cards like Juggernaut and Alioth to slam the door. Something new that generates huge amounts of power by cheating big cards into play via something like Ghost Rider or Redwing is always a threat in an unestablished metagame.
If I Were Playing
Let me know what deck you think will win! Head to the comments and give me your prediction! It could be a general archetype, a full decklist, or even a package of cards you see coming out on top! The organizers of the Golden Gauntlet have been kind enough to provide me with a few season pass codes to give away. Include your Discord name with your prediction to be entered to win one of them! I'll be giving out more on my Bluesky account over the next couple of days!
3) What is the best variant for a really obscure character?
Redshift is one of the most obscure characters we've gotten recently. He only appears in one Beta Ray Bill miniseries and then shows up to fight with the other Heralds of Galactus against the Annihilation Wave. The Fallen One and Stardust are similarly obscure with nowhere near the number of appearances as Galactus' classic Heralds like Terrax, Frankie Raye, and Firelord.
Second Dinner seems to be leaning on the overseas art studios they contract with to make sure they have enough variants for these newer, more obscure cards, but they all end up feeling a bit same-y to me. What are some more obscure characters that have been blessed with great variants from talented artists? Here are some of my favorites.
We still need variants for the relatively obscure Topaz and Toxie Doxie among others. Esme Cuckoo isn't quite as obscure as those, but finding variants for her must be especially challenging considering she doesn't even appear on either of the variants below (those are her sisters)!
Now let's hop over to the ask-the-team channel on the official Marvel Snap discord and grab a few developer Q and A’s!
4) Q: I know it's early, but can you give any more information regarding the "more things in future updates" we'll be able to spend tokens on? If I'm going to use my tokens on seasonal series 5 packs, I'd want to do it before the pool gets crowded with more heralds
A: The old "Spotlight Variants" is one of the ways.
-Griffin
Author's Note:
Additional Token sinks are an absolute necessity. The themed packs with Variants were nice, but old Spotlight Variants are better. If possible, allowing players to spend Tokens on random Mystery Variants or Premium Mystery Variants would appeal to a lot of whales out there and Second Dinner needs to find ways to motivate players with huge stacks of Tokens to spend them. However, I really hope they have plans for non-variant Token sinks. Additional ways to dress up Avatars or new game boards could be ways to create Token-only cosmetics. Introducing smaller quality of life features that can be paid for by either Gold or Tokens could be another way to provide more value for Tokens. I'm thinking of things along the lines of being able to refresh the daily shop rotations, additional decks slots, and some degree of split targeting.
5) Q: Hey team, I just had a game where my ssfs copied my regular silver surfer on a Wong lane, but she only went off once. Is this the intended effect?
A: This is a bug we caught and have corrected for the 8/19 patch, but I wasn't aware it didn't make it in ahead of the release. I'll look into whether it's doable alongside our next OTA.
-Glenn
Author's Note:
Silver Surfer, First Steps being in the Super Premium Season Pass has meant not a ton of people are experimenting with her yet. Some kind of wacky Wong shenanigans might be one of the more fun things to do with her. Another idea is to use her to copy strong 4-Cost cards with high in-built Power like Gwenpool, Wiccan, Ares, Doctor Octopus, Kahhori, and Stegron. I did spy master deck-builder Ika trying her out in a Thanos deck, which sounds pretty cool!
That's it for this week! Come find me on Bluesky, where I'll be giving out some Season Pass codes generously provided by the organizers of the Golden Gauntlet over the next couple of days!