Hello and welcome back to Burning Questions, your weekly romp through Marvel Snap's hottest topics! This week we got the developer video for the upcoming Zombies season, High Voltage returned, and there are a lot of Spider characters in the datamines! Let's take a look!
1) Will Horde be good?
The new Horde mechanic was fully revealed in the latest developer video and it works how we suspected. The first instance of Horde makes a Zombie token somewhere on the board and further instances add power to it. But the real question is, how powerful will Horde decks be?
The good thing is that they're giving us a big Horde payoff card up front with Zombie Giant-Man coming to Series 4 Snap packs the same day archetype lynchpin Scarlet Witch hits the Season Pass. These two, alongside the Hunger Skill coming in Sanctum Showdown are going to form the core of a Horde deck. If the three of them are powerful enough to see play as a small package, Horde will be in a good position. If not, and the deck needs to go all-in and add some of the other Horde cards to be worth doing, that would not be a positive sign for the new keyword. Horde looks a bit on the weak side to me, and not because of its vulnerability to tech like Shadow King and Shang Chi.
I expect any Horde deck to pack protection. Instead, the numbers are just a smidge too low and slow. The best starting point to me would be a deck that tries to play heaps of cards into the Scarlet Witch lane. That means plenty of movers and skills with a Giant-Man finisher. Think of Zombie Wanda as the Horde Angela. I'm always down for a Kitty/Hope deck. Perhaps there's something there for a spooky Werewolf and Zombies deck too. Helping things out a bit are the two new locations. Having one of these pop up will give a Horde deck a major boost.
It's unlikely Second Dinner will allow this new mechanic to totally flop, so expect some quick buffs if things aren't going well early. The key card is Zombie Scarlet Witch. She's the most powerful Zombie card and has pretty easy dials if they want to tune her up to old Angela or Elsa levels. Horde is a new archetype, so I hope the balance team is aggressive with it.
2) How many wins do I need in High Voltage?
This time around in High Voltage the penultimate prize is a Premium Mystery Variant at 6000 Volts and the final prize is a Premium Mystery Border at 12000 Volts. Each completed set of 3 missions will give you 875 Volts. There are 12 mission refreshes and wins are worth 20 Volts each. This means that if your goal is just the PMV, you're golden. You won't need to win any additional wins and you can even miss a couple of resets. If your goal is to finish the track, you'll need 75 additional wins on top of hitting every refresh.
That's a lot of games over 4 days, but I do think it's achievable for enthusiasts of the mode. If it sounds excessive to you, just stop at the PMV and leave the border for those players for whom High Voltage is their favorite mode. How can you get all those wins? Try these decks out!
Sco's HV Oct
HV Oct 2099 Kills!
HV Oct Shangless
HV Oct Can't Jugg This
HV Oct gtfOngoing
3) Are there any more Spider characters to put in the game?
The most recent datamines revealed quite a few new Spider-adjacent characters.
With some long-awaited characters like Prowler and Hydro Man alongside more obscure characters like Man-Spider and Spider-Man Noir, are there any Spidery characters left?
I'm glad you asked. Not only is there a weird one I want, Magic: The Gathering beat us to the punch! You know Spider-Man. You may have heard of Man-Spider. But do you know about Spiders-Man? He's a man who is spiders!
Do you want a Spiders-Man card? Or perhaps you’d prefer Aunt May come to the game in the form of Spider Ma’am? Are you Iron Spider?
Now, let's hop over to the official Marvel Snap discord and grab some developer Questions and Answers.
4) Question:
The hoard mechanic seems real cool, I’m wondering though if there’s any plans to see it expanded in the future? The theming feels like it risks keeping it stuck to this season or a spookier class of characters who won’t always be relevant to a season's theme. And it also raises worries that if this set of cards aren’t good enough it’ll be all the new archetype will have for a while and end up falling flat without any support. So just wondering if there’s future plans for even more hoard cards really.
Answer:
Maybe? Certainly we think these cards are enough to stand it up on their own, and many of them don’t require additional Horde cards to work in other strategies. Sentry doesn’t need us to keep making Vipers to be worth making either—Snap as a game system makes good use of “parasitic” design space.
-Glenn Jones
Scosco's Note:
Parasitic design, for those unaware, refers to mechanics in card games that are heavily reliant on that mechanic. This means cards that don't function well without being paired with other cards with the same mechanic. On the one hand, it can lead to some unique archetypes and outside-the-box mechanics
On the other, it means those cards can't be mixed and matched with other cards very well. The Horde deck will need to be powerful more-or-less straight out of the box since it can't rely on future help or unanticipated synergy as much as other releases. That's why it's a bit puzzling that they haven't tuned up the Horde cards higher. Some don't seem especially strong. I'm very interested to see how these cards land and if they'll get quick buffs or perhaps be stronger than anticipated.
5) Question:
Jocasta is exciting to me in the same way cards like Sam Wilson are. All things being equal, does Jocasta open up the design channel wide enough to make it likely we'll see some very interesting and powerful 6-cost Activate cards?
Answer:
Probably not. It’s just a large opportunity cost to require Jocasta or ramp, and the payoff would likely have to be powerful on a scale that might not be fun or interesting. I imagine we’ll make at least one, though.
Scosco's Note:
6-Cost Activate is pretty silly. As Glenn notes, making cards that are so hard to play means their effects need to be exceptionally powerful to make them worth the effort. As we've seen in the past, giant bombs like this don't tend to be fun to play against. Even 4-Cost Activate has a razor thin margins of error. I do think a 5-Cost Activate card that has some specific synergy with Jocasta could be fun since it could at least still have utility if played out alone on turn 5.
That's it for this week. Please also be sure to check out my 250th article here! Will you be hoarding Horde cards? Dive into the comments to let me know what you think of Horde and come join me on social media for more comics and Snap talk!