Second Dinner has performed quite a magic trick on us. They have summoned so many new cards that I have to split this review up into TWO parts. For now, let’s focus our attention on the Series 5 cards coming this season. I’m here to help break it down, but I like my card evaluations like I like my Marvel Snap games. Fast. Snappy!
But wait! This time I’m not doing it alone. I’ve asked for the Star Ratings from FOUR other Snap.Fan writers. Let’s see what I thought compared to them!
Finally a broken Season Pass card! LOL. You are happy to get any spell, they are all amazing. Generates value every turn!
We’re starting off with the best one and of course it comes from the Season Pass. Merlin is the latest in the line of 2/3s that create cards, comparing favourably with Kate Bishop and Iron Patriot. Not only does Merlin make you great spells, but one of them even buffs his Power. I find myself forgetting that until the final turn when I see that he’s actually a 2/7.
It’s worth noting that both Polymorph and Once and Future need other cards on board to use their abilities, but in return you get stronger cards and more energy. Two things everyone needs to win games. Don’t let that lead you to believe Omniversal Presence doesn’t have its uses. Location control is one of the most undervalued abilities in the game. Turning disadvantageous locations into one that helps you win has been a tried and true method of stealing your opponent’s cubes.
Slight change from datamines, she is now a 4/7. After seeing that I’ve gotten much higher on her than I was before. Is it worth the effort she asks of you? While my fellow writers at Snapfan are fairly low on Morgan, I think she’s going to be better than expected. We’re already seeing the beginnings of a “Death Bounce” style deck, leveraging 1-Costs who grow in Power themselves like Rocket Raccoon and Silver Sable.
The aim is to play a bunch of cheap things, destroy them with a Venom or Killmonger, and then use a combination of Morgan and Black Swan to drop a lot of increased free Power on the final turn. Does this deck have enough staying power to compete in the meta? Not sure yet, but it is at very least a dedicated home for this new card, which is more than I can say for other new releases.
Move over Mystique, a new Ongoing copier has entered. Whether you are going super tall or wide, you will need to plan your board spaces out ahead of time to get the most value. Every season I have one card that I want to be wrong about. This time it’s The Ancient One.
She reads very exciting, copying stuff usually has a way of compounding exponentially. It just seems that in Snap these type of cards have a way of not being as explosive as we think. I’m reminded of Firehair from not too long ago as another card that had a similar ability.
So what do we actually want to be using Ancient One for? It needs to be a deck that uses an Ongoing as a finishing piece. Something to push your cards beyond what your opponent is doing, seemingly out of nowhere. To me this describes Cerebro and Victoria Hand decks. Both decks have a lot of cheap things to take up board space, as well as having a singular Ongoing ability you want copied. If you have too many different Ongoings in play, you risk hitting the wrong one.
The biggest thing causing my reservation with this card is that both Ancient One and Tao Mandala cost 3, meaning that they take up quite a big portion of your turn by turn energy. Hopefully this isn’t as big a deal as it seems on paper.
A casualty of the Snap Design Team’s testing. When this was 2/2 it was bananas. At 3/-1 I’m no longer interested. Okay, I’ll be the first to admit, I wanted to play with the broken card. I wanted 5/14 Red Skull’s with Iron Man’s ability, 3/10 Starbrands with Brood’s. I’m not saying we can’t do that anymore, in fact I expect you will run into this quite often. Just not as often as you otherwise would have at Nightmare’s previously datamined stats of 2/2.
Having -1 Power is a HUGE opportunity cost, especially at 3-Cost. It essentially means that in order for your deck to function, you need to “skip” turn 3. No it’s worse than that you need to make yourself LOSE 1 of the 3 locations in the middle of the game. This means the cards you do change with Nightmare need to be more worth it than ever before.
I’m a little lower than the others, and perhaps I’m being too harsh. We’ll have to wait a couple more weeks to find out.
A BIG BAD-esque type of card! We’ve seen 6/Big take over the meta, how about 3/Big? Play this with a tech on turn 6 and win. Dormammu is my most anticipated release this month. He’s a little complex so let’s go step by step.
You need to fully resolve the skill to move on to the next one. This means if you have nothing destroyed to merge with the first skill, then you do not get the second one. Luckily, you get to start with the first one in hand and it costs 0, so it’s easy to weave into your curve. You also need something already destroyed and in the destroyed pile. Think Bucky Barnes not Deadpool. Once you have that step done, the remaining two are relatively trivial, it becomes about having bodies on the board.
I believe his best use case will be saving Summoning Ritual 3 until the final turn. Preferably you would deliberately lose priority on turn 5, so that you are free from the worry of something like Shang Chi destroying your Dormammu. Since the Ritual only costs 3 you will be able to play it and another card on the same turn. Playing two cards, one of them being a lane winner, together has been historically very meta warping. If you know your Snap history, you’d recognize this as the “Darkhawk and Shang Chi” combo.
I wish this card was better. -3 Power is great, but I’m not sure if that’s good enough. This card easily gets better if you aren’t worried about Luke Cage.
Clea asks a LOT out of you. You need to be a deck that cares about buffing cards in hand, or a deck that cares about buffing cards in play (those two things don’t always overlap). You need to be a deck that cares about afflicting your opponents, and a deck that has space in your hand for all these Flames you are creating. I can’t think of a home that wants to do all this.
That being said, there are great cards that individually work with Clea, which is why I’m not giving her a 1 Star review. Galacta and Gwenpool are amazing support cards for Clea, and are both usually found in the type of deck that likes to continuously play smaller cost cards meaning your hand will have the space for the skills. If only she worked while in the deck like Sebastian Shaw does, then we could get some Surge value as well.
Wrapping Up
What did you think of our review of the new cards? Did we mesmerize your minds? Did we conjure some ideas into your heads? Hit me up on Twitter or down here in the comments and let me know below how you think this season is going to go!
Be sure to come back every week and see our full articles where we go even more in depth into each new character, and stay tuned for the second part of this season’s Snappy Review!