Writer: Bradcifer | Editor: ItsGuestGaming
Bouncing on High Evolutionary: Navigating Today's Meta
It’s been just over three weeks since Conquest first released into Marvel Snap and just over one month since High Evolutionary’s release. Both of which have had an incredible impact on Marvel Snap’s metagame, one for the better and perhaps one for the worse. But before we delve into the possibility of High Evo (or even bounce) being too good in the mode, we need to take a step back and look at what the mode has done for the mindset of players.
Conquest changing the landscape of how to approach your snaps is something that has bled into the normal ladder. In conquest, snaps are far more valuable as they can change the entire tide of the battle, flipping the match on its head. A back-and-forth battle that traded single cubes for the first 4 rounds can suddenly become a 4-cube swing in the matter of a single game. This is a good thing, as I, as well as many other players in the community, have noticed: good snap decisions are being made more and more often. Even in The Proving Grounds, a place that was deemed to be the “snap fast and often” to get to a quick 8 cuber and leave if it doesn’t work out in the first week of conquest, it has become a more grindy experience overall. Players are finally able to put into context how valuable a good snap really is, as well as knowing when to retreat. So even when hopping back into Ladder for the new season grind to infinite, I am shocked to see how easy everything feels in comparison to conquest. Though anecdotal, it’s worth noting that there have seemingly been far fewer 8-cube games in the ladder, as this new-found skill set of knowledgeable snapping is a two-way street. Players are retreating more often and knowing when to cut their losses. Could it just be the fact that players are more familiar with the game's mechanics at this point in its release? Sure, but coinciding with Conquest already having a month under its belt is too juicy to simply be a coincidence.
So players are seemingly better at snapping overall, but what is the Conquest meta shaping up like? As of the time of writing, the top 4 decks are all parallels of each other, being:
- High Evo Lockjaw (59.38% WR)
- Sera Control *with a bounce core* (59.18% WR)
- High Evo Control (57.61 WR)
- Kitty Bounce (56.45 WR)
We’ll come back to these decks in just a moment, as I just want to set the stage for how these top decks influence the remainder of the meta. Looking at the rest of the field, we see a variety of tech cards and decks that specialize in one thing: beating one or both of the top archetypes. Patriot (57.56%) has an outstanding ability to go wide and generate quite a bit of power, capable of holding off the weaker lanes of Lockjaw as well as sneaking into the lockdown locations of Control. Destroy (54.32%) offers its own built-in tools, such as Killmonger, that both progress its own gameplan while potentially hindering both Controls (Sunspot/Nebula) and Bounce. Meanwhile, Discard Dracula has one of the best cards in the game for dealing with Storm/Cyclops combos in its own namesake card. Then finally, Darkhawk offers something that both of the top archetypes have in their own right; flexibility. While High Evo and Bounce offer built-in flexibility due to the nature of their own card makeup, Darkhawk builds create flexibility in the number of directions the deck can go during construction. From the Black Bolt/Stature engines to wacky Ghost Spider/Doc Oc builds, the core package of Darkhawk, Zabu, and only 3–4 other support cards (Rockslide, Korg, and Shang-Chi) leaves the deck with a surprising number of open slots to play around with and build impressively resilient decks, ready to take on any meta possible.
For example, the list that both myself and fellow content creator Paper used to get our infinite border avatars last season was this Darhawk Doc Oc list:
As it stands, the meta itself is incredibly diverse, as there are a multitude of other decks with respectable win rates in conquest mode. Though, the issue lies within how the top 4, seemingly pull themselves away from the crowd.
I want to start by saying that I don’t necessarily think that either of the top archetypes between Bounce and High Evo, are even close to the most oppressive decks in Snaps young history. Do I think that they could use some small tweaks? Sure, but that’s not what we’re here to talk about. Rather, the overarching issue that looms over Marvel Snap as long as we see great performance of these decks in Conquest, but apparently not on Ladder. A week or so ago, our beloved Glenn was asked regarding the lack of changes to High Evo in the most recent OTA, and he had this to say:
- “High Evolutionary is very popular, but his winrates are not outside our metrics for Ranked. He is overperforming those winrates in Conquest, where his well-rounded nature is particularly well-suited to battles, and we're discussing how to factor that kind of information into our process with such a new piece of the game.
Either way, the nature of High Evolutionary is such that if we were going to make changes, we'd prefer to use a patch. Just changing numbers in the card text doesn't really work, and we'd prefer not to adjust the vanilla statlines. Once we're back from our summer break, we'll be taking a close look at him.”
As it stands, High Evolutionary builds are performing just fine on Ladder, but are overperforming in Conquest
It begs the question of how you even approach that from a balancing standpoint. The seemingly obvious answer may be to just say that Second Dinner should nerf any cards or decks they feel are overperforming, regardless of which mode that is, though I’d be wary of that sentiment. It has the potential to create this slippery slope of unintended consequences across formats where players could grow frustrated with their deck seemingly no longer being viable in one mode, while they didn’t even play the deck in the mode where it was too strong. It would be like banning a card in the Standard format of Magic the Gathering and saying that it’s also banned in Modern, a format in which the card is barely playable at best. The other option is to treat each format as separate entities entirely, each boasting its own unique card pool of balance adjustments. This, in my opinion, is far too early in Snap, as there are only two formats in which to play the game, and they both share entire pools of cards.
Another solution down the road would be to go the route of Magic or Heartstone by introducing a standard format with a yearly rotation. But due to the way that collections are built in Marvel Snap, I’d say this has about a less than 1% chance of ever happening. Finally, and in my opinion, the most likely answer, is that Second Dinner needs to identify which format Marvel Snap is balanced entirely around. By drawing a line in the sand and saying everything is balanced around conquest, for example, it sets the expectation of when players should expect adjustments to cards due to their performance in that respective mode. Now this goes back to my first objection, unfortunately, and I would prefer some way to segregate the two modes from impacting one another; but by giving players some sort of consistent expectation, they are more likely to be accepting of changes to come.
Until we get to the point of making changes to these top decks (which is likely on the 11th), there stands to be a sort of Rock, Paper, Scissors going on at the top of the meta right now. High Evo Control is able to keep Bounce from utilizing its flexibility; Lockjaw is able to outmuscle Control; Bounce is able to outmaneuver Lockjaw; and Sera is able to maintain 50/50 matchups against the field.
But let's say you, dear reader, don’t want to play any of these decks. Let's say you want to break the mold a bit. How do you do that? You need to identify tech cards that both complement your own deck's gameplan while hindering your opponents. This doesn’t mean slam a Luke Cage in your deck just because, but really considering what that final jigsaw piece is. Take the Darkhawk deck I mentioned earlier.
I originally built that deck with some minor differences, taking what has typically worked in the Stature versions and expanding upon it. This is what that list looked like:
It looks mostly the same, right? Well, there was an issue with this build, one that Paper was able to identify and adjust. It was a bit too Zabu-dependent, resulting in far more single-card turns that were less impactful on the game. In the original Stature version, you’d typically run Jeff in addition to Polaris, which gave Miles far more consistency as a 1-drop, whereas my version dropped Jeff for Ghost-Spider. On paper, this felt like a lateral move, but in practice, it made for less flexibility on the part of the player in manipulating Miles’ cost since Ghost Spider typically was played on turn 6. Otherwise, Enchantress wasn’t extremely well positioned in the meta, so her value wasn’t as high. So, since this little move engine felt like it wasn’t working as well as the previous list, but the Doc Oc aspect seemed promising, Paper decided to cut Miles, Polaris, and Enchantress.
In lieu, bring back Jeff and insert two impactful tech cards in Killmonger and Shadow King. Cutting two four-drops from the list freed up the strain on Zabu’s reliance, and introducing tech cards at the three-drop slot gave the deck consistency in flexibility on the final turns. I'm still working with Zabu to play a reduced four-drop alongside a three-drop that could win the game for you, while being more playable early in the game is incredibly important. I correctly identified Doc Oc as being an incredible disruption piece for the top decks in the meta, ones that relied on their final turns to make the largest impact. Paper took the deck that extra mile in identifying proper energy spread while utilizing tech cards that acted as fallback plans to the Doc disruption. All the while, the Darkhawk shell allows us to present enough power to hold our ground against the insane power output both of these archetypes have. Perhaps I’ll do a deeper dive into the intricacies of this deck and how it matches up against the field, but for now, I think this serves as a proper ideology of how to break the mold of the meta.
So now that you’ve broken the mold and created something you feel can stand up to the rest of the meta, you need to get your reps in. I’m not talking about playing five games and then moving on to the next build. You really need to stick with a build for 50 or so games to get a true understanding of it. If you’re considering another card in place of an existing one, take notes on when you draw card x and mark down if you were happy it was card x or if you wish it was card y. Even in games where you don’t draw it, ask if card "x" would have fixed a problem presented on the board or if card "y" would have. After a nice tally, you can then make a decision on whether you should make the swap. But even then, you still need to get your games in.
Pilot skill will always trump deck power level. If there is a deck you love and that you’ve put the time in to understand its unique lines of play, intricacies of card interaction, and everything in between, you will always be favored against someone who is playing the “top decks” with limited play experience. It’s why I discourage making rash decisions regarding deck lists and constantly swapping cards around before giving the build an ample amount of play to even identify its strengths and weaknesses.