Hobie Brown didn’t set out to be a masked outlaw. He was an ambitious inventor, but was constantly overlooked and didn’t feel appreciated. So he used his engineering skills to put together the work in claws, gauntlets, grappling hooks, and other advanced tech. The night he put on the suit for his first big heist of the Daily Bugle, he stopped being the one everyone overlooked and became The Prowler.
Prowler is making his debut in Marvel Snap as a 3-Cost 4-Power card with the ability “Add 2 Thief’s Tools to your hand. Set their Costs to 0 if a card moved last turn.” He is a flexible enough card to see play in a wide variety of decks, even those that aren’t looking to take extra advantage of his effects.
How does he actually work?
There’s been some confusion about the timing of the cost reduction for the Tools due to what seems to be two separate texts on him.
On Reveal: Add 2 Thief’s Tools to your hand. Set their Costs to 0 if a card moved last turn.
Although it may look like it, these aren’t two different abilities; they are both On Reveal and take effect once at the time of play, which means, to get the cost reduction on the Tools on a specific turn, a card has to have moved the previous turn. The cost reduction is not triggered when moving a card after the Tools have been generated.
Prowler Synergies
Prowler is flexible enough to be a generic card that helps to fill the curve for decks, or you can build your deck more towards him playing a key role in your game plan, by either trying to reduce the cost of his skills to 0, or trying to get extra use out of the cards he generates.
Here are a few cards that will help set the cost of the tools to 0 with their cheap and efficient move abilities.
Additional Synergies
These cards aim to leverage the tools' skills and effects for additional value by either getting some extra triggers off of Joaquin Torres, getting extra moves on your Werewolf, or allowing for a big turn six dump with Hit-Monkey.
Each tool also has some specific synergies of its own, with Remote Harness serving as both a Diamondback enabler and an Ajax enabler by afflicting 2 cards with -2 power, Flight Harness both giving +1 power and serving as an extra move ability to double your Torch and make it even larger or Vibro-Shock Gauntlets giving Sebastian Shaw some extra power or giving your Iron Man lane extra power to double up on.
Counters
With Prowler having a lot of his synergies as move cards, there are a few ways to counter him, such as:
The existence of these counters doesn’t mean you’ve lost when you come across them. You can similarly run your own tech cards to improve your play against those counters by removing their ability with cards like Red Guardian, Cosmic Ghost Rider, or our most recent addition, Deafening Chord.
Day One Prowler Decks
F2P Prowler move
Just because you’re a newer player or you don’t have most of the cards doesn’t mean you can’t have some fun with Prowler. This list has only one card above Series 3: Araña. Araña can be easily substituted for Iron Fist if you do not have her. Prowler serves as both additional power and extra utility, with Flight Harness serving as an extra move enabler to help with the deck's consistency alongside the deck already naturally moving cards, making it easy for the skills to cost 0.
Batroc Prowler
Batroc decks already run multiple movers, making it easy to get the tools down to 0, but Flight Harness also serves as an additional move card to help with deck consistency.
Wolf Prowler
Much like Merlin, Prowler is a one-cost skill generator that Werewolf loves. With the release of Merlin, we saw a massive uptick in both Werewolf’s play rate and win rate, and I don’t expect this to be any different.
Joaquin Monkey Prowler
This list is looking to use many different ways to get some extra mileage out of Prowler, with the likes of Joaquin doubling up the skills’ On Reveals and Black Swan reducing them to zero, letting you have a huge turn 6 flourish with Hit-Monkey.
Zombies Prowler
Much like the Werewolf deck, Zombie Scarlet Witch is also a card that utilizes skills efficiently by playing them onto her and growing the horde without taking up any board slots, resulting in a much bigger Horde.
Upcoming Variants
These variants are amazing, but my clear favorite is the Creative House Pocket. Let me know which you’ll be looking to pick up.
Final Thoughts
Prowler is definitely my most anticipated card of the month, and he looks like a powerful card that will see vast amounts of play, both as a generic card and with his multiple synergies. This is the best card of the month and an instant pick-up, especially if you are a fan of any of the cards or archetypes he synergizes with.
Let me know what your favorite Prowler synergy is and which deck you’ll be looking forward to trying the most.