Hellfire Gala is coming with style and elegance to Marvel Snap. And the man behind it all, Sebastian Shaw, the leader of Hellfire Club, A.K.A the Black King, is joining the ranks in December's Marvel Snap Season. He has the style but how will he handle himself while fighting in those crazy locations? At first glance he looks similar to Bishop and Werewolf By Night, They focus on scaling and have the same cost. Is he as strong as them? Let’s try to figure it out.
The Card
Sebastian Shaw is a 3-cost 4-power card without a keyword. What he does is Whenever he gets his power buffed, he gets an extra +2, it doesn’t matter if he is on the board, deck or hand his effect will go off anywhere, just remember that Ongoing effects don’t count, so don’t expect him to get +3 from Blue Marvel or Captain America. He can scale very hard with buff cards. He might be the big guy that some archetypes like Silver Surfer needed all this time. Like I mentioned, Sebastian is very similar to our favorite werewolf, but he might be slotted in different kinds of decks. He doesn’t need board space like Werewolf by Night does, Shaw just needs some friends to buff his power.
Let’s Pump those Numbers Up!
Alright, Sebastian Shaw does look like he can become very powerful very quickly, but we can’t just put him in any deck. You need buff cards to make him as big as a hulk. So, we need to invite some people to join Hellfire Club. Not everyone can join, it’s a very exclusive club after all, so he needs people that can give him some extra power. Let’s see the list of potential candidates:
Now that we have a very good list of potential candidates for our Club. Let’s look at some other possible members that would bring something great to the team. Brood also loves to get buffed so they would fit right in. Wong could really raise the ceiling by doubling our buffs. Luke Cage guarantees that no one will be able to strip away our power ups. If we are feeling really greedy, we can get Odin to raise our power ceiling even further.
In Summary, what we want in our Sebastian Shaw deck is cards that buff, cards that like to be buffed and cards that can support us to buff.
More Things to Consider
Let’s take a second to think of our worst possible opponents, cards that could really destroy our gameplan. So far, I can think of a few possible culprits. Shang-Chi is always around the corner when you are going big with your cards, and I believe that Sebastian Shaw will be bigger than 10 most of the time. Also, Shadow king is a card that you really don’t want to see when playing Sebastian, he can destroy all your effort by reducing Sebastian’s power back to 4. The last antagonist would be Cosmo: this bad dog can really stop our plans when we are going for big buffs with Wong and or Odin. So be mindful of these cards when playing Sebastian Shaw.
We don’t need to rely only on our cards to buff Shaw, there are locations that would be quite beneficial for Shaw’s ability (Muir Island would be crazy powerful). We might keep them in mind when they pop up as Hot Locations. Let’s have a look at some of those:
Now for the big question, is $10 a good price to be admitted into the Hellfire Club? I absolutely think so because the invitation comes with a ton of goodies to justify the cost. If you are spending money on Marvel Snap, the Season Pass is always a priority because it gives the most bang for your buck. You’ll get a card that will cost 6000 Collector’s Token in the future, and a ton of exclusive rewards like card backs and beautiful Hellfire Gala’s variants. If you’re on the fence about buying it, there is no rush, you can take the entire season to think about it.
I would be very interested in your thoughts about the Black King himself, I truly think he will be a great addition to the game and I for sure will try him out. Here are some decks that I will be trying day one to reach infinite with:
Dualgloves’s Day 1 Sebastian Shaw Decks
Sebastian Shaw's Greed
This is the greediest deck I made with Sebastian, and you can bet that this is the one that I will try first. It has no counter cards or way to beat counter cards, but this seems like the highest power achievable while abusing Sebastian’s ability. We have Surfer, we have Wong and we have Odin to try to reach crazy high points. Just remember what I said about cards that we don’t want to face while playing Shaw. This is the most powerful and the most vulnerable deck.
Sebastian Shilver
Now this is something familiar, It is basically a version of the Silver Surfer deck with Shaw as a possible big threat for the deck. Using Sera means that we are more versatile, and we can explode on the last turn with big power.
The Club is Closed
Alright, I didn’t want to do this but my hand is forced. Since everyone will mostly be trying out the Lockdown list with Ms. Marvel helping the archetype, I decided to create this evil deck. It is downright wicked, and my soul is in pain for making this. Have fun winning games on turn 5 by locking the opponent out of the game. Remember that Shaw and forge on turn 4 is just as big as Jessica Jones.
Murder on the Dancefloor
This might get tricky. I tried combining Shaw and Werewolf scaling power into a bounce deck. It might be too unwieldy to the common snapper but we can figure it out. The idea is using bounce to get your wolf dancing all over the place while you buff and rebuff Shaw or recycle your Hit Monkey with Beast.
ʍɐɥS uɐᴉʇsɐqǝS
Okay I admit, it’s another very greedy deck. But this one is Negative. We are trying to use Mr. Negative to get powerful combos with Wong, and Mystique quadrupling our On Reveals in order to make huge amounts of power. Another possible play is Iron-Man Mystique. We can also extend the game’s duration with magic in order to draw more negative cards and our combo pieces.
Blob's Gala Night
One thing to note is that Okoye has some pretty interesting synergy with Blob and our guy Sebastian. Blob can be a very different and very surprising finisher. Both Maximus and Gladiator would be great to be absorbed by the Blob since they have detrimental effects. Sera is there for when you’re not planning on playing the blob, on those games you are a run of the mill Silver Surfer deck, so try to drop the most amount of 3 cost cards and finish with your Surfer. Blob will not be out at the time of release. This an idea for once Blob is available
Variants
