We’re just about done with the Marvel Rivals crossover season of Marvel SNAP, and we may have saved the best one for last! We’re closing out the season with a bit of a mega card review edition, doing our usual review of this week’s new release, Rocket Raccoon And Groot, as well as a final verdict on Galacta and a quick look at the Series 4 prize from the High Voltage event, Lasher! But which one ranks the highest in our minds? Will there be one that falls short of expectations? Read on and find out!
Rocket and Groot Team Up For Takedowns
This week’s new release, Rocket Racoon And Groot, makes for an interesting concept, combining two previously existing characters into a whole-new card with all-new abilities. Rocket and Groot (Grocket? Rroot?) have made a pretty surprising splash into the Marvel SNAP metagame on their release!
As I mentioned in Snap Sense, their ability to steal power makes for an effective 2-point increase in power when accounting for what’s lost by the opponent, provided no Luke Cages are on the board. And at a base 3 power, it only takes two triggers of R&G’s ability to make it an effective 3/7 in this manner. That is nearly as strong as a Gladiator, but without the potential downside of Gladiator giving the opponent a free play of one of their big cards. It’s only two or three points lower than the reigning points champion of 3-Drops, Speed, who also requires his player to spend all of their energy every turn to reach its greatest heights. All R&G has to do is manage to get the opponent to play into its lane twice, and since movement happens before anything else, it’s almost trivially easy to guarantee at least a single trigger of its ability in every game you play it, especially if you’re playing it on turn 3.
Overall, I think R&G is honestly in the running for one of the best 3-Drops in the whole game right now. Is it necessary to own? Probably not, but if you’ve got the keys to spare, you could do a whole lot worse than picking up this dynamic duo.
Snap Back Verdict: Strong Recommendation!
A Final Verdict on Galacta
As the season draws to a close, we can look back on the effect that Galacta had on Marvel SNAP. Many season pass cards of late have truly dominated the metagame for their release, like Surtur and Agent Venom before him. While Galacta did not have quite the same impact, it still feels like saying so is reaching short of a very high bar in the first place.
Surtur, according to some of the last-revealed Marvel SNAP internal metrics, was still one of the best decks in the game as of one of the latest OTA updates, but is largely kind of uninteresting to play. Agent Venom absolutely dominated the metagame during its release, but has barely been seen since. Galacta, meanwhile, hasn’t quite reached those same astronomical heights as her predecessors, but she’s still managed to be a very good card.
I think a lot of what makes Galacta feel less important in the back half of her season was the release of Doom 2099, a card that shook up the metagame just with its release alone, and even then, a great deal of decks running Doom also are playing Galacta as well. But as competing 4-Cost cards, there can be only one that’s better than the other, and ultimately, it seems the Tyrant Lord of 2099 has cemented that position for this season.
Does that mean you should pass on Galacta? Absolutely not! The kind of decks that Galacta improves are not only vastly improved by her presence, they are also among the more dynamic and entertaining decks to play. If you love playing smaller scaling cards like Kitty and Angela, Galacta complements them perfectly. If you love playing with interesting synergies and handbuff strats, Galacta complements these as well. There are a lot of different places you can play Galacta, and any one of them is almost always the better for it. I see Galacta continuing to prop up in decks for a long time, so get her now while she’s $10 instead of later when she’s whatever dollar amount 6000 tokens is equivalent to (spoiler alert: it’s much more than ten bucks).
Snap Back Verdict: Strong Recommendation!
Snap Back Bonus Review: Lasher
I wasn’t initially planning on doing this, because by the time you read this, the High Voltage event will have long since ended, and I prefer to give my opinions on cards that are still available to obtain. However, considering the relative ease it required to manage the High Voltage collection track, and my experimentation with the card, I wanted to go ahead and do a mini-review on Lasher as well this week.
Lasher, for the unitiated, is a 2-Cost, 2-Power card with an Activated ability that reads: “Afflict an enemy card here with negative Power equal to this card’s Power.” At first, I was concerned that the Activate mechanic, as with many others, would prove more clunky than useful, and that its base power would make for too wimpy of an affliction to be good.
As it turns out, much like Black Swan, that 2 Energy cost puts Lasher in one of the sweeter spots for an Activate card. It’s pretty easy to fit him into any turn prior to turn 6, giving him a chance to utilize his activated ability before the game’s end. And if two power is too puny to be worthwhile, well, turns out its equally not difficult to boost his power to more serviceable levels. Playing Lasher with Galacta makes him a 2/5, and going even harder on it could include a Forge in the Galacta lane first to make him a 2/7. Once again, this effect ends up working like R&G or Silver Sable, in that any power on Lasher is effectively doubled when his effect activates, and a 2/10 or a 2/14 is a scary card indeed.
I won’t be giving a Certified Snap Back Verdict, not since the card is no longer available until the next patch. Also I don’t think it’s going to be a massive game changer, anyway. As good as it can be, it still requires some setting up. Plus, in a game where you only have 12 cards in a deck, instead of running multiple cards to make one card good, you should usually just run multiple good cards, instead. But keep an eye out for it, and once the token rewards from Spotlight Caches double later this month, consider it when it comes around in your token shop!
Looking Back (And Forward In Kind)
In truth, this has been one of the better seasons of Marvel SNAP in quite some time. At no point has any deck been an unstoppable juggernaut of power. Throughout the whole month, a wide variety of options have been available to a decent variety of players, allowing people to play nearly entirely whatever they want to make big gains on the ranked ladder.
Shadowing it all, however, has been the specter that looms over all live-service games as they begin to get a little long in the tooth: just how sustainable can the game actually be? For Marvel SNAP, the seeds of doubt were first planted by the release of a competing mobile card game in Pokemon TCG Pocket, and fertilized by the wild success of this season’s crossover companion, Marvel Rivals. Doubts of Second Dinner’s ability to manage player expectations with regards to card acquisition has only further created a gap between the game and all but its most loyal player base.
But what does it mean? Does Marvel SNAP have the sauce to keep going? Personally, I think that, yes, it absolutely does. The game continues to be a unique counterpart to the card-vs-card battling that so many trading card games bring to the table, and its speed of play and, pardon the pun, snappiness provide a gameplay experience that none of them can truly match. Even Pokemon Pocket, designed to be a quicker experience than its normal cardboard version, can still go on for twelve to fifteen turns in a particularly intense match. Even the longest game of Marvel SNAP is still going to be over in like five minutes, and that cannot be discounted for the casual player.
That said, there are still so many hurdles that keep the casual player from also being able to fully invest themselves into the game, and card acquisition is absolutely one of them. By now, Marvel SNAP has released so many good Series 5 cards that the gulf between the best card option for any given deck, and its second-best alternative, is getting wider and wider with every release, and that can be troublesome. At the very least, it can feel troublesome when a player running a certain deck gets consistently beaten by players who are playing the same deck but with one or two more optimal cards.
Second Dinner appears to be very aware of this though, and so we will just have to see once the patch schedule begins again in earnest. My hope is that the next round of Series Drops will be robust and get the community engaged, and that whatever their final plans for adjusting the system are exciting enough to bring everyone back into the fold. What do you think? What changes would you like to see in the next year of Marvel SNAP? Which of your favorite heroes should be made into card form next? Will Second Dinner regain its trust and keep the game pushing for its third year strong? Find out all this and more in our next installment of the Snap Back!
