We Are Venom season continues to move forward at Marvel SNAP. We’re now halfway through the season and halfway through Marvel SNAP’s new limited-time mode, High Voltage. How has this new mode been received by the community at large? Is it fun? Is it difficult? If you’ve been paying attention to the ranked ladder, you might be wondering how this week’s Scorn release stacks up against the competition. This week on The Snap Back, we cover all of this and more.
Contempt: Robust symbiote or messy machine?
Scorn is a card that never caused much buzz in the Marvel SNAP community upon release. Cards with discard abilities are almost completely relegated to a single “discard” type decklist. This list is packed with Morbius making the most of every discarded card and Dracula taking over the frequently discarded and heavily buffed Apocalypse powers. Scorn is no exception, but it slots into this deck very neatly and clearly increases the overall power level of the deck.
Scorn’s ability to buff a random card by +2 power each time it is discarded provides additional strength to the lane continuously throughout the game, even if it is ultimately not played. It means you can. A properly buffed Scorn can also be a tempting target for Dracula. This gives players new options for their final turn mind game. Do you play a powered-up Apocalypse and force Drac to discard Contempt, or do you play a one-cost Contempt and other discard cards for the final Apocalypse Pump? Would you like to climb Dracula Lane high into the sky? For a long time, the only sensible choice was to give Apocalypse to Drac, but now discard gamers are given the opportunity to trick their opponents.
Still, as mentioned above, Scorn is a discard card through and through. Even discard-adjacent decks like Agatha/Moon Knight and Black Bolt/Height are lackluster with this card and fall into the classic discard deck archetype. If you like playing discards, you’ll want to have Scorn. If not, it probably isn’t.
If you’re a new player or a player with a low collection level and don’t have any other cards in your spotlight cache this week, this might be an especially good week to use your spotlight keys as well. Jean Gray isn’t that great of a player, but she has a solid place in on-going base decklists. Sebastian Shaw, on the other hand, is an absolute must on any list of Silver Surfers. Surfer lists are often some of the most budget-friendly competitive lists in the game, and can be the last piece a player needs to fully equip a powerful Silver Surfer deck. is.
Snapback Verdict: Highly recommended for Discard and Silver Surfer enthusiasts, show owners and others. Easy to skip.
High voltage: What about the mode? What about the card?
Last week also introduced Marvel SNAP’s second-ever new limited-time game mode, High Voltage. This mode allows players to engage in extremely high-octane card play by constantly increasing the maximum energy available to each player during a lightning-fast three-round match. Winning games and completing missions in this mode will advance players to the reward track and earn a new card, “Agony,” which is a bonus this week.
This mode is extremely popular with Marvel SNAP players, from beginners in the lower ranks to elites sweating it out at the top of the Infinite Leaderboards. People love to slam powerful cards and crazy card combos, and High Voltage doesn’t disappoint. With the maximum energy cap significantly increased, players can use excessive Won/Gambit combos to clear the board of their opponent’s cards, or use one powerful card after another until their opponent can no longer counter them. This means you can play or play in all three lanes. But most importantly, there is no reversal of progression. Bolts can only be earned, never lost. Just play the game, complete the missions and eventually earn the Agony and Iron Man variants.
Speaking of Agony, I haven’t had a chance to fully playtest her, but she seems like a perfectly reasonable card so far. Her ability to apply a targeted +2 buff to the next card played in her location fits easily into destruction-based decks. This replaces Aranya in providing additional buffs to cards like Deadpool and Wolverine. You also lose by helping cards get into strange places, but you gain by removing yourself from the game board when merging to free up space for other destructible cards.
There may be some other places where Agony can shine in the future, like Namora-based decks that only require one card in the lane when Namora is played. But for now, she seems to fit in exactly as intended. Namely, as a nice “bonus card” that players can get for free this week. If you didn’t have time to play High Voltage this week, you’re not missing out on anything important. Even so, Agony is a Series 4 card. She costs just 3,000 Collector’s Tokens, so she’s pretty easy to add to your collection.
For the future
The final two weeks of the Marvel SNAP We Are Venom season promise to be interesting. Toxin, which releases next week, could be a huge success when combined with the list of Agent Venom bounce types that were popular earlier in the season. However, Cosmo’s prevalence in the game at the moment may be enough to trip up the latest Bounce cards before they can get off the ground. His last release, Anti-Venom, seems almost like a joke because his absence feels so strange, but he might surprise us all when he finally arrives.
The release and subsequent enjoyment of High Voltage seems to me like a seminal moment in Marvel SNAP’s life. The ability to relax and play a version of the game with no stakes at all turns out to be deeply sought after. This is a lesson Second Dinner hopes to keep in mind moving forward. Marvel SNAP’s final limited time mode, Deadpool’s Diner, was an interesting foray into a different type of game, but it was more frustrating than fun. At High Voltage, I think the Second Dinner formula is correct. If we’re lucky, we’ll be able to iterate on it and find a more interesting, lower stakes way to play Marvel SNAP.
As always, keep snapping. Don’t forget to come back next week to see how the meta reacts to Toxin’s appearance and other sudden events. If that happens with Marvel SNAP, you can read about it here at The Snap Back!
