Snap Into Marvel: Snap Back To The Past With The Prehistoric Avengers

As the new season dawns, the Marvel Snap meta is in an interesting position. With players focused on “Sanctum Showdown” for the last week of the last season, it stayed more or less locked in as it had been at the start: favoring proactive, points-driven decks. An indirect buff to Hela (thanks to Skaar getting nerfed to costing 7) resurrected that archetype, but otherwise, the best decks are still the best decks. Yet, between “Sanctum” lingering into the start of the new season and the onset of a whole new dimension to the game — the introduction of Skills and Banishment — the meta seems poised for some major disruption.

Before diving into the details of “Prehistoric Avengers,” let’s see where the “Brave New World” cards rank out.

1. Sam Wilson Captain America (1) – As usual, the season pass card proved to be the one to beat. What is surprising is just how dominant the new Captain America became. At the beginning of the season, it simply invigorated a couple of archetypes (Ongoing and Move). By the end, it had risen to become a staple “good card” 2 drop, the kind of card that can just go in a lot of decks and provide value, driven in part by Sanctum Showdown’s need for location flexibility.
2. Thunderbolt Ross (4) – Unfortunately, for as impactful as the season pass card is, there’s a steep drop off to the rest of the “Brave New World” cards. Thunderbolt Ross takes the #2 spot, but that’s mostly just because it found a place in the revitalized Hela deck late in the season, helping get the big cards into hands to be discarded.
3. Diamondback (2) – Diamondback isn’t a bad card. But this far, its turned out to be more of a useful piece in Toxic decks vs. a driver of them.
4. Joaquin Torres Falcon (3) – This card struggled so much that it got a buff before the season was even over, having it’s cost and power dropped to 2 in the last round of OTA changes. That buff invariably makes it a better card (allowing it to get out on turn 2 to setup a play, or get dropped on turn 3 along with a one drop, makes a world of difference), but it’s too early to tell if the change is enough to elevate the card.
5. Redwing (5) – As expected, Redwing is a cute addition to Move decks, but hardly a must play, requiring too much support from other cards for too little gain.

Whereas “Brave New World” took for its inspiration a tie-in to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, “Prehistoric Avengers” instead looks to a relatively deep cut of comic book lore: Jason Aaron‘s Avengers run in which he established a group of Avengers from Earth’s ancient past. Along with these relatively new characters, “Prehistoric Avengers” brings Skills into Marvel Snap via the season pass card, Agamotto. These are cards which get dealt into your deck at the start of a match, like Thanos’ Infinite Stones. But none of them have power, and they disappear (or are “banished”) from the board once they’ve been played.

#1 – Agamotto

Once again, the Season Pass cards looks to be the best of the season. In the case of Agamotto, this is largely because of flexibility and unpredictability. The skill cards it generates have a wide variety of uses (one is like a double Psylocke, another gives the already-decent 10 power of Agamotto a bump to 13 power, etc.), it can slot into a lot of different decks. And because your opponent won’t know which of the skills you drew when, it’ll be harder to counter them even though they’ll know you’re playing Agamotto (the card generates a little pre-match graphic). That combination of being to able to fit into different deck styles and keep opponents off their game is a winning one, even if the new skills mechanic make take a little time to figure out.

#2 – The First Ghost Rider

The rest of the cards this season are much more typical “this will be a nice addition/boost to a particular archetype” cards. The First Ghost Rider gets the nod over the rest thanks to the way it can easily slot into one of the best decks of the moment (Hela). This is basically the Lady Sif for low powered cards, and with Hela already often running Iron Man and/or Gor it’s got plenty of decent targets that won’t deduct its power. Also, it’s probably more complicated than it’s worth, but the idea of using this to discard Iron Man then using regular Ghost Rider to revive it next turn on the same lane for a total of 18 power seems fun.

#3 – Starbrand

On the one hand, this seems like a bad card: ten power, but at the cost of 3 power to your opponent on other lanes? On the other hand, this isn’t that dissimilar from cards like Typhoid Mary or Red Skull, cards with big power but with a catch. Which means there’s an immediate place in the dormant Sauron-Shuri decks for this card, where its downside can be ameliorated by Zero, Sauron, or Enchantress, with the added flexibility of being a three drop. Starbrand is also a card that put a little juice into the recently-nerfed Surtur, giving that deck another 10 drop without needing Zabu to hit it in order to get it out early. We only need to win two lanes, so who cares if one your opponents lanes is getting a three power boost from Starbrand when you’ve already filled it with ten drops or a ballooning Surtur.

#4 – Firehair

This could be the sleeper card of the season. I’m interested to see what kind of playlines deck makers come up with outside the obvious slot-ins like Mill or Destroy. The biggest thing holding it back: there are a lot of solid two drops at the moment, and cards like Iron Patriot and Sam Wilson are good enough that they cross archetypes, which means Firehair will need to be really good to earn itself a place even in decks where its synergies are obvious.

#5 – Eson

Once the scourge of the meta, Arishem has been relatively quiet of late. Fellow Celestial Eson might revitalize it a bit, as that is the obvious place for this card (where Arishem’s extra energy and created cards will allow Eson to be played a turn early, with plenty of potential cards to draw). Outside of that build, it will likely struggle to be anything more than a fun variation on Wiccan (or possibly Agamotto) decks. And even in Arishem, it will suffer as most cards in that archetype do — you need to draw it to play it, and that’s harder to do in Arishem than anywhere else.

#6 – Khonshu

This card is bananas. The idea, I believe, is that when it appears, it will randomly be in a “phase” that determines its power (5/7/12). Each time it gets discarded, it comes back in a different phase/with a different power level. Then, whenever it gets played, it resurrects a different discarded card and assigns it whatever power Khonsu has. So if you draw Khonshu when it’s full/12 power, then discard, say, Blade, when you play Khonshu, it’ll revive a 12 power Blade on another lane. That sure seems like a lot more effort or randomness than it’s worth (especially since the best non-Discard deck right now involves discarding cards like Swarm and Scorn that do not stay discarded). Then again, maybe it’ll make for a decent non-Hela play when Hela doesn’t get drawn in time. Tough to say right now, but it sure feels like a card that will either be more trouble than its worth, or a surprise best of the season card.