Bar Sinister Hot Location Guide: Strategy, Best Cards and Decks

The Hot Location for the next 24 hours is Bar Sinister: When you play a card here, fill this location with copies of it. This is a Hot Location for Marvel Snap’s September 2023 Season, Loki For All Time, that starts on selected Wednesdays and Sundays at 3 AM GMT. For 24 hours, it has a 50% chance of showing up in games.

Players who strategically build around the location or counter the decks that do so can have an advantage over their opponents! So what will you play?

Strategy and General Tips

Bar Sinister allows you to play really strong strategies that have been proven to be superior to other options during the Hot Location. This can lead to a very narrow metagame for the duration, but some specific counter cards can help you if you don’t want to follow the meta.

First, fill the location early with Nightcrawler, then move one out to play an Ongoing effect. On Turn 6, you move the other three Nightcrawlers and play Onslaught, creating a significant buff on each Nightcrawler and anything else you played.

The second major strategy is to stack the lane with destroy effects before playing Venom on the lane and following it Arnim Zola (or some other way to copy the power) on Turn 6. This one takes a little while to resolve, but it creates an impressive amount of power.

This time around, we can combine the with Daken for even more upside. Discard can also work, as you can fill the location with Dracula to trigger Apocalypse while buffing your Morbius on another lane.

You can also try to counter these strategies with Cosmo, Enchantress, and/or Echo. The problem with this, though, is that these counters often still result in you losing the location, and if you’re behind elsewhere then you can easily lose the game. This is one of the truly polarizing Hot Locations in Marvel Snap.

Bar Sinister Series 3

This is a strong starting point for almost all levels entering into this weekend with Bar Sinister. The full combo is this: play Nightcrawler prior to Turn 5; move one Nightcrawler on Turn 5 and play Blue Marvel; finally, on Turn 6, move the rest of your Nightcrawlers away and play Onslaught. Some throwback cards are still featured here since this remains a cheap option that most (if not all) Series 3 players can put together.

Bar Sinister Full Build

This is an updated version of the above list that includes some of the newer cards. Jeff the Baby Land Shark is strictly better on Bar Sinister than Nightcrawler because it is harder to counter (among other things). With this change, we can be even more consistent than the other times this location has been featured.

Daken Destroy

Destroy is a fun direction for this location. You can use Bar Sinister to trigger multiple Yondus, Carnages, Venoms, and Novas, and then play Death and Wave on Turn 5 followed by Knull. Killmonger will clear Bar Sinister once if you use Yondu, for example, and this can let you block the location from opposing Green Goblins.

Daken is the newest piece of the puzzle. Daken can be played off the location, creating the Muramasa Shard. Then you play the Shard there and follow it with Carnage or Venom on a later turn. This will triple the strength of Daken while creating one big card on the location. If that card is Venom, you can play Arnim Zola on the location later on to spread your points around.

DeathPool

Still missing Knull or Daken? Well, this version leans into another neat interaction the location has. Hulkbuster reactivates multiple times on the location. If you can land that on Deadpool, you can destroy the card and create a huge Deadpool that you can then play on any location and copy with Taskmaster on Turn 6.

Discard

When working out which Discard deck to go with this week, including Gambit over Wolverine seemed like the strongest way to go. Why? To maximize the available spots on Bar Sinister without concern, and because we can use Gambit as a small endgame combination. Thus, this deck seemed to be the right build for the location.

Dracula is still Plan A for the location, but when we miss we can Gambit for four Destroy effects, which is a great Plan B. Outside of this, we are playing one of the better archetypes right now; we have both a simple curve and a simple game plan to follow, which helps us easily contest two lanes.

Ramp

Ramp is potentially the strongest plan for this location this time. We can play Electro on the location to immediately ramp to Galactus on Turn 4, and then we have excellent follow up plays. Another option is to play Arnim Zola on the location to trigger big effects all across the board on Turn 5 or Turn 6. This is a simple way to use the location while playing with our newest toy, Alioth!

Junk

With the potential for scam decks during the location, one interesting direction you can try is Junk! This deck has a few great cards for the location like Debrii and Carnage, and these also counter a lot of the combos shown above. Debrii, for example, will fill all the spots on the board, so an opponent who tries to set up with Nightcrawler is stuck, as are the Galactus players.

We also have cards like Nebula to win lanes alongside this plan, as they scale for the rest of the locked out game. It may not seem like the most obvious direction, but it helps counter a lot of what is currently being played, and it has excellent synergy with the location.

Series 2 and Below (pre-CL 474)

This is the Series 2 version of the basic Bar Sinister Combo. As with the first deck featured, the plan is to fill the location with Nightcrawler and move the cards out to allow you to duplicate Blue Marvel and Onslaught.

Wrap Up

What is your strategy? Let us know in the comments below, or our Discord community! Remember to share your decks using our deck builder or browse our deck database!

Good luck, have fun, and stay safe!