Hi everyone, welcome to this new piece looking to help find a way to maximize the use of your shiny new card. This time, we are going to cover quite an unpopular card from Pool 3: Red Skull.
Decks with Red Skull
While a 5 cost, 14 power card sounds very appealing and places Red Skull amongst the biggest point scorer in Marvel Snap, the card sees very little play because of its significant drawback: Giving the opposing cards +2 power at the location Red Skull is played.
In this article, we’ll go over what can be done with the card, both with a limited collection, as if Red Skull was your first pull in Pool 3, or try to build something more competitive, supporting Red Skull with every card available in the game. You thought some cards were unplayable? Well, let’s see if that’s true.
Gameplay and Synergies
Red Skull can be a frustrating card to play. Everytime the bonus he grants to enemy units loses us the game, we immediately want to send him back into the collection and never think about it again. It also didn’t help that for the longest part of Marvel Snap’s lifetime, the most popular decks have been relying on swarming the board with cheap units in order to buff cards like Bishop or Angela.
Other synergies like Discard, that are able to multiply Swarm in hand and play 3 or 4 of them on turn 6 makes Red Skull difficult to find empty locations to be played on. As a result, even when played on turn 6 to avoid the opponent being able to play on the location afterwards, Red Skull isn’t finding enough situations where it can be used without some outside help.
In terms of synergies, Red Skull has different ways to see its negative ability mitigated, which gives the card all its merits. As a way to best make use the card, there are 3 main ways we can look to help Red Skull:
- We can try to deny Red Skull‘s ability, either making it a vanilla 14 power, or enabling other effects:
Decks with Dracula
Decks with Enchantress
Decks with Venom
- We can limit what the opponent can do on the location we intend to play Red Skull at, removing their cards or preventing how many they can play:
Decks with Juggernaut
Decks with Shang-Chi
Decks with Spider-Man
- We can try to be unpredictable as to where Red Skull will end up on the final turn, limiting the positive impact for our opponent:
Decks with Doctor Strange
Decks with Cloak
Through these various synergies, we can see there actually are a lot of different ways to support Red Skull in Marvel Snap. Obviously, it might not be so easy to build a cohesive deck mixing all those options, as we can see cards from very different archetypes being showcased. Despite that, it is nice to see that even for very unpopular cards, there is potential in the deckbuilding area.
Budget Deck
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While talking about a budget deck when building around a Pool 3 card might sound weird, we’ll imagine you have a full Pool 1 and 2 and only Red Skull for this one.
In this deck, we are looking to limit what the opponent can do to use Red Skull‘s ability through Sandman, limiting both of us to 1 card a turn. If the opponent would flood the board before we get to play Sandman, we can always use Enchantress to remove Red Skull‘s Ongoing ability. Including Killmonger might also help if you are afraid of being swarmed by 1-cost cards.
The rest of the deck is centered around being able to attack multiple lanes while playing only 1 card a turn, effectively making this deck more of a Sandman deck rather than a Red Skull one. Maybe with more cards, we can give Red Skull some justice and make him the star of the deck.
All-In on Red Skull
den
Obviously a gimmick aimed at being fun, this deck aims at maximizing the potential of Red Skull and other cards with a similar drawback when played. Alongside cards like Zero, Venom, Enchantress or even Dracula, we are able to largely limit the damage that cards like Red Skull, Typhoid Mary or Ebony Maw could cause to our board development.
Juggernaut should work really well as a follow-up to Red Skull if the opponent would want to invest on the location after we played him. To maximize the card even more, I added Storm for her synergy with both Juggernaut or Red Skull, which can win us a location as well.
The rest of the deck is rounded up with support cards, or ones that would reward us for not playing, in case we would happen to be locked from a weird draw sequence. America Chavez is the only odd inclusion in the build, and gets played mostly for added consistency. I don’t expect to play her much, and at worst she will feed Dracula.
Competitive Build
den
This deck doesn’t feature Red Skull as its primary win condition, Magik and Sera being the real stars in the build. However, our featured card finds a lot of charming synergies in this deck and could prove to be a very good contributor to the overall synergy.
- Enchantress or Shang-Chi can be played alongside Red Skull on the same turn (7) if we have Sera in play. That would either be an addition of 17 (with Shang-Chi) or 18 (with Enchantress) power added to a location while interacting with our opponent’s side too.
- Gambit and Killmonger will remove opposing units, limiting how many buffs Red Skull can distribute. Wong could be added to the deck for even more power to a late Gambit, as when copied with Mystique, Gambit would remove 4 of the opponent’s units.
- Iron Man doubling Red Skull‘s 14 power isn’t such a bad thing power wise.
Just like the budget deck, it is hard to imagine Red Skull to be the primary win condition in a deck. The many synergies he finds with currently played powerful cards is enough to think about including it anti-meta decks that are already running cards like Enchantress, Shang-Chi or Killmonger.
Closing Words
After the first piece on The Collector, a popular card in today’s metagame, going for Red Skull felt like a fun challenge.
I don’t know if I managed to make a deck you could take to the Infinite ranks, or even if I inspired some of you to try this unused card. I think these kinds of cards will be the backbone of Marvel Snap in the future, and finding creative ways to use our collection will be a must-have skill to perform.
I hope you had some fun reading this piece, as much as I have writing and building these new decks, and highlighting what can be done with Red Skull. More highlights are on their way, and you can suggest which cards you would like to see next in this series. To do so, or if you have any question or piece of feedback, find us on our community Discord. You can also find me on my Twitter page.
Good Game Everyone.
